A Continuous Struggle

A Continuous Struggle is a political biography of Martin Sostre (1923 to 2015), a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who is now largely forgotten but was among the most important revolutionary figures in twentieth-century America. The book presents him as an underappreciated legend of the anti-prison and Black freedom movements. Sostre became politicised in prison and worked as a jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped establish the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He later opened one of the country's first radical Black bookstores. After the Buffalo rebellion of 1967, police and the FBI scapegoated and framed him, and an all-white jury sentenced him to thirty-one to forty-one years. Over nine years of imprisonment, Sostre changed himself and the revolutionary movements he belonged to, eventually calling himself a revolutionary anarchist and helping lay the groundwork for contemporary Black anarchism. He resisted strip frisks on principle and was beaten eleven times for it, which drew attention to the routine sexual assault of prisoners. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement won one of the most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, comparable to the campaigns to free Angela Davis and Huey Newton. After his release in 1976 Sostre faded from public view, but he spent four more decades in committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Over his life he was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist and original political thinker. The range of tactics and terrains he worked on points to the need for a multi-faceted, continuous struggle against every form of oppression, aimed at an egalitarian society built on "maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love."