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Garrett Felber, "A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre" (AK Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Garrett Felber
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Michael Stauch
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stauch, and today I'm here with Garrett Felber to talk about their new book, A Continuous the Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre, which is out now from AK Press. Garrett Felber is an educator, writer and organizer. They are the author of those who Know, don't say the Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State, and co author of the Portable Malcolm X Reader with Manning Marable, as well as the editor of a collection of Martin Sostre's writings entitled I Cannot Submit to Injustices, which is forthcoming from AK Press. Felber is also a co founder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library in Portland, Oregon. Garrett, welcome to the show.
- [00:49]
Garrett Felber
Thanks for having me.
- [00:51]
Michael Stauch
I'd like to begin with the title of your book, A Continuous Struggle. What about Martin Sostre's life does that title capture?
- [00:59]
Garrett Felber
You know, A Continuous Struggle was from a quote of his where he talked about getting out of prison in 1976 and it being a continuous struggle, whether he's inside or outside. And one of the things that really appealed to me about Martin's life was just the many iterations of struggle, how multifaceted it was, but also how he goes from different, you know, from black nationalism to revolutionary black nationalism, to a sort of Maoist Marxism, Marxism, Leninism, and eventually to anarchism. And so, you know, part of my interest in writing this book was to give people a sense of how we continually grow our politics and transform them, especially through, in his case, through actions and experimentation with actions against the state. So, you know, he was describing, in a way, in that quote, a continuous struggle. He was describing something that I think his life also captures, which is the sort of geographic dynamism of struggle. So I mean, it was continuous in a temporal sense, but it was also sort of contiguous in a geographic sense of, you know, being inside and outside. And I think that was something that was really appealing to me about his politics, is just understanding the prison as a concentrated manifestation of repression of the state rather than something sort of outside of society or independent from it.
- [02:33]
Michael Stauch
Great. No, I think that's, that's, that's a great, it's nice to have a quote from him as, as the, the title of the book. I really love that. Did you know that that was going to be the title the whole time, or did it come to you at a certain Point in the process.
- [02:45]
Garrett Felber
It was. It was a late, late minute title change. I had sort of been working under the title we are All Political Prisoners for a long time. And I couldn't quite place my discomfort with that title. And. And I think part of it was that it felt like it was reducing his life to his political imprisonment. Once as I wrote the biography, I came to understand so much of his life came after that period, and I really didn't want to reduce it to that. And then, I mean, the other piece of it was that he had a really complicated relationship to the idea of all imprisoned people being political prisoners and sort of like has these different moments where he's. That was a quote as well from the new prisoner, where he's describing all incarcerated people as political prisoners. But then there's other times where he really talks about the specificity of political imprisonment. So I think for both of those reasons, I was just always a little bit on the fence about that title. And then as I wrote the book, I really came to a continuous struggle just because I thought it captures his life in many ways much better.
- [03:58]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, well, I like the idea that it also include that you've included in the writing so much of his life that happens after his incarceration. I think that's a really helpful addition. I have some questions about that for. For a later moment, but I want to start kind of at the beginning of the book with Harlem. You describe Harlem during the Great Depression as a river of black radicalism. Could you describe Harlem's rich social life at that time and how that atmosphere influenced so strained as politics?
- [04:26]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, I mean, a lot of that early chapter, as you know, is just sort of building kind of like the speculative world around him. Just because I didn't have much. Many of his experiences, you know, through oral histories or things like that, that just really didn't exist of him talking about his early life. So so much of it was contextualizing the people and places that he did interact with. I mean, foremost among them was Louis Michaux's bookstore and really learning more about what that space meant to Harlem during that period, and then also to Martin. And so I talk a little bit in the book about not only it being a bookstore, but also having this lending library aspect in the back of the bookstore, and then just really kind of building out the world from there of like, you know, we've got Louis Michaux's bookstore, but then you also have the street corner orators he talks about, you know, seeing Paul Robeson debating on the streets as a kid and then moving into other community spaces, like, you know, this Spanish fraternal communist organization, Club Mea, that his parents went to. And, and then just sort of these, you know, like, vibrant community history spaces. Like, I, I used John Henrik Clark, the African historian, several times because he was sort of a contemporary of Sostre's who was also growing up in that same environment. And I, I think, like, for me, part of it was to contextualize his upbringing, but also break free a little bit of this idea of like an autodidact, you know, because I think there's this sort of binary between like formal education and then this idea of this trope that we have of like Malcolm X, of sort of like he's in prison, reading the dictionary page by page. And what it does is it really strips out the way in which the people who are, quote, unquote, self taught are actually part of a community of learners. And that was very much the world that Martin grew up in. And then it was also the world that he created again and again throughout his life. So that was really what I was trying to capture in that early chapter.
- [06:48]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, well, I think it's a great success. Moving on a little bit, could you talk about Sostre's experience in the military during World War II? How did this role policing other black soldiers, influence his own political outlook?
- [07:01]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, so this was one of the big surprises of researching the book. I, the only thing that I really knew about his time in the military was that he had been dishonorably discharged. The, the only story that sort of had traveled through family history was the dishonorable discharge for being part of like a bar brawl. So I, I was searching for some of his military records and then found out that those had been burned in a fire in the 1970s and really just kind of stumbled across because he was dishonorably discharged and, and court martialed twice. Those records were held somewhere else and then came across this, you know, this history of him being a black mp, military police, obviously being sort of forced into that role, and then of all places, doing that in Jim Crow Florida during the 1940s. So, yeah, I'll be honest, that was one of the most difficult sections of the book to write. And it took me a long time to sort of figure out the framework because I didn't have any of his narration really of this period besides as he's being court martialed. But yeah, I mean, part of what I learned through that process of research was that the military police had this exponential growth during World War II, and particularly black military police who were being conscripted into that role, specifically to police the boundaries of Jim Crow, as the military was stationed in places like he was. So I think then it kind of began to dawn on me how that was linked to his later critiques of the role of black police during the 60s and 70s, when people were actually calling, in some senses, for, you know, greater inclusion into police forces or community, so called community policing. And he was quite critical of, you know, what that function was and compared it basically to the role of, you know, sort of indigenous troops in colonial settings. But I think that it would be hard to not see that critique coming out of his own experience of being conscripted into that role.
- [09:34]
Michael Stauch
Well, I think that's really fascinating. I mean, in later moments, you can imagine this as informing his anarchism in a way. He's got that really powerful critique of this sort of black political class emerging at that time. That's fascinating. Now, most folks know him best as a political prisoner. His life is marked by these two extended bids in prison. And early in the book, you describe Sostre's conversion to Islam while in prison on a drug charge that began in 1952. As you do, the book transitions into a social history of the Nation of Islam and how the group organized in prison, culminating in a constitution that Sostre helped draft that governed the conduct of incarcerated Muslims. How did you write this incredible section of the book?
- [10:19]
Garrett Felber
Well, I thank you for saying that. I had the benefit of having already written an entire book about this. So. So in some ways it was really hard to write because I was sort of like, well, I. I can't just rewrite that chapter, but I'm writing it through a. A singular person in this case, rather than sort of the collective. But, you know, to answer the question, kind of in both cases of the earlier work on the Nation and then Martin more specifically, I mostly used trial transcripts of. Of these trials. You know, I wasn't able to do oral history interviews with many of the people who were part of this kind of early prisoners rights movement. This is in, like, the late 1950s, early 60s in New York prisons. You know, they. They had a lot of autonomy in. In part because of the restrictions on how they could practice Islam and interact with, you know, Elijah Muhammad and the rest of the nation outside. You know, I learned through this process that Malcolm X was dressing up as a Catholic priest and coming in to, you know, mentor and deliver lessons that way. And, um, so. So that was really interesting because I think in many ways like it, it was sort of a black autonomous formation, even within an organization that's sort of thought of as very like, top down hierarchical. Like, the way it was operating inside in that period was much more autonomous and horizontal. But yeah, they were, you know, Martin was sort of one of the leading figures who was authoring these cases against the state, asking for, you know, access to the Quran, to a specific, you know, translation that had Arabic, asking for space to have religious services, and then, of course, trying to challenge the way that they were being repressed around loss of good time and the use of solitary confinement. And through these cases, they were, you know, he would, he would sort of author them and then provide templates for people who would fill out the same petition, the same writ. So it was, it was essentially like a collect, a collective mass action of litigation, all of which is really now not possible under the PLRA of the 1990s. But at that time, you know, there wasn't even agreement that incarcerated people had constitutional rights. So all of these cases sort of lay the foundation for that claim in 1964, but for the, for the research part of it and, and sort of like building out, you know, I wasn't just interested in the litigation. I was interested in, like what the political world looked like for these folks who were organizing inside. And a lot of that really was finding the transcripts from these trials where they talk in depth about, you know, I mean, this constitution that you talk about was something that the state was using as evidence to say this is a politically subversive group and we confiscated this constitution. So, you know, as they talk about the way that they were organized and so stre is teaching Spanish classes and they have a treasurer and they have a communal library that they build and all that stuff. I mean, they're testifying in court about that. And so that was. Yeah, that was most of the way that I was sort of able to piece that world back together.
- [13:49]
Michael Stauch
Right, right, right. Well, can you remind listeners now you mentioned this a couple of times in your previous response, but Sostre functions as a sort of jailhouse lawyer in really important ways and is responsible for some really big victories. So could you talk a little bit more about what he does and what he's able to achieve for prisoners rights in this period?
- [14:10]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, so, I mean, he sort of, in this really fascinating way, builds his legal cases kind of build upon themselves in different eras. So in this earlier period, as I mentioned, he's finally cases that are ostensibly about Religious rights in prison for Muslims in particular. But he does this through kind of a legal mechanism, section 1983. And it just sort of is this new way of thinking about arguing for the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. And over the course of several cases in the early 1960s that leads to the precedent both at the Supreme Court level in Illinois through Cooper v. Pate, but also through his own case that same year, Sostre v. McGinnis. And then once that, I mean, that really opens the floodgates then to all of these other claims. So then he sort of transitions in the late 1960s to being able to argue some of the things that he wasn't able to successfully claim earlier about solitary and, and the way that it's used as punishment. So he's got this really important case in Constance Baker Motley's court that he wins where he actually gets damages from the wardens for his. I mean he doesn't actually ever get it, um, unfortunately, but they, you know. Yeah, the courts, so. But he wins, you know, sort of the, the basic framework of, you know, that solitary confinement for punishment, you know, shouldn't be legal. He wins cases about political censorship that really allow a lot of revolutionary literature that was being censored to come inside. You know, he's, he's, he interprets the, the Motley case to also be about the state sanctioned sexual assaults through the so called rectal examinations that he later is fighting. He says that they're, that. That's what she's talking about, about these like, harsh punishments. So yeah, I'm all. If you talk to jailhouse lawyers from that period and onward, they're all familiar with Sastre's work because he's, he's frequently a precedent that they cite.
- [16:34]
Michael Stauch
Right. Was this, was this information ever in one place in the same way that it is in your book about him as a jailhouse lawyer and his legacy?
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Garrett Felber
I will say, like, as he's written more about as a jailhouse lawyer than in any other way. So there were people who were interested in his time in the Nation of Islam in those cases. There were, you know, like law students study his cases from the late 60s, less so about like the, the organizing that happens to bring those cases forward, like more just from a like sort of legal framework of like, oh, here's the precedent. And yeah, so part of my, part of my interest was in sort of like understanding that he was. Because I think, I think what happens then is people are like, oh, he was this really important prison reformer. And I'm like, no, this guy wanted to abolish the state, so. So a lot of my impetus for writing the book was seeing that he, he was getting some attention, but it was being framed as, as really like this legalistic thing without an understanding of like how he understood the law and the courts and was strategically using them at different times.
- [17:47]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, I guess that's what the benefit of writing it as a biography is. You're able to. Speaking of continuity, of establishing some continuity in his own activism in that way. Now when Sostre is released from prison in 1964, he settles in Buffalo, he gets a solid working class job in the steel industry. He marries, he opens a bookstore, and once again you're able to pull together a number of different threads to give your readers a brief history of social and political ferment in that city preceding its uprising in 1967. Could you walk us through the role that Sostre's bookstore played in Buffalo's radical movement and perhaps also the role of community bookstores generally in this period?
- [18:28]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, I mean, so he opens this bookstore in 1965 and at that point it's one of the first black revolutionary bookstores in what kind of becomes the golden age of black radical spaces like that. And within Buffalo specifically, you know, because I, I don't know that Buffalo is known as like a, a radical center, but it, it really was in this period experiencing, it has all the ingredients and, and the, the campus community in particular was really, I mean, it was sort of like considered the, the Berkeley of the East. And so, yeah, his, his bookstore just became this really perfect connector for really some different constituencies within the city. I mean, one was black youth on the east side that he was really interested in connecting with. And, and then, you know, predominantly white college students who were mostly coming into struggle through the anti war movement. And then this group of white Marxists who were affiliated with the Workers World Party, which had started in Buffalo and then moved its headquarters recently at that time to New York City. And so the Afro Asian bookshop just became this kind of space where all of those people were moving through. And I mean, one thing that you probably got from the book is like, Martin doesn't do anything half assed. It's always like the most ambitious version. So he opened not one radical bookstore, not two, but three. During the, you know, brief time that he was there before the framing in 1967, which he continued to talk about, like from prison, he was like, you know, I'm going to come back to Buffalo and open a chain of radical Bookstores. And so, yeah, the sort of purpose of the space. I mean, he talked about it as a community center. Like, it was. It was a place where people could just come in and leave things. Like, he would watch people's kids while they were on. I mean, it was just on kind of Jefferson Avenue, which was, like, the center of black life on the east side. So, yeah, it was a space where people could hang out, kids could, you know, just, like, pop in. He would talk to them. Everyone that I interviewed who went to the store remembers having conversations with him. Like, he just. He was really wanting to talk to people and. And loan them books and they could bring them back. So, yeah, it was, you know, for all of those reasons, a target of the state, not just for the radical content of the books, but also the function provided in. In terms of, like, connecting radical community and building it.
- [21:22]
Michael Stauch
Right. And this is a. This is a through line, in a way, to his earlier experiences in Harlem. Right?
- [21:27]
Garrett Felber
Yeah. I mean, one of the, like, very obvious things that came to me during the course of, like, researching and writing the book was thinking about how it was also continuity to his time inside. You know, I mean, he's. He's part of a study group on the yard at Clinton Prison that has a communal library that gets raided by the guards, and, you know, then that's reproduced outside, creating a similar radical community space that gets raided by cops. And so, like, to get back to your very first question about a continuous struggle and thinking about the continuity between, you know, the prison and the society outside, I just. I was constantly sort of. I think his life and his ideas were drawing me to the ways that the state sort of just has the same grab bag of tricks and that's happening to people whether they're in prison or outside.
- [22:19]
Michael Stauch
Right, right, right. I like the idea of a grab bag of tricks. In some ways, he's drawing on his own little grab bag of tricks. You mentioned this earlier in the book when you talk about the lessons that he's learning in some ways from Harlem political education, of youth, intergenerational mentorship, community study. These things are following him through the different institutions that he's spending time in. In some way.
- [22:44]
Garrett Felber
Yes. Yep. And then they, like, pop up in these really beautiful ways in the 80s when he's doing work in New Jersey. And I was like, oh, yeah, here it is again.
- [22:52]
Michael Stauch
Right, right. We'll get to that. In 1967, Buffalo experiences an urban rebellion. And Sostre's book sits at the geographic center of that rebellion. And I thought this was really fascinating. One of the photographs you include in the book depicts a group of people attempting to overturn a car in front of this thing called the Woodlawn Tavern on Jefferson Avenue, as you mentioned, which was right next door to Sostre's bookstore. So what role did Sostre's bookstore play in the uprising itself? How did Sostre ultimately end up back in prison, that rebellion? Can you walk us through some of those experiences?
- [23:27]
Garrett Felber
It's funny you mentioned that photo, because one of the great disappointment. Disappointments for me of researching this book is that I never found a photograph of the bookstore either inside or outside of it. And so it was like, just out of the frame of this incredible photo where, like, you know, they're overturning a car during the rebellion. Yeah. So, I mean, he. He writes this really remarkable essay right after he's arrested that gives us really, like, the best and almost only chronicle of what the bookstore was like and how he structured it. And it's kind of this, you know, retrospective that he writes at this moment where it's just been raided and he's arrested. And he's thinking back to, you know, the early part of starting the bookstore and what it became. And in that essay, he talks about the rebellion and, like, what the importance of the rebellion was in terms of the bookstore, and then vice versa, what role the bookstore played in the rebellion. And essentially, he just kept the place open, you know, until 3am so people were in the streets, and then they would come inside and, you know, he would give speeches or lectures or, like, hand people pamphlets. And so it just became this really, like, everything he's been talking about is being demonstrated outside and people are coming inside and there's this. I can't even remember what kind of source it was, but there was this incredible scene that's described where, like, some kid calls a cop a pig and, like, runs into the bookstore and the cop, like, comes in and he's just, like, met by this whole group of, like, young people and Martin, and he sort of just, like, retreats. And so I feel like that's this demonstration of, like, what that space meant in that moment. But, you know, quite predictably, like, the state had already been surveilling him for years and was looking for a reason to frame him. And then the uprising was just, like, a perfect opportunity for them to scapegoat him. And, yeah, use the sort of, like, black leadership class to say, like, oh, here's, you know, this radical who is responsible for all of this ferment and, and yeah, all the, all the standard issue, you know, using an informant to plant drugs on him. That one that's consistent with his previous charge. So then he gets sentenced to 31 to 41 years as a second felony. So, yeah, I mean, it was just like an incredible moment in Buffalo's history and yeah, some, some really incredible stuff happening today around. Around what that moment and that legacy meant.
- [26:18]
Michael Stauch
Well, I wanted to just follow up because is the bookstore or the building still there? I. I tried to look it up in my feeble way on the Internet and it looked like it is not there.
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Garrett Felber
Yeah, so they. The building was destroyed maybe in the last decade or two, and so it was an empty lot. And yeah, in the last year there's really been an effort by folks in the community there to occupy that space. So now there's a community garden there, there's a radical library, there's a bulletin board which kind of references back. You mentioned the Woodlawn Tavern, but yeah, when they, when the Woodlawn Tavern burned and they blew out the windows of his bookstore in the Woodlawn, he put up these boards that he used as a community bulletin board. So there's a really cool movement happening in Buffalo to reclaim that space.
- [27:13]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, well, that's the thing I saw and I couldn't quite make sense of it, but I did see a community garden and what looked like one of those small bookstore, library basically things there. So I think I was going to ask you about memorialization. So that's great that it has been reclaimed in that way at least. Even if this store is not there, that that stuff is happening.
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Garrett Felber
Okay. Yeah.
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Michael Stauch
Okay. So my next question was. My understanding is that Sostre was a somewhat inconsistent writer, meaning he didn't produce a lot of formal written material, but he did make significant contributions with what he did write. One of the most important of those contributions was his essay the New Prisoner. Can you describe for me, for our listeners, Sochit's contributions with that essay?
- [27:59]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, it's still something that I wish more people read, but I think it's. I feel confident in saying it's the best account of the meaning of the Attica rebellion by, you know, a non historian. I mean. Ori Burton's book Tip of the Sphere, I think is the most incisive and comprehensive, but really like builds out of the arguments that Sostre makes in the New Prisoner. Um, but he's just so uniquely positioned. So I should say he, he wasn't at Attica during the rebellion and the state was Quite intent on making sure that he wasn't back at Attica after he was sentenced, that he was there one night and then they moved him. But he just makes this, this incredible argument about the sort of long. The much longer trajectory of Attica that goes back to his time in the late 50s in the nation of Islam. All of these cases where they're talking about, you know, the state's punitive measures and, and the state's unwillingness to even. I mean, he just traces through all of his legal cases how they haven't been enforced and, and positions, you know, prisons as revolutionary training grounds that are going to overthrow the state. So it's both like this kind of auto ethnography in a way, of his own participation in a movement that goes back 13 years before the Attica rebellion, but then also is part sort of this revolutionary polemic.
- [29:40]
Michael Stauch
Right, right. Does he touch on sort of democratic forms of organizing in Atticud? I've seen some folks talk about this. I'm not familiar with Burton's work, um, so I'm not sure if it appears there, but does that. Does, does he get to that? Does. Does he talk about the organizational stuff? Because that was one of the things that was striking to me about the Constitution that he wrote, was it seemed very democratic and.
- [30:02]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, no, in the New Prisoner, he's not. He doesn't talk as much about sort of the on the ground organizing on Dr. Just because he wasn't a part of that. Um, yeah, but Uri's book, it does a phenomenal job of talking about the commune and the space as a commons that was democratically organized.
- [30:22]
Michael Stauch
Okay, great, great. Okay, that's helpful. All right, so one of your book's major claims is that Sosster is a key figure, kind of following up on that topic, a key figure in the development of anarchism among black folks. You mentioned his key role in mentoring important figures in this tradition, such as Lorenzo Ervin and Ashanti Alston. At the same time, once he was imprisoned again in 1967, Sostre cycles through a number of organizational forms for his defense committees, generally related to the groups providing political support on the outside. In other words, when vanguard parties are responsible for his defense committees, they're hierarchical, centralized, and empower just a few people to make decisions, at times even cutting out Sostre himself. So can you talk about how Sostre reorganized his defense committees as his politics evolved toward anarchy?
- [31:12]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, I love this question. So he, he describes his reorganization of his defense committee from a centralized committee in Buffalo to This network of autonomous bases as his first experiment in anarchist organizing. And, you know, I mean, he had a. He had a central committee in Buffalo beginning from his arrest in 1967. It was formed with a lot of people who knew him through the bookstore and sort of immediately came to his defense. And most of them were affiliated with Workers World Party. And then in 1970, he had started a newspaper called Black News, which was, you know, sort of modeled after Black Panther newspaper Polante, the Young Lords newspaper. So his idea was that he would edit this paper from prison. The WWP would help him produce and print it, and then it would be sold by young folks on Buffalo's east side who would even write articles for it and participate in the production of it. And it only lasted a few issues. And essentially what wound up happening was he wrote a third essay on a series of essays that he was writing about political prisoner exchanges. So he had this idea of, you know, recently independent countries seizing US Agents and then trading them for political prisoners. And this was a. An idea that got picked up by the Black Panthers and was gaining traction at the time. But essentially his defense committee, again, through this kind of like top down structure, vetoed it and said they weren't going to run it. And so that was. That facilitated his break with them. Because of course he was like, well, I'm an impli. Imprisoned black revolutionary having my work censored by white radicals outside. And. And you know, it was at the time that he was even winning a case in court about political censorship. So, like, the. The ironies upon ironies of that. I mean, it felt like a huge betrayal to him. And so I think he was just identifying over that period in the early 70s, which also coincided with him reading more anarchism, just starting to identify the problems with centralization. One of those, of course, was his own experience, but then also seeing what was happening with the Panthers and, you know, like, if headquarters is raided, then they just have all the information on the entire organization. So, yeah, he wound up forming almost a dozen of these autonomous groups that all were sort of connected through him. And his idea was that they would use his case as a sort of propagandistic point, but from which to build outward so they could bring people into struggle through the injustice of his framing, but then start to do organizing and base building from there. So he theorized that these would be revolutionary bases that sort of were loosely connected with one another and they were very hyperlocal. I mean, he was sort of forming them in all of these towns in north country around where he was incarcerated.
- [34:35]
Michael Stauch
Right. I mean, it's a fascinating legacy through his own experiences against both the sort of vanguardist Leninist tradition and also black nationalism, black power, all those kinds of things. And I'm just thrilled that it's in the book that we have it. We can think through it. I think it's a really helpful, valuable legacy that you've described. So I want to talk then about some of those defense committees and the way that they transform in this process. Maybe the defense committee that best exemplified Sostre's growing evolution toward anarchism was the one based in Potsdam, New York, that renames itself the North Country Defense Committee around 1976 and thereafter begins to dedicate itself to activism against nuclear power and environmental destruction. So can you talk about how this group put into practice some of Sostre's ideas about political organization coming out of this evolution that he's going through?
- [35:30]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, I mean, I became so fascinated by this, with this group during that period, in part because of the archive that I was lucky enough to have. I. I wound up connecting with some of the children of the Defense Committee members. So they. They were able to send me especially Martin's correspondence with Ed Dubinsky, who is one of the sort of more seasoned organizers who had come through the civil rights movement in the south and was a professor, math professor there. And so I have this series of. I mean, you so rarely get right the, like the letter to and the letter from. But I was able to have both sides of these conversations for the better part of a year as Dubinsky and others in Potsdam are building the organization. And, you know, he's going back and forth with Martin about the challenges that they're having. So, you know, some of the things I talk about is, you know, the nitty gritty of, like, horizontalism within the group about, you know, male chauvinism, the feelings that, like, Ed Dubinsky's dominating the conversation or so and so. And, you know, like building things like a rotating facilitator in or the development of like, a sort of group within the organization that's looking into conditions of local jails or women's incarceration. So already within the formation of the group, they're already starting to think about, like, well, what are the broader implications of the work we're doing with Martin and how can we apply that to our local conditions? But all of this is sort of like they have this great momentum and they're working, and then it's like, very improbably Martin gets out within a year of them building this structure. And I mean, this is, I think, where you get like, how his vision impacts everyone else. Because, you know, I think in most cases, if you formed a, a local defense committee, many of the people on this are like first time organizers, right? They're being politicized through this. They've never organized in their life. So I think a lot of those committees would then declare success and disband. But because he has sort of built into the formation of this group this like really robust idea of, of like a revolutionary base. I mean, he was like in the local jail looking at real estate to try and buy land so they could have a political commune with like, you know, a collective, like a cooperative grocery and you know, bars and laundromats. And which again, I think actually goes back to part of like the black nationalist, like nation building, you know, like that he's just thinking in terms of like a whole sustaining economy. But anyway, for all of those reasons, I think that like the political vision was so vast that people were able to pretty quickly pivot to like, well, we have this organization, we have this momentum. What do we engage with now? And then they wound up doing this kind of like eco defense work around this power line that was being run from Canada through North country down to New York City. So you wind up with these like really remarkable stories of, you know, people who were politicized through that group and then wind up like standing in front of bulldozers a year later and, and very consciously making the connection between Martin and that action.
- [39:01]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, yeah, yeah, That's a great story. That's, that's really powerful. Now, before I move on, I wanted to ask about his release. I guess we should talk a little bit more about this, this improbable release. How, how does that come about?
- [39:13]
Garrett Felber
I mean, so he, you know, he's got this 31 to 40 year charge and then the thing that we haven't talked about is that he's facing another life sentence on top of that for his resistance to the state sanctioned sexual assaults, where he gets charged for assault. So that's like really the sort of like point that's rallying a lot of these defense committees is that he sort of had. He has this new charge hanging over him and he winds up getting sentenced for that. But I think very much because of these defense committees, it's not a life sentence, it's zero to four years. But it just sort of enlivens all of this new energy into the campaign. And then Especially with the birth of a New York City based group that has some kind of, for lack of a better term, star power. I mean, Daniel Berrigan's part of it and I just think there's people with more political connections in New York City and then it's bolstered by him being named a prisoner of conscience with Amnesty International. So there's this international push. But yeah, I mean, he gets clemency from the governor in, in 1975 as one of these like Christmas commutations and, and comes home in 1976. And it's just really like, I think it's a very obvious reminder in the limitations of the law. Like by that point, he's one of the most accomplished jailhouse lawyers in the history of this country. His. The person who framed him has recanted his testimony. That appeal failed. You know, I mean, he's exhausted every sort of legal means. And the thing that ultimately wins it is like Daniel Berrigan and other folks are following the mayor around and sitting in everywhere that he is. I think he was just like, I gotta, I gotta get this off my plate, you know?
- [41:04]
Michael Stauch
Right.
- [41:05]
Garrett Felber
Okay.
- [41:06]
Michael Stauch
So in 1976, now getting to that point where he's, he, he leads a full after prison, right? He leads a very full life in prison. And then he gets out, he leaves prison in 1976 for the last time. And in the years that follow, he gets involved in a kind of grassroots community development that you describe, which consists of rehabilitating a series of dilapidated buildings in New Jersey with a comrade named Sandy Shivak. So what did Sostre and Shivak hope to achieve with this activist? Tell us a little bit about it and then what their vision was for it.
- [41:37]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, this was one of those things where originally I was like, oh, that, that program will be like the epilogue to the book. And then I very quickly realized like, oh, this is a multi chapter, which I'm so grateful for. I mean, Sandy. When I first contacted Sandy in 2020, I just decided to write the book. And it was like one of these things where he was just like, I've been waiting for someone to call me and ask me about Martin. And so he just was incredible in making this history able to be written by putting me in touch with all the young folks that were part of the program. And it's such a testament to like Sandy's organizing that he was still in touch with all of these people too. I mean, these are all people that he met when they were like 13 to 18 in the 80s and 90s and are now in their 50s, and he's, you know, still in touch. So. But they had very different. I mean, to the question of their vision, I think they had very different visions of what they were doing at first. Like, Sandy tells this great story about. So he. He had sort of. He had been a part of that film Scared Straight, and he was working with, like, criminalized young folks in Passaic, where he grew up. And he knew about, you know, he was interested in supporting political prisoners. So he knew about Martin. He met Martin at a rally, and he brought Martin down a few times to, like, talk to the. To the young folks. And as they're driving back, Martin starts asking about, like, the. The status of all these buildings, of, like, who owns that?
- [43:06]
Michael Stauch
And.
- [43:07]
Garrett Felber
And Sandy's just, like, in his early 20s and is like, I have no idea who owns that building. Why are you asking about this? And so there's this kind of moment where you realize that, like, Martin's bringing with him, like, decades and decades of political thinking about controlling community space, about youth mentorship, political education, all this stuff. And Sandy's like, you know, half his age. Very different moment. So they wind up, you know, buying 40 Market street at auction, turn that into a community center. And like, their headquarters, it has a library there, of course, and. And that they get grants and pay young folks the minimum wage to, like, learn construction skills and, of course, do political education throughout that. And eventually you do this with. With affordable housing for some apartments. And then their final project, which became much bigger than they thought it would, of. Of rehabilitating a building that turned into a daycare. And, you know, like, my own sort of story of this is that when I first wrote to Martin a couple years before he passed away, he sent me this, like, set of documents. And one of them was this, you know, revolutionary newsletter that he was producing from solitary confinement in the early 70s. And the other was him sitting at a daycare graduation in the early 90s. And I just remember sort of like, I mean, being stunned by the fact that this person wrote me back, being more stunned that he, like, sent me. I mean, it was like the original document that he made in solitary. It wasn't like a photocopy. But of course I was like, maybe I shouldn't say of course I was gravitating towards that document and didn't really know what to make of the daycare. And I really found myself, as I learned more about his life, understanding the relationship of all of these things. And then, yeah, talking to Sandy also Really helped that because I then understood how Sandy had been mentored and politicized through Martin. I mean, he talked about, like, thinking that struggle would all happen in the streets and, you know, it was all mass demonstrations and, and he was like, wow, this is really hard, grinding, unglamorous work. But I. And then that really, like, has shaped my own thinking about physical space, intangible counter structures. And, you know, like, I, I still now when I see, like, old brick buildings, I'm constantly fantasizing about turning them into things. And I'm like, that's, that's very much coming from Martin via Sandy.
- [45:43]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, I started to have the same thought myself as I was reading it. I was like fantasizing about, you know, some storefronts not too far from my own house. And I was like, I wonder who, who owns that?
- [45:54]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, that's, that was very much the story. The Bookmobile was thinking about the importance of building tangible material. Counter structures.
- [46:03]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great. Now, I had just one follow up question about that. I'm, I'm so curious about the archive that you mentioned with, with this, with this thing in particular. Sandy Shivak. Was this a formal archive or were you going through his papers in his living room? Like, what did that. Do they eventually make it into the archive? What is, how does that work?
- [46:22]
Garrett Felber
I mean, it's almost all oral histories, honestly. Yeah, like, I, I think, I mean, Sandy would occasionally like mail me a deed to a building or something if I was like, hey, what year did you guys actually buy this building? And he was like, oh, here's, you know, the deed. But no, it was very much like Sandy just sending me numbers of people and being like, oh, yeah, he was on this project because the years were sort of like aligning with like, oh, from 83 to 85, that was Market Streeter from, you know, in 89, that was the daycare center. So, yeah, I was. But I did archive all of those oral histories at Centro with.
- [47:00]
Michael Stauch
Well, that's a great way to kind of to tell that story also through oral histories of the lives of people that were around it. So I think that's a really smart decision and I think you probably gain a lot through that as opposed to like a more documentary approach.
- [47:14]
Garrett Felber
Yeah, I don't even know what the documentary approach would like. I just feel like it would be such a dry history of like, this building was built and like. Yeah, you just get this texture from, especially from like the memories of people thinking about when they're 15. You know, like, one of the incredible things about hearing from folks is, like, a lot of them had no idea who Martin was. Even now, like, they were like, oh, yeah, I remember he was like. He had been incarcerated, right? And I was like, yeah, no, he was one of the, like, most important political prisoners of the 20th century. And they were just like, what are you talking about? Because they just. He was humble, and they, like, spent their time putting up, you know, sheet wall, so.
- [47:53]
Michael Stauch
Right.
- [47:53]
Garrett Felber
Yeah.
- [47:54]
Michael Stauch
No, that's great. That's great. Well, as we come to a close, I'd like to ask about the broader implications of your book. I think we've kind of implicitly talked about some of these things with the bookstores and spaces. But what do you hope are some lessons that readers take from the life of Martin Sostre?
- [48:10]
Garrett Felber
I think one of them is definitely, like, the dynamism of struggle. That there's just no way to struggle narrowly or, like, in a single issue way, which I think can feel overwhelming to people. But to me, it's like, there's just so many entry points from all sorts of, like, skill sets. And I just think, like, if you look at Martin's life, I mean, even within one of his tactics, the law, he was both using the law as a offensive tool and a defensive tool. And he wasn't just using the law. He was writing. And then he was, you know, using media such as, like, newspapers and essays, and then he was creating encounter spaces such as the bookstore and the community site. So, like, there was just so many different ways that he was thinking about struggle. And then, you know, of course, that radiates outward to other people, so all the people who engage with him found ways in. So I hope that that's something that people can, like, glean from the book and take into their own lives. Another is just like, a sense of revolutionary optimism that I felt certainly writing this book. I mean, 2020-2025 wasn't like, the most glorious years to be thinking about state repression. And, um, I don't know what years are, but it was, you know, it was in that context that I was writing this. And he's just so certain at every point that we're gonna win and it comes through. It's not like a, you know, oh, yeah, like, I'm giving this lip service. It's like a deep belief. I mean, there would be, like, hardcore repression happening. It was like. And he would immediately see it and say, like, oh, this is perfect. This is such a glaring contradiction of the state. That we can use to show people that they say one thing and do another. And so it's just that sense of revolutionary optimism that I really felt writing the book, and I hope people feel reading it.
- [50:14]
Michael Stauch
Well, it's been a pleasure. Garrett, this book is great. There's so much that we were not able to cover, so I'd encourage anyone who'd like to learn more to pick up a copy for our listeners. Garrett Felber's book, A Continuous the Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre, is available now from AK Press, and you can find it wherever the finest books are sold. Garrett, I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [50:35]
Garrett Felber
It was a pleasure.