Previous Articles Sections Next

My brother isn't permitted to read his own story. That's a remnant of slavery.

Prisons censor what inmates can read, a throwback to when it was a crime to teach enslaved people to read.

By Deborah G. Plant | 2024-03-21

Deborah G. Plant is an independent scholar and author of "Of Greed and Glory."

My brother Bobby is not allowed to read the Black history that he is integrally a part of, a history that is presented in a book that he, himself, helped write.

I've sent my brother many books over the years, with the help of various bookstore owners (since books sent from residential addresses are not allowed in the prison where he is incarcerated). He received and read every one -- except the last one, the recently published "Of Greed and Glory," the one that documents his voice. That one was banned.

For nearly 25 years, my brother has been behind bars in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the nation. "Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom For All," recounts his story, in the context of the larger story of America's "peculiar institution" of slavery and its contemporary iteration as America's mass incarceration system.

Many of the issues roiling American society today -- the banning of books, magazines, newspapers and music, the outlawing of the freedom to read and write and listen, the censoring of educational materials while criminalizing educators and librarians, and repressing speech -- have roots in the anti-literacy laws of colonial slaveholding America.

For instance, Section 45 of the 1740 Negro Act of South Carolina declared that as "the having of slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attended with great inconveniences; Be it therefore enacted ... That all and every person and persons whatsoever, who shall hereinafter teach or cause any slave or slaves to be taught, to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe in any manner of writing whatsoever ... shall, for every such offense, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds." A more comprehensive 1833 Alabama statute declared that anyone found guilty of attempting "to teach any free person of color, or slave, to spell, read or write," would be fined $250 to $500.

Anti-literacy laws exemplify some of the "badges and incidents of slavery" (as the Supreme Court put it in 1883) that served not only to keep Black people disempowered, stigmatized, marginalized and "in due subjection and obedience" to all White people; but also to intimidate antislavery and anti-racist White persons into abandoning the cause of universal freedom, justice and Black sovereignty. But, in the main, anti-literacy laws were instituted to uphold a White-elite and patriarchal socio-economic system whose power depended upon the brutalization of Black people.

Such laws served to justify the enslavement, imprisonment and enthrallment of Black people -- then and now. It is no coincidence that prisons ban more books than schools and libraries combined. It is no coincidence that 70 percent of all incarcerated Americans read below a fourth-grade level and that, though Black Americans are but 13 percent of the general population, they make up almost 40 percent of America's imprisoned population and that nearly 75 percent of those incarcerated in Angola prison are Black. And it is no coincidence that currently 84 percent of Black fourth-graders are not proficient in reading.

Literacy -- the right to read, to write, to think critically -- is a civil rights issue. It is a social justice issue. And where our political and civic leadership, within and beyond prison walls, impinges upon these rights, that leadership is imposing, anew, badges and incidents of slavery.

Prison administrators, like those at the Louisiana corrections department, argue that censorship is necessary "for rehabilitation and the maintenance of safety and security," according to Pen America. And yet data compiled by organizations such as the Marshall Project, Pen America, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association indicate that the banning of books often has less to do with public safety than with the politics of suppression. Indeed, the banning of books, as correlated with what materials are permitted, is a species of totalitarianism, "a form of control," as one Pen America contributor concluded, "the ultimate form of power of manipulation."

Through the ongoing criminalization of Black people and present-day prison book bans and censorship, badges and incidents of slavery persist. Perhaps the most salient badge of chattel slavery was that it was imposed in perpetuity -- forever. As the criminal-exception loophole in the 13th Amendment sanctioned the enslavement of the "duly convicted," extreme sentencing has allowed for perpetual incarceration.

Of the more than 2 million incarcerated Americans, over 200,000 are "lifers." And of that number, more than 53,000 are sentenced to life without the possibility of parole -- which is essentially a protracted death sentence -- and more than 55 percent of that number is Black.

My brother was sentenced to life at hard labor without the possibility of parole. "Parole" means something said or spoken, an utterance, a written word, a promise. This extreme sentence that eclipses the promise of Bobby's life carries with it the badges of slavery that would deny him the possibility of reading his own words, of hearing the sound of his own sovereign voice.


This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/21/prison-censorship-slavery-deborah-plant/


Previous Articles Sections Next