The Books Briefing: Stories From America’s Prisons

In these personal narratives, writers often theorize about how to advance the struggle for racial justice. During the civil-rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail” outlined his philosophy of using nonviolent direct action to dismantle racist laws. More recently, in 2017, Susan Burton—the formerly incarcerated founder of A New Way of Life Reentry Project—published Becoming Ms. Burton, which highlighted the adversities facing incarcerated women and her efforts to build a justice system founded on compassion and empathy.

​Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas.

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What We’re Reading

(OWEN FREEMAN)

What prison takes away

“In The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, completed about five years before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Reed reveals the stark reality beneath a comparison that has become a rhetorical staple: the shared logic of prison and slavery. His account is a reminder of the power of prison, despite whatever rehabilitative designs lawmakers and administrators may endorse at different times, to break human beings.”

📚 The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, by Austin Reed, edited by Caleb Smith

(Reginald Dwayne Betts / W. W. Norton)

From prisoner to poet

“For my birthday I was in a cell that I only left for showers every three days and rec twice a week. … Two days after my birthday, I was on the door yelling for a book when someone threw The Black Poets by Dudley Randall under my cell door. James Baldwin said that people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. The poets in Randall’s book were telling the history in shades of gray, telling the stories I never found in schoolbooks.”

📚 A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, by Reginald Dwayne Betts

📚 Felon: Poems, by Reginald Dwayne Betts

(Don Cravens / The Life Images Collection / Getty; Bettmann / Getty)

Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’

“I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together.”

📚 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King Jr.

(ILLUSTRATION BY GLUEKIT)

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The legacy of Malcolm X

“For all of Malcolm’s prodigious intellect, he was ultimately more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain. Malcolm was the voice of a black America whose parents had borne the slights of second-class citizenship, who had seen protesters beaten by cops and bitten by dogs, and children bombed in churches, and could only sit at home and stew.”