Beneath the Mountain

‘Beneath the Mountain’ is a reader’s guide for understanding the evolution of anti-prison tenets. This essential core of primary texts provides an arc of insurgent writings by dissidents and revolutionaries who experienced incarceration and state terror first-hand. With contributions from John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Crazy Horse, to Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Leonard Peltier, it also includes a previously unpublished communiqué from Angela Davis, written from jail at the time when she was forging the anti-prison critique that has since inspired a national movement. ‘Beneath the Mountain’ offers a record of the historic foundations for the contemporary abolition movement. What emerges from these texts is an emancipatory vision that inspires the work being done today, a vision centered on organizing and solidarity as an antidote to repression. An invaluable resource for readers on both sides of prison walls, this compendium of resistance and hard-won vision will be essential to all who seek to develop an abolitionist critique and to further an understanding of the nature of repression and liberation.