Thursday, August 29, 2013

UDC – David A. Clarke School of Law;

4340 Connecticut Ave, Bldg. 52, Room 505   5pm

Sponsored by the National Lawyer's Guild and Muslim Law Student Association, this program will feature Donald F. Tibbs, JD/Phd of Drexel University Law School and author of the book From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union. The book is a legal history of how the social and cultural history of the Black Power era connects to the legal history of the Prisoner’s Rights Movement; and what the Supreme Court did to eviscerate both.

This book uses the landmark case Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union to examine the strategies of prison inmates using race and radicalism to inspire the formation of an inmate labor union. It thus rekindles the debate over the triumphs and troubles associated with the use of Black Power as a platform for influencing legal policy and effecting change for inmates. While the ideology of the prison rights movement was complex, it rested on the underlying principle that the right to organize, and engage in political dissidence, was not only a First Amendment right guaranteed to free blacks, but one that should be explicitly guaranteed to captive blacks—a point too often overlooked in previous analyses. Ultimately, this seminal case study not only illuminates the history of Black Power but that of the broader prisoners’ rights movement as well.