Black Power in a Prison Library

Abstract

Black Power in a Prison Library" focuses on a list of ninety books on the black experience in America that were added to the Marion, Ohio Correctional Institution in 1972. It uses the list as a way of gauging what books the plaintiffs (and thus the court) thought were essential to telling the African American experience. And in that way, we can use the list to reconstruct the contours of the bibliographic world of the African American experience in the early 1970s. The list reflects an interest in the history of slavery, the eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, literature of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary works on Black Power. Notably thin is prison literature. Together, the books help form a picture of the critique of law made by Black Power writers and the ways those claims built on historical, sociological, and Civil Rights literature. The book list, thus, suggests some of the ways that books propagated and gave definition to Black Power claims.