Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State by Garrett Felber

Abstract

Reviewed by: Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State by Garrett Felber Jimmy Butts (bio) Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. By Garrett Felber. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 272. $90.00 cloth; $22.95 paper; $12.99 ebook) Aiming to correct the narrative about the Nation of Islam (NOI), Garrett Felber demonstrates the significant role the group played in the Black freedom struggle as they challenged the carceral state. To put the NOI in its proper historical context, Felber makes use of newspapers, trial transcripts, speeches, telegrams, FBI files, and other sources. Moreover, the chronological structure of the book lends itself to identifying the presence of the NOI at every stage of the civil rights movement. [End Page 661] The author traces how two popularized depictions of the NOI negatively influenced the perception of the group among the public. The 1959 documentary entitled "The Hate That Hate Produced" situated the NOI as a hate group calling for "Black supremacy" (pp. 18, 36). Furthermore, the 1961 publishing of the book The Black Muslims in America by C. Eric Lincoln caused the religious validity of the NOI to be questioned (pp. 18–19). These two sources assisted what Felber describes as "epistemic violence" against the group by the state. In particular, the state "created ways of knowing the Nation of Islam that distorted our understanding of its politics to this day" (p. 14). Thus, carceral officers accused the Nation of reverse racism and argued the incompatibility of "Blackness" with true Islam. Felber offers a useful theoretical conception he calls the "dialectics of discipline." This theory suggests interplay between NOI's responses to "state repression and the paradoxical acceleration of the expansion of the carceral state through new technologies of violence" (p. 2). For example, in the New York prison system, the state obtained control by prison transfers, religious literature confiscation, solitary confinement, and the loss of good time. In response, Muslim prisoners performed hunger strikes, filled solitary confinement, and filed complaints. Having laid out this theoretical tool, Felber then concentrates on various aspects of the civil rights movement to emphasize the significant ways the NOI participated. The author introduces diverse ways that the NOI challenged the carceral state both inside and outside of prison. In response to the draft during WWII, members of the NOI refused to fight in a war for what they perceived as a white supremacist nation. As a result, by 1945 nearly two hundred men from the NOI served time for draft evasion. These conscientious objectors came ready to challenge Jim Crow in prison. Because the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution relegated imprisoned people to slaves, the government followed a hands-off approach to how prison officials treated them. Therefore, although prison officials sought to suppress the NOI, the litigation and organizing of Muslims resulted in the 1961 Supreme [End Page 662] Court ruling that the federal government can intervene based on the denial of an individual's Fourteenth Amendment rights by the state and protect the rights of the incarcerated. The state used similar tactics to suppress the NOI outside prison. In response to police brutality, the NOI worked to create a Black united front across religious affiliation. The NOI endured police violence, home and mosque invasions, and racial profiling. However, they responded by using the courtroom as a political battleground to build Black unity against police violence. Thus, both inside and outside of prison the NOI played a significant role in Black resistance to state aggression. Whether one points to the Watts or Attica uprisings, members of the NOI played an instrumental role in these expressions of resistance. The state also responded to these acts with increasing surveillance and violence. This reflects the dialectics of discipline. Although this work helps to broaden the historiography on the NOI, it would benefit from a more critical analysis of the claims of religious authenticity made by the NOI. Felber highlights the eventual validation of the group's religious legitimacy by the courts and some "orthodox" Muslims (pp. 30–34...