"The roots of revolutionary nonviolence in the United States are in the Black community." - Joanne Sheehan, Waging Nonviolence
The setting is Albany, Georgia, January of 1964. Participating in where the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo March for Peace with some thirty other protestors, they all were arrested by the police a spent nearly two months in prison. They decided to carry on their use of non violent protest with a very poignant medium - fasting. Extreme to the point of hospitilization once they finally were granted release, Prison Notes accounts for real struggle in the name of fighting for equity. Deming presents the reader with dire stakes by recounting the adamant stamina and drive of her fellow protestors despite the psychical pain they endured for their cause.
THEMES:
HOPE.
"In this struggle we are unable to measure our hopes literally. So to keep our hope alive we feed om symbols." (pg.95)
STRUGGLE.
There is a jail within a hail here, hell within hell. The men and women behind these bars are not supposed to exist, but some are supposed to exist even less than others." (pg. 25)
Barbara Deming was an activist, one especially fervent on nonviolent social change. Deming participated in political actions whenever and wherever individual rights and human dignity were being threatened, and the experience that she describes from her book Prison Notes is the account of the month she spent in prison after she and some 30 other protestors were arrested in January of 1964.
In 1964, Deming and her racially integrated group of activists were just one group of many peaceful protesters across the Nation that were arrested for protesting. The year before, some 2000 students in Birmingham, Alabama, opted to skip their classes and March downtown in protest, to be intercepted by police forces and arrested. (National Musuem of African American History and Culture). Many activists of yesteryear were firm believers in non-violent movement and were met with force meant to silence, and this has unfortunately not changed, especially for Black Americans. On Apr 15, 2024 states that Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit to go forward against a black lives matter activist who let her protest in Louisiana in which a police officer was injured, which civil rights groups warned that the suit threatened the right to protest. (PBS News Hour) Furthermore, the justices rejected an appeal from a case that stems from a 2016 protest over the police killing of a black man in Baton Rouge. In the Civil Rights Act being signed a very recent 60 years ago, this cements that there still exist the political and social plates of the black American, and instead of going forward, there are threats of moving steps backwards.
Link to the article!
protesters in the Albany Movement, 1961.
There was many an a-ha moment in the book for me personally, but I think the one I would like to shed light on is the notion of the imprisoned activists taking their stance by fasting. The book goes into detail about how it was not easy, some of the inmates periods of not eating ending up requiring them to be hospitalized. The dedication through the means of a dangerous but completely passive form of protest sheds real light on how adamant the movement for change was that happened more recently in history than you believe.
protester in the Albany movement, 1961.
Prison Notes, though it is taken from the perspective of a white woman, tells the account of a real experience within the prison system of the United States. Deming cites that in the days she spent in jail with her fellow activists, many of whom were black Americans, she and her white peers got to see firsthand the ramifications of being black in America. There can be connections made from this memior to another memoir presented in class, When They Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Cullor.
