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A new historical work reveals many connections to issues of incarceration and inequality in Rochester today.
“A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre,” is a political biography of Sostre, a Black Puerto Rican man who became a “politicized prisoner” and jailhouse lawyer in the 1950s and 1960s.
“He was a remarkable figure. His actions led to constitutional rights for prisoners; that is, that even inmates have their rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution,” author Garrett Felber said at a recent film screening and panel discussion at Akimbo Books.
He was joined by Jose Hamza Saldana, director of Release Aging People in Prison, Jose Di Lenola, clemency campaign director for RAPP, and Jalil Muntaqim, Citizen Action NY special projects coordinator.
In the mid-1960s, Sostre owned a political bookstore in Buffalo, which featured anti-Vietnam War and Black liberation writings. After the Buffalo rebellion of 1967, he was arrested and, though the main witness against him later recanted, spent nine years in the prison system. He was granted clemency by Gov. Hugh Carey in 1975.
Sostre engaged in resistance work, speaking out for civil rights (including religious access and freedoms), and against the inhumanity of the physical space, and sexual assault and violence against prisoners.
“I know most of you in here have seen the video of the lynching of Robert Brooks. The only thing that video did not contain was the sound, but we know what it sounds like,” said Saldana, who is working to end lengthy imprisonments. “We know what a head slamming against the wall sounds like, what it’s like when a person cries out.”
Brooks, who was from Rochester and in the seventh year of a 12-year sentence, died last December after being beaten by multiple corrections officers at Marcy Correctional Facility in Utica.
Saldana, Di Lenola, and Muntaqim all served multiple decades in prison. Each of them agreed that Sostre’s actions, which included labor organizing, worker strikes, and legal action, helped shape their advocacy while incarcerated.
“He wrote that solitary confinement is a form of torture; he was one of the first to resist the policy of rectal examinations,” Di Lenola said of Sostre. “He organized strikes, and it struck me, it was the same-sized room I was in when he did all that.”
The panelists also noted the connection between Sostre’s bookshops and book bans of today.
“Restricting literature, there’s a reason (the Trump administration) wants to do that. To keep you politically unconscious, so you can have 13 billionaires running the country and no one questions it,” said Muntaqim.
Book-banning challenges in schools have been on the rise, with the American Library Association tracking huge increases in 2021 both across the country and in New York. This trend has surfaced locally as well, with a highly publicized book challenge in Penfield schools earlier this year.
Akimbo Books itself has similarities with Sostre’s stores, identifying itself as “radical” ever since the shop was launched three years ago. The store has sections dedicated to “banned books” and stocks shelves with leftist material on topics on Palestinian liberation, feminist sociology, Indigenous Land Back, police abolitionism, community organizing, and, of course, “A Continuous Struggle.”
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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It is frustrating, after a lifetime of advocacy, and the millions that have stood against racism, bigotry, and war against the poor and workers, how little has changed in the attitudes of millions of others. We conti9nue to be labeled leftist radicals, Marxists, commies, and un-American. They will always be wrong.