Memory, Movement and June 11th 2024
This week on The Final Straw, we’re sharing an interview we conducted in recognition of the upcoming celebration of June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and other long term anarchist prisoners. This week you’ll hear Julie Herrada, a long time anarchist activist, comrade of Marius Mason and worker at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan. Julie is joined by Matthew Hart, another longtime anarchist involved in labor organizing, historical research with the Dockstadter Mutual Aid Society and the Los Angeles Anarchist Black Cross chapter of the Federation. We speak about history, memory, prisoner support and continuing the struggle.
- Transcript
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If you’d like to hear more about the history of June 11th and voices of anarchist prisoners and those who support them outside, we’ve taken the opportunity each year to have at least one show focusing on specific cases or concepts related to ongoing struggle and anti-repression work.
But first up, you’ll hear a comrade reading the 2024 call entitled No Separate Worlds and you’re hearing a conversation between anarchist historians and prisoner supporters about memory and the upcoming June 11th international day of soldiairty with marius mason and longterm anarchist prisoners. More info at June11.noblogs.org
Announcement
Fundraiser for Oso Blanco’s Family
There’s a fundraiser for the family of Cherokee anarchist prisoner, Oso Blanco, as they recently suffered a housefire that destroyed their home. You can learn more and find where to donate at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-political-prisoners-family-cherokee-rebuild-after-fire
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Featured Track:
- Blindblindblind by Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band from 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons
Transcription
TFSR: Let’s start with you all introducing yourselves, names, pronouns, or whatever else you’d to mention about who you are and what you do, and maybe how you relate to this conversation, either in terms of anti-repression work, in terms of a longer memory of anarchism. That sort of stuff.
Julie Herrada: Sure. Hi, I’m Julie Herrada, and I’m based in Southeast Michigan, from Detroit originally. I’ve been working with the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of radical social protest movements for the past 30 years, which is part of the University of Michigan. That collection has its foundation and anarchism going back to the mid-19th century and all the way up to the present, but covers a lot of other social movements as well.
I’m also a support person for Marius Mason, who’s been in prison since about 2008 on charges of eco-terrorism. And I’ve known Marius since the late 1980s, so we go back a long way in Detroit doing direct action and environmental justice activities together, as well as anarchist stuff. I’ve been involved in a lot of different movements around anarchism, as well as political prisoner movements, capital punishment, environmental justice, anti-racist stuff. And definitely against anti-choice movements, especially against Planned Parenthood in the 1980s, when there were a lot of clinic defenses and I was on the front lines with a lot of people helping women get access to their health care needs. That’s about it.
TFSR: Awesome. Thank you.
Matt Hart: My name is Matt Hart. Pronouns he/him. I’ve been involved in the anarchist movement since the mid-1990s, originally got involved in Food Not Bombs, but then quickly got involved in the Anarchist Black Cross. I joined the Federation probably about a year after our chapter was formed. Over the years, I’ve been involved in doing political prisoner support, but also been involved in the IWW. Early on in my activism, I got involved in the labor movement. I was involved in the Southern California grocery strike in 2003-04, which lasted about 141 days. Ever since then, I’ve been primarily involved in doing political prisoner work and labor.
I’ve also had a passion for labor history, or an anarchist history, and trying to uncover the anarchist and radical history in Los Angeles. A few years ago, I started what was originally called the Black Rose Historical Society, but it’s now called the Dockstadter Mutual Aid Organization which is named after one of our former anarchists who passed away in the early 2000s. A gentleman by the name of Seth Dockstadter was an activist in the area since the 1980s. A lot of what I do is about labor education. Also, I teach locally at a community college called LA Trade Tech, particularly various things along labor, whether it’s labor education, grievance and arbitration, or contract negotiations. My day work is working for a labor union, and that’s about it.
TFSR: Thanks, Matt. We’re here today talking about June 11, the International Day of Solidarity with Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners. What’s specific about June 11 is the long-term, it’s about longevity, and so it’s about memory. What is your understanding of anarchist memory, and why is it important? What are some aspects that might be different from other types of memory?
JH: The anarchist movement is not mainstream, so it’s a little bit harder to keep that memory going because it doesn’t see the light of day as far as mainstream archives, as part of my work at the Labadie Collection is to find those voices and make sure that they’re preserved and made accessible. What was the rest of the question?
TFSR: Yeah, just thinking about what is specific about anarchist memory compared to other types of memory, and why is it important to maintain our history?
JH: Because nobody else is going to do it. At least they’re not going to do it honestly and with integrity. So it is up to us to keep those voices and also hold those historic movements so that people in the future can have access to them and understand them better. A lot of people don’t understand that a lot of the work that they’re doing now was done decades ago, and things happen so fast these days that people don’t have time to look back and reflect, and that’s the importance of keeping those voices and keeping that history.
MH: And along that, when I was originally thinking about this question, I found it very interesting, because reflecting on this question, I’m not sure if we have an anarchist memory, per se. Obviously, we have certain moments and individuals that we oftentimes remember. But in terms of that long history, I’m not sure if as a movement we really particularly have that I know that there are individuals Paul Avrich and David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer, and obviously the work that Julie does, we’ve got those individuals who try to bring that history out into the open, but a lot of times that in that history is oftentimes covered up through time.
One of the examples that I can recall just in Los Angeles is that there was a time when, after a protest, we were walking past a building called the Italian Hall. And I just kept on thinking, “This building, I know this name. I don’t know why I know this building.” I started looking through some of my books at home and discovered that this location was during the 1910s, 1920s a center for a lot of the Italian anarchists, the Magonista movement, and that just north of that, the whole Magonista movement was vibrant in that community and in that space. But the anarchist community here in Los Angeles had no understanding of where the Magonista movement was active, the fact that here right where we have La Placita, which is down where Los Angeles was built. Just a few yards away, we had this space that was once the home of the anarchist movement, and that none of us even knew about it.
And even when I got involved in the movement, names like Ricardo Flores Magón or Anselmo Figueroa or María Talavera, who were very important figures in the anarchist movement in Los Angeles, especially the southwest, the very fact that these were people that were part of our community and had struggled in the same spaces in which we stand, this was not information that was really, really, really discovered or unearthed. We knew that Ricardo Flores Magón lived in Los Angeles, but the very fact that the whole movement at one point was centered here in Los Angeles, or that we had a vibrant Jewish anarchist community, or vibrant Italian anarchist community, for a lot of us in Los Angeles, this was something that wasn’t known. When I think about the concept of anarchist history and our relationship to it we certainly know Haymarket, Alexander Berkman, and Emma Goldman, but in terms of that real, tangible history, that broad history, oftentimes those things are lost in time, except for people like Julie and David Struthers, and other folks who have worked over the years to unearth it.
In terms of its importance, I do think it’s important because we need to understand where our movement has been, the struggles, the significance of our movements, how our movement has transcended through various aspects of society, and how it’s still relevant today. Even the Ricardo Flores Magón movement, the one community that brought Ricardo Flores Magón and the Magonista movement to life was not the anarchist movement but was the Chicano movement in the 1960s. Here we have this history of the Latino community, and the anarchist community, all coming together in Los Angeles, it is unearthed by another movement, the Chicano movement, here in Los Angeles. And it just shows our connection to different spaces and different communities and that’s an important aspect of why we need to uncover our history and who we are. Because I do think that it reaches out into other aspects of society, whether it’s these civil rights movements that are building, these power movements that are building, or even the labor movement. We can see a lot of overlap when we start unearthing our history.
JH: Yeah, and I just wanted to add that we tend to rely on these individuals, I’m thinking people like Bob Helms, who has a passion for history, not necessarily historian or academic or anybody that’s formally trained. But yet, they have a passion because they’re anarchists and because they love history, and we rely on them to tease out some of these stories and share them, and they don’t get shared widely enough, but yet they are documented. Those are the ones that I gravitate toward, people whose research I trust, and who have a passion for it.
MH: Jumping on what Julie said, Robert is such an amazing resource. And that’s one of the things that’s interesting about, the community of those people who are very, very passionate about that history, is how oftentimes we build relationships with each other and help each other unearth a lot of that information. I know certainly he and I have shared a lot of information about anarchists who have come from Philadelphia and have come over to Los Angeles, and we’ve worked with each other in trying to share that information to unearth it to the best of our ability. He’s one individual that is definitely an amazing resource.
TFSR: So, I’ve had several conversations recently that have made me realize how quickly we lose memory within and among struggles and movements, much we are talking about. On a shorter scale, even. In my own time, there will be people organizing around an issue of no idea that anyone ever tried this before and how it went, but it was only five years before that we did something similar. I’m sure a lot of people have seen similar things in their places. I wonder what y’all sense of this is, and what we can do about just that short-term longevity and interconnection between – can’t say generations, because it’s only again in this example, five years… But what it is about the lack of continuity on a short-scale, and how we communicate with new folks coming in?
JH: Well, I find this happens a lot in my work because, one, I’m old, so I have memory of movements going back 40 years and more. But also, I work in an archive that goes back 150 to close to 200 years. I’m exposed to historical movements constantly, and it strikes me how the feeling of “this is a critical moment in our history and things are falling apart, and what are we going to do, and wringing our hands” never goes away. People always feel that way, going back hundreds of years. I have to step away from that feeling that I am critical, that hype that goes on now that everything is falling apart, and this is the end of days and all that because I see it in other movements, historical movements. And it is frustrating to see that there’s no connection to history.
One thing I’ve been trying to do is bring out some of those historical movements just a little bit at a time, I post flyers and images on the Facebook page for the Labadie Collection using something like the Certain Days Calendar, or Autonomedia, I go to the calendar, “Okay, what happened on this day in history? And what do we have from our collection that I can show people that this happened?” And I’ve been trying to do a little bit more of that, just because there’s so much in the archive, and there’s no way that I could tackle any one project in a big way. So that’s something that everybody who knows about these historical movements can really help do something about. And if you talk to people, and you can tell them “This isn’t the first time this happened, and there is information, there is a place you can go to find out about it.”
MH: One of the things that I’ve done over the years that’s been somewhat useful is walking tours. To step back from my statement earlier, Los Angeles, oftentimes our history is forgotten. And I don’t think that we’re the only town where a lot of our movement’s history has been forgotten. Some cities probably can obtain that history a lot more effectively than places like Los Angeles, because we tend to build over and build up. But one of the things that I thought has always been useful in understanding the connection between the past and where we’re standing. Things like walking tours, especially walking tours in our communities, remind us that this history, this movement is part of where we stand today, and is part of the streets that we navigate. And oftentimes it not only changes our relationship to that history but also changes our perspective towards the landscape in which we’re walking through.
Using again that example of the Italian Hall, we’ve built off of that. One of the tours that we do is through an area in Los Angeles called Chinatown that at one point was Sonora Town and Little Italy. We have as part of that, a conversation about how spaces and communities have shifted over the years, and have an explanation as to why that is. It gives us a better understanding of our community. It has a better understanding of our history as a city, as a movement, and as spaces that we navigate through. We begin to develop a greater sense, a historical sense of self in our communities.
But going back to the idea of seeing things being reinvented every five years, or seeing movements reemerge not really seeing its its history. It’s one of those weird fine lines because you also don’t want to be that person who steps in and says, “Back in my day…” because nobody really wants to hear that. But I do think that it is important to have those conversations of, “Hey, look, this is wonderful that this is being created. Are you aware that this was something that existed previously here?” As an example of that, the city that I live in is outside of Los Angeles, but it has an interesting, vibrant history of anarchism since the late ‘80s, and every once in a while, we will see young anarchists organizing in our community. One of the things that we try to do is try to find ways in which we can support them without necessarily being the old men that are sitting there saying, “Oh, back in the day, we did this,” but trying to find ways in which we can actually support them in the work that they’re doing now. Offer advice, if needed, but we’re there to support, we’re not there to storytelling. That’s one of the things that we try to do, and we try to be very conscious of, not being the old folks in the corner that are reminiscing about the good old days, but trying to find ways to build tangible support for the community that’s coming up.
JH: I love those walking tours that have been created around different cities. In fact, once I had a walking tour with Paul Avrich in 1997. He took me for a walking tour around the Lower East Side, just me and him, and he pointed out all the old anarchist haunts: Emma Goldman’s apartments, places where she published the Mother Earth magazine, places where people lectured, marched, rallied, Tompkins Square, Cooper Union, Webster Hall. It was amazing, and it really had an effect on me. And I love it when other people take up those projects and do them in cities around the country. The problem with that is that you have to be in a city to be part of a radical walking tour. And a lot of people aren’t necessarily in cities where they can walk around and think about what happened here in history. There all different ways to bring out these histories. And walking tours are certainly fun, and they’re definitely hard to sustain, but I’d like to see more of those.
MH: One of the things that is interesting about walking tours is, and for those that are looking at doing that, the one thing that I’ll caution is also have an understanding about space and respecting space. One of the areas that’s the most vibrant community, or at least vibrant history of anarchism in Los Angeles, is, for example, Boyle Heights. It has a rich, rich, rich history of both the Jewish anarchist movement and the Latino anarchist movement. But right now we’ve got a huge struggle around issues of gentrification. If you’re thinking about doing something like that as a way to draw that connection, you want to make sure that you’re respectful of the communities that are there now and making sure that you’re not part of the problem, while you’re trying to unearth the history and connect certain communities with their history, while at the same point being a problem with another community in terms of the current community and the struggles that they have around gentrification. One thing that I do want to throw out is if you’re thinking about doing something like that, at least be respectful of the communities that are there and how what you’re trying to do may be helpful or maybe a hindrance to what’s going on currently.
And also, Julie, anytime you ever want to do an LA history tour and you’re in town, let me know. I’ll be more than happy to.
JH: Thank you.
TFSR: I was just thinking in response to this, in terms of the small city that I live in, there’s a project called Hood Huggers that gives a history of black organizing and black neighborhoods around the city of Asheville that, in a lot of cases, don’t exist or look vastly different. That brings in the conversation of gentrification and redlining and Jim Crow and makes it very material for folks that are on the tour, as well as the tour redistributing money from people that are paying for the tour back into black businesses.
I think, that even if you’re not in a place that has had a history of vibrant anarchist organizing, this materializing or concretizing resistance to similar institutions and organization methods of repression as capitalism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism, that model a really interesting way to make those conversations vibrant and alive in the minds of people that are taking the tour and plus a nice opportunity to do a little digging into the history of the place that you live in. Because even if you’re anywhere in the US, there’s a good chance there’s been a Klan chapter, and there’s a good chance that there’s been people fighting it. That’s a that’s a good conversation starter, right there.
JH: The other thing that I wanted to point out is that you can really get a sense of what a city’s commitment to history is when you do a walking tour and there’s nothing left. And I did that. It wasn’t a walking tour. It was more of a driving tour with Carlotta Anderson, who wrote the biography of Joseph Labadie in the late 1990s. She came to town, and we went on a tour around Detroit and picked out all of the places where Joe Labadie hung out or had his network and community spaces and all that. She had exact addresses and everything, and there was nothing left of any of the buildings or spaces from that period. And that was probably 1998 when we did that tour. It’s even worse now because Detroit has been badly gentrified in the last 10 or 15 years. That was pretty depressing.
MH: Going back on that issue of trying to find- The very fact that you may not have anarchist history, but you may have history around social justice, or issues of institutional racism in your city, at least being aware of that… It’s reminds me of, a couple years ago, I wrote a piece about the history of the Klan in my city, in the city that I live in, and how Richard G Butler, who was the head of Aryan Nation, built a lot of his politics while living in the city that I live in, and how there’s this very deep root of historical institutional, structural racism, racial movements in our society that have this relationship with the city I live in, including eugenics. What was funny was the city I live in is like a small Quaker town, so there are all these implications related to that, but the reaction that I got from the community was outrage over the fact that I was trying to soil the imagery of the city in which we live in, even though all of this is historically accurate. But the outrage of the fact that there was an attempt to somehow besmirch or put a blemish on the city’s image. It was very eye-opening to me in terms of working to uncover that history, putting that history out there, and then seeing the blowback and the reaction of it, It was very, very interesting for me when that all took place.
TFSR: I love how y’all have connected these questions of memory and history to place. That seems such an important element of how that continues to be present in our lives. Or, as Julie mentioned, sometimes it isn’t present anymore, and that in itself is something to notice. And Julie, I’m glad you mentioned Emma Goldman, because last year I was reading her autobiography, Living My Life, with a few friends.
And that’s actually what inspired this next question, which is about what things do we document in history? So much of it is names, dates, and big events, but I’m always thinking about the details, the logistics of how people actually went about doing things, and what disagreements and conflicts they had. Does this information exist? Is there something about the way we traditionally document our history that favors certain information and perspectives over others?
JH: Yeah, history is written by the people who write it down, right? So, if you’re not keeping journals and diaries and talking about these issues that happened within movements or within your network, then how are people going to know about it? The dates and the names of big events are easy because they’re usually published somewhere, but getting into the nitty-gritty and the real story, sometimes these are published in the anarchist presses, or if you look in the Letters to the Editor, you’ll find some back and forth dialog about issues that affect smaller communities, but it’s pretty hard to get some of those stories unless you can interview people. And then, of course, you have different people having different agendas, and they might not remember everything relevant. That’s the case with a lot of history. All of those stories are not necessarily well-documented.
MH: From my perspective, certainly there are those moments in which our conflicts are certainly more notable. Because oftentimes we have a tendency to air our dirty laundry. Looking at the history of the Anarchist Black Cross, certainly, in the last couple of decades, we haven’t shirked the opportunity to make a lot of our criticisms or a lot of our conflicts. We certainly have no problems making those known, oftentimes in terms of public criticism and whatnot. In terms of the issues of logistics and how we build, that’s a little bit harder to – very much in support of what Julie’s saying – it’s a lot harder to obtain because the instructions of how we make the cake, or how we build that movement, it’s sometimes not one of those things that we have a habit of writing it down unless you’re somebody who thinks like an organizer rather than activist, somebody who wants to make sure that how we built this movement and the methods, the tactics, the strategies that we used are useful and need to be put down. I think that for the most part, those are things that are a little bit more difficult to find.
TFSR: Since June 11 is about keeping memory and helping to keep the connection between our comrades behind bars and movements outside, often drawing our energy into prisons to support the ongoing work and organizing that our friends are doing. It’s this connection between the past and what we consider the present. It’s obviously not the past for Marius when Marius is coordinating either the Day in Solidarity With Trans Prisoners or even his medical needs behind bars. This is an opportunity for people on the outside to be drawn into the struggle that our comrades are engaged in. For folks wanting to strengthen those connections to struggle as it existed in the past, and struggle as we see it today, how do we find what we need? How do we dig into the historical record, or how do we keep those memories alive? There’s so much history, there’s so much to read. And how do we find the right things? How do we get the right stuff into the hands of the people who could use it?
JH: That is a tough question, because there is so much, and I am overwhelmed by the amount of information there is out there, and how I just don’t have time to read or listen to everything I want to listen to. I do listen to a lot of podcasts because I just don’t have time to sit down and read a lot of books, so it takes me longer to do that. But what I will say is that I found a good podcast that I listen to because I trust the people that are on it, and I trust their sense of history what they’re saying and their recommendations for what to read, and what they talk about is the Green and Red Podcast I really like a lot. And, of course, The Final Straw, and some of the few that are out there, but it’s hard to share that information in a way like I try to tell people that these are good sources of information, but everybody’s got their own playlist and that they keep going back to.
With Marius, I talk to Marius on the phone every week, and he has quite a network of people that he does correspond with. If he hears about a book or an article or something that he wants to read, I’ll make sure I find a way to get it into his hands, if possible. And something we talk a lot about issues when we talk on the phone and when we email each other, so I always know what he’s thinking, what he’s reading, what he’s experiencing in prison. And I try to share that as much as I can with the support group and with the social media that we have for him, but that’s one person. How do you expand that? That’s the question, I guess.
MH: From my perspective, one of the things that is critical, especially if we’re talking about prisoner support and long-term prisoner support, and how we build that connection between the past and the current movement is really about trying to figure out ways in which the voices of those who are imprisoned, how to get those voices out, and how to get those voices to be brought into the current spaces and current struggles that are going on. Because for a lot of our folks who are held captive, the reality is that they’re just as passionate as they always have been. Their convictions are just as strong as they have been, more or less, to the movements that they’re participating in or that they were incarcerated for. So one of the things that is imperative is trying to find ways in which we can bring those voices, bring those folks into those communities that currently exist.
One of the individuals, when he was incarcerated, did a wonderful job in terms of trying to not only bring his voice into the movements that were going on but also drawing a connection between what he was involved in and then the current struggles and even the historical struggles, was Daniel McGowan. Daniel did a lot of really wonderful writing drawing those connections between his experience and experiences of the past and what was going on in the current day. And that we need to try to try to do what we can to foster that as much as possible. And part of that is about making sure – and very much in line with what Julie was saying – making sure that those resources, in terms of information about what’s going on on the ground, are flowing into our comrades inside the prison system. Because obviously, the information that they’re getting is oftentimes filtered, whether that’s through corporate news, or whether or not that is just, literally, the filtering of information because of the prison industrial complex. But we need to try to do what we can to make those resources available to those folks.
For the folks that are on the outside, trying to build that bridge between those folks that have been previously incarcerated and the current communities. The problem that we have with that – and it’s somewhat of a tangent here – is that for a lot of those folks who were long-time prisoners and who are coming out, one of the things we don’t talk about is about the lack of resources that are being provided to those communities, whether that’s financial or psychological support because there’s a lot of damage that takes place with those individuals who’ve been incarcerated and once they come out, there’s a lot of trauma that they need to work through. Providing those resources to those individuals so that that way they can figure out how to navigate this emerging world that they’ve got plucked from, and then now they’re being dropped back into, but then also how to build that community between those folks that are coming out to the current community, so that that way the current community can have a better understanding of the struggles of those that are within the prison system.
JH: Yeah, I agree with you about Daniel McGowan. He’s done a great job. He did a great job in prison, and he’s doing a great job out of prison by staying active in communities where he falls within the legal conformance that he’s allowed to do but still remains very active and visible. That’s quite rare, actually, because there’s a lot of institutional trauma that comes with having been a long-term prisoner… And the resources, and you have to find work, and you’re on probation for however long, and just struggling with all the changes in society coming out, and your whole network is different because you’re in a physical place that maybe people can’t access you quite as easily and can’t find you. Or maybe you don’t want to be found, maybe, you just want to hole up and try to maintain your existence on the outside, and just be with your close family and friends. I am concerned about that, with other prisoners and with Marius um facing release in the next few years, as well, and how that’s going to affect everything that he’s gotten used to over the years.
MH: Just to follow up with that, for those of us who have done the prison support, that is one of the things that we do often see is as part of those individuals that have been released from incarceration, oftentimes – and it’s understandable – you see them float away. I’m not sure where the truth is, whether or not we as a community, just – I don’t want to say wash our hands up, but say, “Okay, our job is done. They’re now free. They’re out to go live their lives.” Whether or not it is a thing of “I need to focus on me and try to build my life and try to build my relationships with my community, with my family. And I just want to live my life.” Whether or not there’s some truth in the middle, I think there’s some truth in one space and some truth in the other. But I do think that one of the things that we don’t provide is really resources for those individuals that have now come out, not as much as we should.
You’re absolutely right. We’ve got individuals who are on the verge of getting out, and we need to make sure that we certainly have those resources to help folks. Because one thing we don’t ever talk about is the trauma that takes place having to navigate through the prison system. We don’t talk about that in any way, shape, or form, nor do we provide resources for that. And that’s one of the things that our community needs to have a real, honest conversation about. Because those individuals that are coming out, that’s one area where we failed. That’s one of the things when we’re talking about, how do we get resources to people? We need to have a really honest conversation about it. Because I do think that there is a lot of trauma that needs to be addressed.
TFSR: Since we’re touching on this specific topic, and this is a really important one, are there any examples that you all see of projects or groups or individuals that are doing good work in this direction of prompting folks to think about how do we support people coming out, whether they be people that have been our comrades, or people that are just within society that are experiencing decarceration, that are getting out now, or a different form of incarceration through home arrest. Are there any resources or groups that are thinking well about this?
One example that I can think of is Jailhouse Lawyers Speak founded in 2022, a women’s re-entry house that can only house a certain number of people, and they’re specifically housing people that have been engaged in activism while inside of prison. But that seems like a really amazing project to me, not only to try to offer space for people to heal, and offer resources but also trying to keep people, if they want to be, still connected with the movement after they’ve left the prison walls.
MH: To be honest with you, most of the time where I’ve seen people have resources provided to them, it’s been through the generosity of their family and their community, especially in terms of finding jobs, finding employment, finding resources, that’s usually what I’ve seen personally. I’m sure some organizations are out there, but none come to mind offhand.
JH: I’ve seen organizations but not specifically targeted toward political prisoners or anarchist prisoners. As you said, there are community groups and family and churches on a large part, and there are Facebook groups that help with that. There’s one called Helping Our Prisoners Elevate, and it’s out of Detroit, and they do a lot of networking. But there is a lot of affiliation toward the Christian churches. So there’s that. It’s a lot harder when you don’t have that community group that’s already established and set up and doing this work. And it would be great to have something, but it’s hard to sustain that unless you’re really dedicated to it.
TFSR: What would you all to see in terms of active remembering and support for long-term prisoners?
JH: Maybe getting some of their stories and touching base with them as soon as they get out and talking to them and establishing some communication, ongoing communication. It might be hard, based on what we talked about earlier, about the institutional trauma and what they’re faced with coming out, but just maybe interviewing them, getting their stories, and maintaining some support for them, that maybe they choose who they want to help with that. Maybe they have family members or friends that they trust and want to see involved in something, and then just get a few other people involved. It doesn’t have to be a whole network. It can be four or five people that work on this together, just there are four or five people that are on Marius’ support group and have been sustained on that group for many years now. And it seems to work, and he knows who we all are, and he trusts us. Maybe just somehow maintaining that on the outside too.
MH: I’m not sure if this falls into this question, but one of the things that’s important for the support communities to have an understanding is really what happens for activists that are being dropped into the prison system and the cultures that exist within the prison system, and how to survive, and how to navigate spaces, and how to continue to do that in a way that reduces the possibility of harm and trauma, and how oftentimes you have to engage in a cultural shift. For a lot of activists who may not have experience with the prison system I would assume, are oftentimes ill-equipped to navigate those spaces. And cultural shift, that individual shift that you have to engage in to survive this new society in a way where you’re able to come out on the other side, trying to be somewhat who you were.
A resource that would be extremely valuable, something that needs to take place is how do we communicate with the community on the outside of this real reality. And the fact that when these individuals come back out, they’ve spent sometimes decades in this society, while trying to retain the values and the principles and the ideas in which they hold true, and everything that happened to them because of that. And oftentimes we expect these individuals once they come out, to come out in the same way in which the community speaks and lives and interacts with each other. When they’ve lived through this space, they’ve lived through this culture, this really transformation that they’ve had to go through in order just to survive. And there’s a lot of emotion. There’s a lot of going back to the concept of trauma.
One of the things that we can do in terms of what I’d like to see is maybe a better understanding or a way in which our communities of support, I’d like to see us really have a real conversation about that, and then also, how do we react to that, and how do we support them in terms of their transition back from the experience that they’ve navigated through. Because oftentimes when we start seeing problematic behavior, rather than putting it in the context of what this person has endured, we put it in the context of the community in which we are currently navigating.
There’s a fine line between abusive and inappropriate behavior that needs to be checked and an understanding of where this person has come from, and the very fact that we need to have a better understanding and a better sensitivity to their experience and how to support them in that space, rather than reacting to the inappropriate behavior, whether it’s issues of anger, frustration, snapping, positive communication versus negative communication, all of those things are things that we need to have a conversation about in a much more positive way. And in terms of what we can do for long-term prisoners, especially those that are coming out, or even those that are still currently incarcerated, we need to have conversations about how to handle those things in a much more productive way.
TFSR: Absolutely. That’s all been very well said. It’s funny how easily one can forget the wider context and experience that someone else has had and hold them to the expectations that we would have of someone who’s been living five doors over the whole time.
It’s a bit of a jump thematically from where we’ve been going with the conversation in terms of the practical size of prisoner support. But, in closing, and as a way of bringing this back to the abstract of June 11, although it is about specific individual prisoners, it’s also about this collective memory and the movements in which people acted and the goals that we share with them. That continuation of the story across generations, or even, like I said before, between the people who were doing stuff five years ago and the people that are doing stuff now, keeping the culture of resistance alive is super important, and that’s an important part of the June 11 Memory Project. Stories and metaphors give us so much more nuance and room to explore and question and go deeper than straightforward, simple answers do sometimes. They invigorate our hearts, and they help us to make emotional connections with people that we’ve never met. Within a wider anarchist culture, but June 11, in particular if it sparks you, where does anarchist storytelling fit into creating and maintaining memory?
MH: There is value there because it’s about creating culture and community, and shared values. Very much on topic with what you’re saying, but it’s one of those things of how do we do that. And sometimes we live, certainly I do, as somebody who has a passion for history, I live in a very factual mindset. But much can be communicated through things, not just through metaphors, but through artistic expression, expression of self. I’m reminded of the feminist movement and how they oftentimes talked about the expression of voice and finding your voice and finding it through various methods and means, whether that’s through poetry, whether that’s through short story, whether or not it’s about their own personal narrative and expressing narrative. And that was very much an important part of the feminist movement.
And that there’s a place for the anarchist movement to find that as well or even the political prisoner movement. I’m thinking of the book Hauling Up The Morning and how we’ve got various different artistic expressions as a way to communicate the struggle of political prisoners. There’s a place for the anarchist movement for that too. We’ve traditionally done plays. We’ve traditionally tried to find different avenues of art as a way to express our ideas, our culture, and our community. I do think that we can certainly use stories, whether fictional or nonfictional or even using nonfiction and grabbing from nonfiction and using storytelling in a fictional method as a way to communicate our history. For example, there have been some books written about Ricardo Flores Magón that are loosely factual or nonfiction but are written in a fictional way. I do think that there is an opportunity for us to do that and be successful at it.
JH: I’m trying to think if there’s anything I can add to it that would be worth saying. And I don’t think I have anything more to add to that. That was a good answer, Matt, thank you.
MH: The only thing that I’ll jump on with that is one of the organizations that was always very, very successful, especially using symbolism and metaphors as a way to communicate, educate principles and values is the IWW. They’re very successful in using these different methods as a way to communicate their ideas. Obviously, there’s a strong correlation between the IWW and the anarchist movement, and we can be successful in bringing that back into the modern-day movement.
TFSR: Matt and Julie, thanks so much for bringing and sharing what is clearly a very rich experience and a deep consideration for these issues. Are there any final thoughts that you’d like to share?
MH: Not from my perspective.
JH: No, I just wanted to thank you guys for the work that you’re doing and thank you for inviting us on to be part of this project.
MH: Absolutely, I agree with Julie, thank you.
TFSR: Cool. It’s been my pleasure and honor, and I hope we get to talk again in the future.