Sostre, Martin Ramirez

SOSTRE, MARTIN RAMIREZ (1923 –2015). A revolutionary anarchist political prisoner and one of the most successful jailhouse lawyers of the twentieth century, Sostre developed a radical vision of individual freedom and collective liberation from captivity, while winning rights for religious freedom, political expression, and due process regarding censorship and solitary confinement for the prisoners.

Born in East Harlem to Puerto Rican parents, Sostre was exposed to a range of Black radical thought and revolutionary anti-imperialism during his youth. He saw Paul Robeson speak on street corners and frequented Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial Bookstore on 125th Street in New York City. He recalled his parents being connected with the Communist-affiliated Spanish-speaking workers’ club, El Club Julio Mella, named for the assassinated Cuban revolutionary. Sostre left school after the tenth grade and was eventually drafted into World War II at age nineteen. Dishonorably discharged in 1946 and later arrested on drug charges, he was sentenced to six-to-twelve years in 1952.

Sostre described his incarceration as the “first time I had a chance to think, and began reading everything I could – history, philosophy, and law.” He began practicing yoga, joined the Nation of Islam, and became a respected writer. In the 1960s, he emerged as a leader in an organized prison litigation movement by incarcerated Muslims to secure constitutional protections to religious practice inside. He and other jailhouse lawyers creatively used Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 to claim religious discrimination by those acting under state authority. By 1964, these cases had secured important rulings such as Sostre v. McGinnis in New York and Cooper v. Pate in Illinois, ultimately securing constitutional rights for all those incarcerated.

Serving the full twelve years of his sentence—the final five of them in solitary confinement as punishment for his activism—, Sostre moved to Buffalo. He worked days at the Bethlehem Steel mill in nearby Lackawanna and saved his money to open the city’s first openly revolutionary bookstore, the Afro-Asian Bookshop. Like Michaux’s bookstore of his youth, his bookstore allowed people to sit and read, returning each day until they had finished the book. The bookstore drew student radicals as well as neighborhood youth. During the urban uprisings of 1967, Buffalo became one of 159 across the country that summer, and the bookstore became a base for political education and refuge from the violence of police in the streets. Several weeks later, his store was raided by police and the FBI, and Sostre was framed with a fifteen-dollar bag of heroin by an informant. Sostre faced an exorbitant bail and served eight months in jail before being forced to represent himself at trial. In court, he challenged the all-white jury and spoke out against the Vietnam War. He was gagged by the judge and sentenced to a virtual life sentence of thirty-one to forty-one years. He left the courtroom with his fist raised and told the audience to “keep resisting.”

Sostre regarded the prison as a concentrated form of state repression and the considered the so-called “free world” outside as merely “minimum security.” Dismantling both the prison and the state, he believed, was necessary to bring about an egalitarian society free of all forms of domination and coercion.

Over the next eight years, Sostre fought his case while winning landmark legal victories over political censorship, solitary confinement, and the rights of prisoners to due process. He also organized chapters of the Black Panther Party and fought for prisoners’ unions, established radical study groups and lending libraries, and published several revolutionary newspapers. During the final years of his incarceration, he identified as a revolutionary anarchist and refused to shave his quarter-inch beard or submit to rectal assaults. For these refusals, he was beaten nearly a dozen times. He identified the “struggle for the liberation of women as the most widespread and humanistic struggle” and became a symbol of resistance for a younger generation of Puerto Rican revolutionaries such as the Young Lords, who established a free breakfast program in his name. Finally, after having been named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and with the support of defense committees across the country, his sentence was commuted by the governor on Christmas Day 1975.

“For me this is a continuous struggle whether I am on the outside or the inside,” he explained when released. “If the battlefield changes, my struggle never changes.” He continued to organize on the outside, leading tenant organizing efforts in Harlem and co-founding a group called the Juvenile Education and Awareness Project (JEAP) with Sandy Shevack in New Jersey. JEAP combined jobs training with political education and youth mentorship, and over the course of nearly a decade, the group employed eighty teenagers to renovate buildings in Passaic and Paterson. They eventually transformed five properties into a community center, daycare, and apartments rented for below market price.

Martin Sostre died on August 12, 2015 at the age of ninety-two. At the height of his international prominence, attorney William Kunstler remembered Sostre as a “Promethean figure, a hero to other inmates and to ourselves. He should not even have been in jail, but while he was, the state did all it could to destroy what it could not destroy – his indomitable will.”

Copeland, Vincent. The Crime of Martin Sostre. New York: McGraw Hill, 1970.

McLaughlin, Malcolm. “Storefront Revolutionary: Martin Sostre’s Afro-Asian Bookshop, Black Liberation, and the New Left, 1964-1975.” The Sixties 7, 1 (2014): 1-27.

Kaba, Mariame. “Martin Sostre: Legal Advocate, Prisoner Revolutionary.” Prison Culture. June 12, 2012. http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2012/06/12/martin-sostre-revolutionary-legal-advocate-prisoner/