American Purgatory by Benjamin D. Weber

Author:Benjamin D. Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press

Alderson Women’s Prison

“The politicals,” as imprisoned Communist organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn fondly referred to them, at Alderson Federal Prison for Women included Claudia Jones, Blanca Canales, and Lolita Lebrón. Jones and Flynn were arrested and indicted along with other members of the Communist Party USA on charges of violating the Smith Act and stood trial as part of the now widely discredited McCarthy era persecutions of the early 1950s. Inside Alderson, Jones strengthened her bonds of solidarity with other anti-imperial intellectuals and activists, and together they sharpened their decolonial framework for challenging, and ultimately repairing, the injustices of the rapidly expanding carceral system at the center of U.S. state building. In her poem to Puerto Rican independence activist Blanca Canales, Jones expressed what Africana studies scholar Carole Boyce Davies describes as her theory of “anti-imperialist feminism.”24

It seems I knew you long before our common ties—of conscious choice

Threw under single skies, those like us

Who, fused by our mold

Became their targets of old25

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