Those Who Know Don't Say

“Richly researched and told with elegance and sophistication, this stunning book is the definitive account of the Nation of Islam’s political activism. Felber provides a revelatory look at the urgency and far-reaching influence of this controversial, pivotal Black nationalist organization.”—Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

“Those Who Know Don’t Say is an archivally rich, bicoastal tale of the central role of Black nationalists in challenging prisons and police in the postwar era. Garrett Felber’s portrayal of the Nation of Islam stands out as an original contribution for showing how the organization’s leaders, contrary to popular myth, mobilized politically on city streets, in courts, and behind prison walls to challenge police brutality and prisoner abuse years before the War on Crime and mass incarceration began. This is a must read.” —Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“Garrett Felber’s powerful new book on the Nation of Islam details, with nuance and rigor, an important and often-overlooked chapter in the narrative of the twentieth-century Black freedom movement, expanding upon how we understand Black politics, Black liberation, and the movement for prison abolition today.” —Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century

“Felber . . . examines how the Nation of Islam, and its growth during the civil rights era, impacted prisons, policing, school desegregation, and voting rights. Drawing on history, law, sociology, and politics, Felber looks at how the Nation impacted the modern carceral state. . . . One can find many books on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, but Felber’s is valuable for its interdisciplinary approach to possible solutions for the carceral state in the 21st century.”—CHOICE

“Essential. . . . Felber insists—rightly—on reading prisons and courts as 'sites of activism,' where the legitimacy of the state was challenged, locating litigation alongside hunger strikes, sit-ins, takeovers of solitary confinement, street protests, and prison uprisings as acts of resistance within a broader Black Freedom struggle—acts to which the state responded, often with crushing force.”—American Religion

“Felber’s excellent book broadens scholars' view of the Black freedom movement—widening its cast of characters, expanding its sites of struggle—and collapses false dichotomies between civil rights and Black Power.”—Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

“A vital contribution to scholarship on the [Nation of Islam], the carceral state, and the Black Freedom Movement. Felber insightfully links the expansion of the carceral state and movements seeking to dismantle it through his concept of the ‘dialectics of discipline’ . . . [which] provides an analytical tool by which to understand both carceral expansion and resistance.”—New York History

“Felber’s political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam centers the Nation in the US Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state, seeking to capture the ambiguous place of the Nation—and Black nationalist organizing more broadly—during an era which has come to be deï¬\x81ned by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.”—Law and Social Inquiry

“Shows that police departments steeped in cultures of bigotry, and a judicial system that promotes punishment over rehabilitation, were harsh in responding to black protest movements, many of them led by the Nation of Islam. . . . An impressive academic investigation and an appealing contribution to black American history.”—Foreword