Book summary “If They Come in the Morning”: summary

Introduction

You live in a society where state repression, political imprisonment, and systemic racism form the core instruments of an oppressive social order. When you confront this reality, you see how the legal apparatus targets the poor and racial minorities while framing dissidents as common criminals. You need a way to understand this machinery of control and how to resist it.

Angela Y. Davis and her co-contributors present the central idea that state repression must be met with a broad united front and uncompromising resistance. The book combines theoretical essays, personal letters, and legal documents to expose the violent nature of the prison system. You will examine the conditions of political prisoners, militant inmate rebellions, and the strategies used to crush revolutionary movements.

The following questions guide this analysis:

• How does the legal system manufacture political prisoners?
• What role do prisons play in maintaining class rule?
• How can you build a nonsectarian united front against state oppression?

1. Political Prisoners and the Legal Apparatus

The American judicial and penal system disproportionately targets the poor and racial minorities, creating an army of the wronged while framing political dissidents as common criminals.

The Army of the Wronged

You see thousands of innocent victims fill jails simply because they lack money or friends. The great mass of arrested Black people have no defense and stagger out of prison ruined.

Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois observed this reality directly. He was indicted in 1951 as Chairman of the Peace Information Center for failing to register as an agent of a foreign principal. Only the money and courage of friends freed him while countless others remained behind bars.

Definition of a Political Prisoner

A political prisoner is someone whose words or deeds embody political protest against the established order. This opposition brings you into acute conflict with the state.

The legal apparatus attempts to reduce political acts to standard criminal offenses to affirm the invulnerability of the existing order. Your true offense remains challenging racism and exploitation.

Historical resistance reveals the violent cost of enforcing state laws:

• Anthony Burns, a Virginia slave captured in Boston in 1853, was defended by abolitionists in a fierce courtroom gunfight.
• The rendition required 22 companies of state militia, four platoons of marines, artillerymen, and police to ensure his return.
• The Federal government spent 40,000 dollars to enforce his return to bondage.
• Nat Turner and his followers killed 65 white people during their revolt.
• Bartolomeo Vanzetti received a 15 years sentence for an attempted payroll robbery by Judge Webster Thayer.
• 352 years of marched oppression emerge from the loins of Black America.

The American nation faces deep crisis because it remains unprepared to confront the algebra of our history and the reality of Black self-emancipation. Generations of Black people have assessed and absorbed their history, freeing themselves from self-contempt. You recognize that you are a person, which terrifies a nation built on greed and profit.

When Muhammad Ali refused to put on the military uniform and sacrificed millions of dollars, it created a profound instructional impact on the people far beyond emotional catharsis. You develop a new consciousness that challenges the legitimacy of the courts and the prison walls.

2. The Totalitarian Prison System

Prisons operate as instruments of class control and totalitarian isolation, provoking militant inmate rebellions and manifestos against administrative brutality.

Prison as Totalitarian Institution

The American penal system operates as a totalitarian structure designed to isolate captives from the developing world and strip them of their humanity. Through repetitive routines, imposed anonymity, and rigid atomization by numbers and cages, the prison attempts to create a desocialized environment. High walls, barbed wire, and armed guards function not merely to prevent escapes, but to shield prisoners from external social life and progressive influences. You encounter unmitigated totalitarianism through dehumanizing, desocializing mechanisms that suppress any sign of independent thought.

Prisoners Rebellions and Manifesto

The Attica prison revolt was not a criminal act, but an intensely political confrontation reflecting the inmates' collective consciousness and rejection of penal totalitarianism. Inmates organized across racial divides to challenge barbarous conditions and demanded the right to study radical political theory and secure amnesty. The state responded with massive violence, leading to a massacre that exposed the systemic failure and brutality of ruling circles.

In November 1970, over 2,000 Folsom inmates initiated a work stoppage protesting slave wages of two to sixteen cents per hour, inadequate medical care, censorship, and arbitrary punishment, while facing brutal retaliation and solitary confinement. A work stoppage at Folsom Prison involved 2,100 out of 2,400 prisoners starting on November 3, 1970. Striking prisoners at Folsom Prison organized across racial lines to treat the fascist concentration camps of modern America as targets for reform through the Adjustment Center. They issued a comprehensive manifesto containing 29 distinct demands:

• End the injustice suffered by all prisoners regardless of race, creed, or color
• Provide constitutional rights of legal representation at Adult Authority hearings
• Reform medical staff, procedures, and hospital facilities
• Improve visiting conditions and facilities for inmates and families
• Provide written notices signed by the Warden for all Adjustment Center placements
• Replace indeterminate Adjustment Center terms with fixed terms based on good conduct
• End segregation of prisoners based on political beliefs
• End political and racial persecution and guarantee access to mail and literature
• End compulsory prison labor and exploitative pay rates
• End the tear-gassing of prisoners locked in their cells
• Pass a minimum and maximum term bill to eliminate indeterminate life sentences
• Allow outside industries to employ inmates at scale wages
• Grant inmates the right to form or join labor unions
• Allow inmates to earn enough to support their families
• Prosecute correctional officers for unjustified shootings or cruel punishment
• Enforce state and federal minimum wage laws for inmate labor
• Grant political asylum to condemned prisoners and revolutionaries under international pacts
• End prison-premise trials without a jury of peers from the county
• End physical brutality in California state prisons
• Provide full-time legal assistance through the California Bar Association
• Update industry working conditions to state standards
• Establish an inmate workers insurance plan for workplace accidents
• Establish unionized vocational training programs with union pay scales
• Provide annual accounting of the Inmate Welfare Fund with an inmate committee voice
• Replace the Governor-appointed Adult Authority Board with an elected parole board
• Create a full-time salaried board of overseers for state prisons
• Conform prison authorities to the Folsom Adjustment Center manifesto demands
• Furnish Folsom Prison with ethnic counselors for Black and Brown populations
• End discrimination in parole judgments and quotas for Black and Brown people

3. Trials of Political Prisoners Today

Political prisoners in the United States are largely victims of an exploitative and racist socioeconomic arrangement rather than isolated lawbreakers. The vast majority of imprisoned Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans are targeted because of their successful community organizing or as reprisals for resistance. Authorities utilize frame-ups, excessive bail, and harsh prison conditions to suppress political dissent and eliminate revolutionary movements.

Militant organizations, community leaders, and anti-war activists face systematic frame-ups, excessive bail, and police harassment designed to crush revolutionary movements.

State repression manifests directly through police operations against radical groups. Law enforcement carried out 1,000 arrests of Black Panthers during a two-and-a-half-year period starting May 1967. Authorities committed 19 killings of Panthers during the same period.

Marie Hill was sentenced to die at age 15 in North Carolina after being coerced into a false confession for murdering a white grocery store proprietor.

Targeting Movement Leaders

The prosecution of the Panther 21 illustrates how vague conspiracy charges and paid informants are deployed to dismantle radical organizations. Twenty-one members of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party were charged in a 30-count indictment alleging conspiracies to commit bombings. The state relied heavily on paid police infiltrators and intent-based charges while subjecting defendants to exorbitant bail and severe mistreatment.

Lee Berry, an epileptic defendant in the Panther 21 case, was denied medical care for seven months in a New York jail, leading to pneumonia and a lung abscess.

Exorbitant bail amounts are manipulated as financial ransom to gag and silence prominent Black activists. SNCC chairman H. Rap Brown faced fabricated charges involving interstate weapons transportation and alleged threats. Authorities revoked his bail without due process and imposed massive financial conditions to keep him imprisoned, prompting him to launch a prolonged hunger streak.

H. Rap Brown undertook a 46-day fast in jail after his bail was raised to one hundred thousand dollars following his trip to a birthday celebration for Huey P. Newton. The state fixed 50,000 dollars new bail after a California speech, contributing to the 100,000 dollars total bail amount used to keep him confined. The trial of the 21 members accused in the New York chapter indictment involved 100,000 dollars bail set for each defendant.

4. Prisons as Instruments of State Control

American society functions essentially as a prison, with the only real difference between the outside world and maximum-security institutions being the level of security. The same racism, violence, exploitation, and fascist repression that destroy people in general and Black people in particular are embedded throughout the entire American social and governmental system.

American society functions as an expansive prison where Soledad Brothers and women prisoners face extreme violence, slave labor, and reactionary reform traps.

Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton observed that the general population experiences poverty, underemployment, and malnutrition akin to neo-concentration camps. You live under a system where minimum security outside mirrors maximum security inside.

The Soledad Brothers Case

Following the unpunished killing of three Black inmates at Soledad and the subsequent retaliatory death of a guard, authorities targeted outspoken Black activists for legal lynching. Prison officials and district attorneys selected George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette as scapegoats, denying them legal counsel, isolating them, and exploiting the legal system to secure their execution under mandatory death penalty statutes.

George Jackson faced California Penal Code Section 4500, a mandatory death sentence for lifers convicted of assaulting a non-inmate who dies within a year, solely due to his revolutionary writing and refusal to submit. At the time of the accusations, George Jackson had served 10 years on a one-year-to-life sentence within a total convicted felons population of 28,000 in California's prison system.

Defeating state repression and preventing fascism requires building a broad, mass-based defense movement that unites the working class, activists, and prisoners. Revolutionaries must avoid sectarian divisions and personality cults, using traditional channels of protest and creative mass actions like petitions, rallies, and demonstrations to demand freedom for all political prisoners.

Angela Davis argued that failing to build a strong united front to free the Soledad Brothers, Bobby Seale, and Ericka Huggins will unleash an era of uncurbed terror and official barbarism. You can fight this repression through specific actions:

• Initiate petition campaigns, mass rallies, demonstrations, and block meetings.
• Demand the abolition of the indeterminate sentence law.
• Demand the repeal of penal code 4500 mandating the death penalty for lifers accused of assaulting non-inmates.
• Lay aside sectarian differences to build a vigorous and militant united front for prisoner defense.

5. Toward the United Front

Prisons and Class Struggle

Prisons and institutionalized racism are two principal instruments developed by the ruling classes to suppress hierarchy disobedience and maintain property relations. Imprisonment is an aspect of class struggle from the outset, serving to isolate those who defy a hypocritical establishment. Most crime is the simple effect of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege.

Defeating fascism and class oppression requires building a nonsectarian united front, combining grassroots organizing with rigorous revolutionary specialization.

Historical examples of groups and movements targeted by the establishment include the Working Men’s Benevolent Association, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Working Men’s Party, the banned Communist Party, and the Black Panther Party. You face an apparatus operating within a nearly two hundred and five million total population of the United States. Two-thirds of a million people or more are confined to these prisons at all times.

Strategy for United Front

Vanguard elements go among the people at rallying points with elevation strategies, promoting commitment and providing concrete activities. At the same time, partisans popularize goals in their natural environments. Racism, categorized into overt, self-interdicting, and unconscious types, must be combated while the system manufacturing it is destroyed.

• Renounce the idea that all participants must be of one mind or work from a single party line.
• Vanguard elements search out people who can contribute to building the infrastructure with pen and clipboard.
• Provide a packet of pamphlets for individuals who cannot yet take the step of contributing directly.

George Jackson wrote to his brother Jonathan Peter Jackson, advising him to take Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward and specialize in a crucial field needed by the revolutionary group. Jonathan Jackson's death occurred on August 7, 1970. You can apply this same rigorous focus by choosing a specific skill that serves liberation.

• Decide now on one thing to specialize in that will help the war effort, such as chemistry, electronic engineering, or surgery.
• Establish a certain time to give over to your specialty each day.
• Get passing grades on the simple unnecessary subjects required by school with a little attention and study.

The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis built a massive nationwide grassroots movement by organizing local committees across major cities, small towns, and communities. In early November 1970, 300 to 400 people attended a mass meeting in a South Central Los Angeles church to found NUCFAD, electing Franklin Alexander and Fania Davis Jordan as national co-coordinators. You can sustain this popular movement rooted in class and racial oppression through direct participation.

• Conduct church meetings and neighborhood coffee klatches.
• Perform leafletting and door-to-door raps.
• Hold block meetings and distribute leaflets at factory gates.
• Organize Free Angela committees in local unions.

Black women must unite across all spheres to dismantle a corrupt, racist society that targets their children, men, and families through police repression and social destruction. A Harlem manifesto written in November 1970 highlights how heroin, inferior segregated education, underemployment, and unjust imprisonment ravage Black communities. You must stand against the white-death habit and reject the white myth of Black Matriarchy.

• Come together and speak out loud and clear that Angela Davis must be free.
• Refuse to accept the senseless answer of more jails and police repression.
• Stand beside children and reject the destruction of the Black family.

10 Key Ideas

1. The American judicial and penal system disproportionately targets the poor and racial minorities while framing political dissidents as common criminals.
2. A political prisoner is someone whose words or deeds embody political protest against the established order, bringing them into acute conflict with the state.
3. The American penal system operates as a totalitarian structure designed to isolate captives from the developing world and strip them of their humanity.
4. Striking prisoners at Folsom Prison organized across racial lines to issue a comprehensive manifesto containing 29 distinct demands addressing wages, medical care, and brutality.
5. Militant organizations, community leaders, and anti-war activists face systematic frame-ups, excessive bail, and police harassment designed to crush revolutionary movements.
6. American society functions as an expansive prison where Soledad Brothers and women prisoners face extreme violence, slave labor, and reactionary reform traps.
7. Prison officials and district attorneys selected George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette as scapegoats following prison killings, denying them legal counsel and exploiting the legal system.
8. Prisons and institutionalized racism are two principal instruments developed by the ruling classes to suppress hierarchy disobedience and maintain property relations.
9. Defeating fascism and class oppression requires building a nonsectarian united front, combining grassroots organizing with rigorous revolutionary specialization.
10. The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis built a massive nationwide grassroots movement by organizing local committees across major cities, small towns, and communities.