This roundtable will celebrate the much-anticipated publication of Orisanmi Burton’s first book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. It will include leading scholars, intellectuals, and activists, located within and outside the academy, discussing the book’s contribution to scholarship on radical prison movements, Black Revolutionary struggles and theories of the prison and rebellion. It will also include the author offering a brief response to the panelists.

Speakers:

Jared A. Ball is a Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Palgrave, 2020). Ball is also host of the podcast “iMiXWHATiLiKE!”, co-founder of Black Power Media which can be found at BlackPowerMedia.org, and his decades of journalism, media, writing, and political work can be found at imixwhatilike.org. Ball has also been named as one of 2022’s Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Freedom Scholars.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad was a leading member of the New York Black Panther Party, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21. Arrested June 1971, he was framed as part of the illegal FBI Counter Intelligence program (COINTELPRO) and subjected to unfair treatment and torture during his nineteen years in prison. During Dhoruba’s incarceration, litigation on his behalf produced over three hundred thousand pages of COINTELPRO documentation, and upon release in 1990 he was able to bring a successful lawsuit against the New York Department of Corrections for all their wrongdoings and criminal activities. Living in both Ghana and the U.S. Dhoruba, an uncompromising critic of imperialism and capitalism, continues to write and work promoting freedom for all political prisoners and revolutionary Pan-Africanism.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press). Change Everything is forthcoming from Haymarket. She and Paul Gilroy co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke University Press). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore features her internationalist work.

Sarah Haley works in the areas of U.S. gender history, carceral history, Black feminist and queer theory, prison abolition, and feminist historical methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity and is working on a book titled Carceral Interior: A Black Feminist Study of American Punishment, 1966-2016. She is an associate professor of gender studies and history at Columbia University and organizes with Scholars for Social Justice.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

Orisanmi Burton is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University. His research employs innovative ethnographic and archival methods to examine historical collisions between Black radical organizations and state repression in the United States. Dr. Burton’s work has been published in North American Dialogue, The Black Scholar, American Anthropologist, among other outlets and has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and The Margarite Casey Foundation, which selected him as a 2021 Freedom Scholar. Dr. Burton’s first book, entitled Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt was published by the University of California Press on October 31 2023.