By Timothy DuWhite
On August 21st, 21 cities across this nation went on strike against the deplorable state of prisons in this country. These 19 days of resistance included work stoppages, sit-ins, and hunger strikes, and follows the valiant riot of the inmates at Lee County earlier this year, as well as the one-day prison strike of 2016.
Even despite her hectic schedule filled to the brim with fighting for her people’s liberation—writer, prison activist, and community organizer Amani Sawari managed to find time to chat with us about her involvement in this year’s strike.
We discussed her involvement in the movement, the motivations to extend the strike from 1 to 19 days, the media’s silence around this effort, and much more. This is part one of a two part interview.
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Timothy DuWhite: Thank you for agreeing to speak with me! Let us begin with you telling me about how you became involved in the strike, and maybe a little bit about your organization.
Amani Sawari: Okay, sure! The way that Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, the organization responsible for organizing much of the strike, found me was through Twitter. I’m very vocal about prison advocacy and my work as a social justice organizer and activist. I founded my website sawarimi.org, which means discovering yourself in Yoruba, right after I graduated from the University of Washington. I just published articles about different current events. A lot to do with social justice, Black Lives Matter stuff, and different marches that I went to. What really sparked my wanting to start that website was seeing that a lot of marches weren’t getting the right sort of coverage. The way they were framed weren’t accurate portrayals of why people were out.
Through that is how Jailhouse Lawyers found me, and asked if they could host their strike on my website, which I was totally down to do! My role and responsibility with posting the strike was being a spokesperson on their behalf as well as publishing a newsletter that went out every single week throughout the strike, leading up to the strike, and just after the strike. It’s called “Solid Black Fist”.
Jailhouse Lawyers would send me the articles that they wanted in there, and they’ll send me the statement that they wanted in there—so it was really their newsletter. They named the newsletter and I just put it together on their behalf. A lot of my work was just kind of doing the footwork for them on their behalf, just being sort of the feet for their voice and amplifying their demands.
The website is also where all the endorsements live. So people that wanted to endorse the strike, that wanted updates about the strike, individuals, businesses, groups, organizations, they all would sign up there and then every single week I would send out an update, “This is what’s going on. This is where you should be at with your planning. This is what Jailhouse lawyers wants to see.” My job was basically just answering questions and connecting people to local groups that were organizing in their area, and also responding to media requests.
T: Got it. Thank you! So you said you sent these newsletters out weekly, but the actual strike this time itself was about two and a half weeks, correct? How further in advance were you sending out this information?
A: Okay. The newsletters went out to prisoners, as well as people on the outside—but it was really directed towards prisoners. It went out every other week as a print publication that people were encouraged to print out and send to the people on the inside who were participating in or who wanted to be involved in the strike. Also for folks who just wanted to be aware of what was going on. We started the newsletter the first week of July.
T: Perfect! All right. So for my next question I’m interested in what you know about the motivations for changing to a two week long action. I know the strike that was held in 2016 was only one day. What were some of the factors that changed it from one day to this extended time?
A: It stretched out into this longer time span because two years ago when prisoners called the strike, officials were able to lock down a lot of prisons that they thought would be involved, which repressed prisoner’s ability to act. They weren’t able to amplify their voices, to demonstrate, because officials just kind of blocked off and locked down that day. Officials can’t lock down their prisons for two and a half weeks, they can’t go without operations, they can’t go without prisoners going to work, doing the cleaning, doing the year maintenance, the cooking, they need prisoners to be in that role. They could lock things down for one day, but prisoners thought, “We’re going to stretch this out and make this longer.”
Another motivation behind that was by the time a lot of prisoners found out about the strike, it was too late to participate in 2016. But a lot of prisoners found things out through snail mail, through word of mouth, and by the time they found things out the strike was still going on and they could jump on board. We were able to see a lot more participation from prisoners who may have not been directly connected to what happened in Lee County or who didn’t know what was happening there, they could find out and still participate.
T: Absolutely. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Oh, also, I guess the next natural question is what did the strike entail? What was actually happening?
A: There were two things that were happening on the inside and the outside. On the inside, prisoners could demonstrate in one of the following ways: work stoppage was a really popular way but not all prisoners have jobs, so for those who didn’t have jobs, they could participate in the strike through a sit-in, which is just them sitting and gathering in a common area of the prison and refusing to move. And then for those prisoners that might not be in general population and can’t participate in the sit-in, they could participate through boycotting. And a lot of prisoners boycotted commissary—they refused to purchase anything during that time. They boycotted telephone—they didn’t make any telephone calls during that time.
Some prisoners who didn’t have access to purchasing from commissary or talking on the phone, like prisoners in segregation or in solidarity units, they would participate through a hunger strike. Regardless of a prisoner’s location or their status, they’re always served food at least three times a day and their denying that food could be a form of solidarity with the strike.
And so, those are four ways that prisoners participated on the inside. And then on the outside, on day one there were at least 21 cities that were doing solidarity on August 21st in the form of rallies, protests, marches, noise demos were really popular too, just being outside of the prisons and making noise and letting prisoners know that we were out there standing with them.
T: Right! Yeah, I attended one of the noise rallies in 2016, and it was really, really amazing.
A: Yeah, it’s amazing. And that was the cool thing about it being like one day, everyone could put all their energy into this one day, but it didn’t serve the prisoners as well as the longer time span.
T: That makes a lot of sense. Well, I’m not sure how involved you were in 2016 but, I wonder, have you noticed a shift in support from the one day demonstration two years ago to now? Do you think the support has grown? Do you feel like folks were attuned to it more. Two years ago I heard about it because I’m in the networks, but it was still a surprise, you know?
A: Right. Yeah, so I was definitely involved but not the capacity that I was this year. And I can say definitely that people that were involved in 2016 were more so people that were always standing with prisoners, abolitionist groups, advocacy groups, families of prisoners, people that were more aware of what was going on on the inside. This year that expanded. That same group was participating this year, but they were also called to sort of take the lead, which is why prisoners opened up this sort of endorsement pathway. You know what’s going on, we know you’re an advocate, we know that you’re a family of a loved one, we need you planning events and going out and hitting those communities that aren’t directly connected with incarcerated groups.
I feel like everyone is at least indirectly affected by mass incarceration, but people that didn’t really know, were targeted through boycotts, through pickets, through the events that were happening outside. And then the mainstream media got ahold of it and a lot of people found out that way.
Once Democracy Now had it, a lot of people found out that way. They were kind of hit in the face with it whether they wanted to or not. If they were going into a Starbucks, for example, here in Seattle, we were standing outside passing out flyers. People found out that were outside of it, and that sort of raised way more awareness and raised participation levels as well because a lot of people were like, “Oh, wow, I didn’t even know that this was a thing. This is definitely something that I want to support and get behind.”
Check back in for the completion of this interview tomorrow!
Timothy DuWhite is a black, queer, poz-writer/artist/nigga based out of Brooklyn, NY. A majority of his work circles around the intersections of state & body, state & love, and state & mind. All Timothy desires is a different/newer world for his sha-daughters, and believes the written word is one tool that could be used towards achieving that goal.
