A Kansas City Case Study in Revolutionary Prisoner Solidarity

KANSAS CITY, MO – A Kansas City man who asked to be identified as Carl Holmes, and a few of his friends, including his current partner who goes by the name Brianna Peril, made their way to Memphis in 2012. An encampment affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement was still standing there, after so many Occupy camps in different cities had been evicted by police.& & Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, a self-identified anarchist who while incarcerated authored the first edition of Anarchism and the Black Revolution, met with the car full of people from Kansas City after they arrived in Memphis. It was there and then that the folks from KC were introduced to the life and work of Martin Sostre, a celebrated champion of the rights of the incarcerated whose work inspired subsequent generations of prison abolitionists, including members of the Industrial Workers of the World who formed the IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. Labor organizers established the IWW in 1905 to unite workers across industries with the aim of abolishing the wage system and with the intention of “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” In 2014, IWW members and people doing...