The Martin Sostre Memorial Prison Books Fund

Martin Sostre was born in 1923 in New York City, and grew up in Harlem’s Puerto Rican community. Having dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, he joined the United States Army in 1943. At his station in Tuskegee, Alabama, Sostre ran afoul of the military’s hierarchy and authoritarianism, and returned to Harlem in 1946 after he was dishonorably discharged. In 1952, he was sentenced to twelve years ostensibly for drug possession after his bookstore was identified as an organizing hub. In prison, Sostre converted to Islam and became involved in a 1962 lawsuit that argued it was unconstitutional to deny the Quran to incarcerated Muslims.

But he did’t stop there. In Sostre vs. Otis (1971), the court ruled that prison procedures for evaluating literature entering prisons was constitutionally deficient, and therefore had to be revised to protect the first amendment rights of incarcerated persons. Prior to this suit, there were no time limits for evaluating literature. Prison authorities could hold books for as long as they wanted under the auspices of “evaluation,” an easy way to simply deny them in a neverending holding period. The case also established that incarcerated people needed to be informed that they had received a book and, if the book was being censored, provided a justification for why. Additionally, publishers needed to be notified of any literature they published that was rejected by carceral authorities.

In Sostre v. Rockefeller (1971), the courts ruled that incarcerated people could not be placed in solitary confinement for possessing literature carceral authorities don’t like. In the case, Sostre cites several times he was placed in solitary as retaliation for having “inflammatory racist literature.” You can see the stamp of carceral censorship on the image below of Sostre’s copy of The Death and Life of Malcolm X (1973). Sostre said, "The ultimate weapon [and] the ultimate apparatus that they have to deal with all dissent is the prison."