United States
Learn about political prisoner support and archiving resistance with an insightful discussion for The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar and its 25 years of publication.
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar is a joint fundraising and educational project between outside organizers and current and former political prisoners. For the first time, all of the previous years are compiled and available now at the Freedom Archives. Featuring vibrant artwork, moving essays, poems and historical dates commemorating radical history, each Certain Days calendar is itself an archive of resistance.
Moderated by Certain Days Collective member Josh Davidson, this panel features:
- Certain Days founders and former political prisoners Herman Bell and David Gilbert,
- former political prisoner and Freedom Archives co-founder Claude Marks
- and calendar contributor, lifelong organizer and prisoner supporter dequi kioni-sadiki.
Connect: Certain Days - Website | Freedom Archives - Website
About the panelists:
dequi kioni-sadiki is a Coordinating Committee member of the Spirit of Mandela Coalition, the former chair of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee and leader of the Sekou Odinga Defense Committee which waged a successful campaign for the release of her husband. A consistent coalition-builder and organizer, kioni-sadiki is a retired educator with the NYC Department of Education and a member of the Jericho Movement to Free All Political Prisoners. She co-edited Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st Century Revolutions and is a contributor to Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party.
Herman Bell is a former member of both the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, and he was imprisoned for forty-five years. Bell was captured in New Orleans in 1973, and eventually he, Jalil Muntaqim and Albert Nuh Washington were convicted of attacks on police. He was also implicated in the San Francisco 8 case and pleaded guilty to a lesser offense. He spent five years imprisoned in the federal system, in the Marion control unit for two of those years, before spending decades in various New York State maximum security prisons. While imprisoned he was committed to community work, and he is a founding member of the Victory Gardens Project and the Certain Days Collective. He was released in 2018, after his eighth parole hearing.
Claude Marks was imprisoned for his involvement in an escape conspiracy to free Puerto Rican independentista and political prisoner Oscar López Rivera. Marks has worked in radical media since the late 1960s and is co-founder and co-director of the Freedom Archives. In 2016, he traveled to Palestine as part of an anti-prison delegation that focused on political imprisonment and solidarity between prisoners in the US and Palestine. He has also worked to free numerous political prisoners and continues to fight for prison abolition.
David Gilbert is a lifelong anti-imperialist who was captured and imprisoned as a result of an attempted expropriation of a Brinks truck in Nyack, New York, in 1981. Gilbert was sentenced to 75 years to life but his sentence was commuted by outgoing Governor Cuomo, and he was released from prison after forty years in November 2021. While in prison, he was a cofounder of the Certain Days Collective, and he also helped pioneer AIDS awareness programs that saved thousands of lives in prisons across the country. While incarcerated, David wrote three books, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner; Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond; and Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically.
Josh Davidson is an anarchist and abolitionist, a member of the Certain Days Collective, and part of the Children’s Art Project with political prisoner Oso Blanco. He has edited two books, Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners and A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America's Most Notorious Prison, both with former political prisoner Eric King, and is the author of the forthcoming children's book on abolition, A Cage Is a Cage. Davidson works with the Zinn Education Project, which promotes the teaching of people’s history in classrooms and provides free lessons and resources for educators.