A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre

In East Harlem’s sunlit tenements, Martin Sostre—born to Puerto Rican parents and raised amid bustling streets—became a jailhouse lawyer whose early 1960s prison victories secured constitutional rights for incarcerated people, blazing a trail toward Criminal Justice Reform and Racial Justice. When the FBI and local police scapegoated him after the 1967 Buffalo rebellion, an all-white jury sentenced him to an ironclad 31–41 years behind bars, yet Sostre refused to yield. He opened one of America’s first radical Black bookstores, mentoring revolutionaries and nurturing Black anarchism with fierce passion. Inside supermax cells, he rebuked strip frisks through unyielding principled resistance that left him beaten yet unbowed, exposing the sexual violence hidden within steel walls. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre campaign—alongside efforts to free Angela Davis and Huey Newton—proved that fierce collective activism can shatter prison gates. After his 1976 release, Sostre carried on as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey, embodying a revolutionary blueprint for Political Justice and synergy between abolition and community care. Will your classroom, fellowship group, or book club let this forgotten hero remain hidden in history’s shadows, or amplify his multifaceted struggle for freedom? Witness how one man’s unrelenting fight still lights the path to liberation.