Incident

Date Jul 14, 1967
Department Buffalo Police Department
Address Buffalo, NY

Incident Description

On 14 July 1967, Black anarchist of Puerto Rican descent, Martin Sostre, was arrested at his Afro-Asian Bookstore in Buffalo, New York and charged with “sale of narcotics, riot, arson, and assault.”

Sostre, who previously described himself as a “street dude, a hustler” became politically active during a period of incarceration. Upon his release, he got a job as a steelworker and saved up to open a radical bookshop.

The bookstore attracted student radicals as well as neighborhood youth. During the rebellions of 1967, it became a refuge and base. Several weeks after the uprising, police and the FBI raided Sostre’s shop and framed him with a $15 bag of heroin using an informant.

Sostre faced an exorbitant bail and languished in jail for eight months before being forced to represent himself when a judge suddenly rushed the case to trial. There, he challenged potential white jurors about their feelings on integration. “I don’t see any black faces" (there were no potential black jurors), he said. “I want to be tried by my peers.” He spoke out against the twin evils of racism and militarism before eventually being handcuffed and gagged a year before it happened to Bobby Seale in Chicago. Sostre tried to hand his legal appeal to the judge on his way out of the courtroom, raised his fist, and told the audience to “keep resisting.”

Over the next eight years, Sostre appealed his case while also winning landmark legal victories over political censorship, solitary confinement, and the rights of prisoners to due process. He also organized chapters of the Black Panther Party and prisoners’ labor unions, established radical study groups and lending libraries, and published several revolutionary newspapers. During the final years of his incarceration, he identified as a revolutionary anarchist and refused to shave his ¼ inch beard or submit to mandatory rectal “searches.” For refusing these state-sanctioned sexual assaults, he was beaten nearly a dozen times. Finally, after having been named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and with the support of defense committees across the world, his sentence was commuted by Governor Hugh Carey on Christmas Day 1975.

“For me this is a continuous struggle whether I am on the outside or the inside,” Sostre announced. “If the battlefield changes, my struggle never changes.” He continued to organize, leading tenant's rights efforts in Harlem and co-founding a group called the Juvenile Education and Awareness Project (JEAP) with Sandy Shevack in New Jersey. JEAP combined jobs training with political education and youth mentorship, and over the course of nearly a decade, the group employed nearly 100 teenagers to renovated five buildings, transforming these abandoned properties into a community center, daycare, and apartments rented for below market price.

Martin Sostre passed away on August 12, 2015 at the age of 92. At the height of his international prominence, radical attorney William Kunstler remembered Sostre as a “Promethean figure, a hero to other inmates and to ourselves. He should not even have been in jail, but while he was, the state did all it could to destroy what it could not destroy – his indomitable will.”

Today, the Martin Sostre Institute continues his legacy.

Source: the Martin Sostre Institute

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