Prisons That Could Not Hold by Barbara Deming

by Barbara Deming

Prisons That Could Not Hold weaves together diary entries, letters, and interviews to provide a very human portrait of the evolution of an individual activist and the development of contemporary "movement" philosophy. The centerpiece of this volume is the acclaimed Prison Notes, a powerful account of the twenty-seven days Barbara Deming and thirty-five others spent in an Albany, Georgia, jail during their Canada-to-Cuba Walk for Peace in 1963 and 1964. Demanding that black demonstrators and white demonstrators be able to walk together, the peace marchers were imprisoned, leading many in the group to fast and employ other nonviolent techniques of protest. Their presence and discipline had a lasting effect on the Albany Movement and other nonpacifist civil rights groups in the South. The remainder of the book relates Deming's final protest walk some twenty years later in 1983 with the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment, a group of women-only peace marchers scheduled to walk from Seneca, New York, the site of the first Women's Rights Declaration in 1848, to the missile base in Romulus, New York.

Genres: History

Paperback

First published June 1, 1985

About the author

Barbara Deming (July 23, 1917 – August 2, 1984) was an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change.

arbara Deming was born in New York City. She attended a Friends (Quaker) school up through her high school years.

Deming directed plays, taught dramatic literature and wrote and published fiction and non-fiction works. On a trip to India, she began reading Gandhi, and became committed to a non-violent struggle, with her main cause being Women's Rights. She later became a journalist, and was active in many demonstrations and marches over issues of peace and civil rights. She was a member of a group that went to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and was jailed many times for non-violent protest.

In 1975, Deming founded The Money for Women Fund to support the work of feminist artists. Deming helped administer the Fund, with support from artist Mary Meigs. After Deming's death in 1984, the organization was renamed as The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.[5] Today, the foundation is "oldest ongoing feminist granting agency" which "gives encouragement and grants to individual feminists in the arts (writers, and visual artists)"

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Victoria Law · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given all the hoopla that occurs in the activist world every time an #OWS arrest happens (and all the outrage over jail conditions that the protesters (but not all the rest of the people in the jail) have to endure), I thought I'd finally dust this off my to-be-read pile. Deming and the women in jail with her in 1964 came out with a very different view of prisons than what I'm seeing from the #OWS arrestees today. In 1964, one of Deming's cellmates wrote, "...the court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong..."

[Geoffrey Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm doing research for a paper and ideally an essay on Deming, and having read a few of her essays for a class I teach on nonviolence, wanted to go back to some of her earlier work and activism. This book is beautiful--especially the first part, "Prison Notes," which takes up most of the volume. It chronicles Deming's participation in a peace walk in 1964 from Quebec to Guantanamo (she didn't walk all of it), in which she was arrested and spent nearly a month in jail in Albany, Georgia. It's a harrowing, beautiful, and hopeful account of her commitment to nonviolence, the experience of going to jail for one's conscience and commitments, and reflections on the connections between the anti-war/peace movement and the fight for racial justice. Note to self: I would strongly consider using this book (or certainly parts of it) for PJ 400.

[Marlee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was different from most of the books I normally read. It took me longer to get through than many of the other books I've read. It was an interesting book though, and presented in a way that I found captivating.