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2013 Bob Sheldon Award Honors Organizers in NC Prisons

Bob Sheldon founded Internationalist Books in 1981, and ran the shop for
ten years, until his death in 1991. 23 years after his death, Bob’s memory
endures through the friends, family and community that knew him, the work
he did, and the project he began that has continued for decades to inspire
political action in North Carolina and bring people together.

In a culture that degrades us and pushes us to see ourselves as isolated,
our desires for revolutionary change as futile and limited by our own
smallness, Bob’s example shows us that living a life of conviction creates
something that can outlast our own times. Remembering Bob inspires us to
understand how our acts of bravery and defiance and the spaces – like
Internationalist Books – that we make and defend have a power that is
bigger than each of us individually, a power to unmake the world we endure
and to create the world we want. Bob said, in 1983, that “the world
situation demands sweeping changes and we must do our part to meet that
challenge. We support the unity and liberation of oppressed peoples
worldwide, and are working toward the day when all oppression and
inequality will be removed from the face of the earth.” We award the Bob
Sheldon Award each year to recognize and celebrate individuals and groups
whose work is done in this spirit.

This year, we choose to honor the bravery and resilience of people engaged
in struggle against some of the most crushing odds in our society – the
violence and captivity of the state. This year, we honor the many bold
organizers inside the prisons of North Carolina.

These organizers have organized hunger strikes, protested working
conditions, sued guards and facilities, called out the abusive behavior of
their guards, and organized together and with supporters on the outside.

We are choosing to honor all of these organizers as a group with the Bob
Sheldon Award. We do this to celebrate collective action, and to make sure
that we recognize all of these brave organizers, even if we do not know
their names, or we can not safely name them publicly for fear of
retaliation within the prisons. We would like to honor by name those
people who we can, publicly and as we reach out to people over the next
weeks to share the news of this award. One of those men, Jamey Wilkins,
was involved in the hunger strikes this summer in Central Prison in
Raleigh, and has a long history of resistance in prison – including a new
year’s riot at Polk Youth Facility, and a successful suit against guards
that changed policies within the NC prison system. We would like also to
specifically honor the Strong 8, the organizers of hunger strikes in three
facilities this summer, the prisoners in Sampson CI who brought suit and
circulated public letters in November, and the prisoners who have written
from Central Prison this fall and winter who are incarcerated on Unit 1,
housed in segregation and facing beatings and abuses for their political
activities.

Unlike in past years, where we honor individuals who can join us for an
event to celebrate this award, this year we are honoring people who can’t
be with us on the outside. For this reason, we would like to encourage the
community to celebrate the recipients of this year’s Bob Sheldon Award by
writing letters, supporting and publicizing prison rebels and their
struggles, and working with groups who connect organizers on the inside to
support and solidarity on the outside, like our own Internationalist
Prison Books Project, the organizers of the Amplify Voices Inside project
with the Durham jail, North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, and all of
our friends, family and comrades resisting inside the prisons, and on the
outside resisting prisons and the world that creates them.

Internationalist Books will be publicizing and celebrating the recipients
of this year’s Bob Sheldon Award through personal letters, celebratory
cards for organizers at this month’s Political Prisoner Letter Writing
Night (March 13th), and the creation of a pamphlet about Bob Sheldon’s
life and legacy and the celebration of NC prison organizing for the Prison
Books Collective to include in the packages sent within the NC prison
system. We will also be sharing this news with the wider community through
publicity. Help us spread the word of this year’s Bob Sheldon Award and
the struggles of organizers in the NC prisons!

http://www.internationalistbooks.org/2013/02/24/2013-bob-sheldon-award-honors-organizers-in-nc-prisons/

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