In 1906, two men recently released from a Tsarist prison started collecting boots, linen, and clothing for comrades still being marched into Siberian exile. Harry Weinstein and B. Yelin had no organization behind them yet, no funding, no headquarters. They had a list of names of people who were cold, and a decision that those people were not going to be forgotten just because the state had put them somewhere designed to make forgetting easy.

From that first list of names, the Anarchist Black Cross's story reaches Nestor Makhno's Ukraine and Bolshevik repression, then Giuseppe Pinelli, an ABC member killed after three days of police interrogation in Milan, and Kotoku Shusui, executed in Japan in 1911 despite an urgent appeal London anarchists sent within weeks of his arrest. From there it carries through Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's 1979 proposal, written from a federal prison cell, that eventually became the Anarchist Black Cross Federation; Angela Davis, who was never an anarchist but faced the same state claim this episode is about; and Mariame Kaba's work with criminalised survivors in Chicago today.

In the present, Mapuche political prisoners in Chile and Anarchist Black Cross Belarus are still doing exactly what Weinstein and Yelin started in 1906: tracking names, raising money, refusing to let a government's prisoners become a government's secret.

Further reading: Matthew Hart, "Yelensky's Fable: A History of the Anarchist Black Cross" — available via libcom.org Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kate Sharpley Library, "Urgent Appeal" (Freedom Group, London, 1910) — katesharpleylibrary.net Global Nonviolent Action Database, "Mapuche prisoners hunger strike for law reform, Chile, 2010" — nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu

Tags: Anarchist Black Cross, prison solidarity, Białystok, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Giuseppe Pinelli, Kotoku Shusui, High Treason Incident, Mapuche prisoners, Chile, ABC Belarus, Ojore Lutalo, abolition, anarchism

Show notes: Prison Solidarity and the Anarchist Black Cross A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 8

The Anarchist Black Cross started in 1906 as two men in Białystok collecting boots and letters for comrades marched into Siberian exile, and it's still running today — through fascist Italy, a failed appeal in Japan, a Marin County courtroom, and present-day Chile and Belarus, asking what solidarity actually costs the people who practice it.

In this episode:

• Harry Weinstein, B. Yelin, and the founding of the Anarchist Black Cross in 1906
• The 1919 renaming, Nestor Makhno's Ukraine, and Bolshevik repression
• Giuseppe Pinelli, the Piazza Fontana bombing, and Italy's strategy of tension
• The Kotoku Shusui case and the London appeal that couldn't stop an execution
• Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's 1979 proposal and the Anarchist Black Cross Federation
• Angela Davis, the Soledad Brothers, and the Marin County courthouse takeover
• Mariame Kaba, Survived and Punished, and criminalised survivors
• Mapuche political prisoners and the 2010 Chilean hunger strike
• Anarchist Black Cross Belarus and the Black Nightingales

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