Tip of the Spear

"Orisanmi Burton takes narrative and analysis to another level. His scholarship comprehends resistance with a nuance that I have not seen delivered by most academics."--Joy James, author of In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love and New Bones Abolition "Tip of the Spear transforms our understanding of prison rebellion. In so doing, the book offers a stunning contribution to Black radical thought and abolitionist scholarship and politics. Exquisitely researched and argued, this is a must-read."--Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity "In this meticulously researched and beautifully written book, Burton presents one of the most dynamic accounts of Black revolutionary struggle against the prison industrial complex to date. Burton centers Black radical action as the hub of knowledge production to explain the function, implementation, and logic of the carceral apparatus over the past fifty years. Powerfully arguing against the ill-conceived notion of Black revolt as spontaneous and state violence as the happenstance of misguided policy, Burton carefully takes the reader through a rigorously developed source map to understand the breadth and depth of prisons within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With a brilliant array of methodological, conceptual, and theoretical interventions, Tip of the Spear is a must-read and is fundamental to the study of prisons and movements against prisons."--Damien Sojoyner, author of Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums