Malcolm X’s prison letters not only chronicle his relationship with his relatives, most significantly with Ella, but also provide a portal through which readers begin to gather some notion of the profound thinker and activist he would become. The letters are a bedrock of his growth and development, a form of self-discovery and rumination that will guide him to a higher level of social and political commitment. The exchange of missives between him and Elijah Muhammad is like a graduate course in history and Black Nationalism, all of which shaped his quest for enlightenment and leadership. Readers get a chance to look over his shoulder as he grapples with his incarceration and how best to use this time to improve himself as a writer, thinker, and debater. In effect, this is the beginning of Malcolm X who would evolve into El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, an internationalist and spokesperson for the oppressed and marginalized.

Angela Davis, George Jackson, and other prominent Black intellectuals and radicals shaped abolition in different ways. The evolution and popularization of abolition promoted by Angela Davis was influenced by her own traumatic incarceration. Jon Jackson, the younger brother of George Jackson, had worked with Angela Davis to support the incarcerated men through the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. Without her permission, in August 1970, Jonathan Jackson took guns belonging to Angela Davis to wage a raid at Marin County Courthouse in order to take hostages that could be exchanged to free Black prisoners. Prison guards shot and killed Jon Jackson, two Black prisoners, and a white judge in a stationary van. Davis fled the state, fearing reprisal from reactionaries, and was arrested by the FBI in October. During her incarceration, George Jackson was also killed by prison guard(s) in August 1971. Acquitted of all charges in 1972, Angela Davis advocated for abolition and over decades aligned abolition with advocacy academics; her work also increasingly focused on gender leadership of women and feminism, as noted in Women, Race and Class.

Reconsidering Douglass’s legacy at the beginning of the twenty-first century reveals his contested iconicity. In the 1960s, Angela Davis read Douglass as a model for Black liberation, and fifty years later, Christopher Lebron posited him as a historical antecedent for the contemporary activism of Black Lives Matter. These activists themselves have shown how they work with and through historical ancestors, and the revival of Douglass’s North Star as a digital paper and hub encapsulates the trajectories of Black scholar-activism in which he has been placed. However, Douglass’s complex life and his multifaceted writings have made him the target of very different intellectual and political co-optations. Most notably and surprisingly, perhaps, he has become a favorite of conservatives and the political right. In such interpretations, Douglass emerges as a model Republican (Smith) and a classic libertarian self-made man (Sandefur). Laying claim to Douglass in the age of social media has blurred the lines between activism, polics, and scholarship.