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The Alternative Community in Buffalo, 1965-76

B. Martin Sostre Bookseller Turned Black Revolutionary (1967)

-By Elwin Powell  

Does the State care about the writing and reading habits of the people? The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is unambiguous:

 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment or religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. "

 

But consider what agents of the State tried to do to Martin Sostre.

 

Several months after opening his Afro‑Asian Bookstore in 1966 Martin Sostne had "two visitors who after some careful browsing, came to the counter, identified themselves as FBI agents." Was Sostre the proprietor? Yes. Was he affiliated with any Socialist or Communist group? No. Why then was he selling that type of literature? "As the owner of the bookshop," Martin said, "I alone determine what books are sold in the shop . . . a right guaranteed me in the Constitution." The Agents left. Then two months later two detectives from the Buffalo Subversive Squad came to the store. They were not as polite as the federal agents. "Nice place you got here, Marty," one of them said. "You're doing alright for yourself since you got out of prison. What are you doing now behind this bookstore front?" Sostre tells him this was not a front, that he was working at Bethlehem Steel and operating the bookshop on the side, that he had paid his debt to society for past mistakes and was "now living the life of a law‑abiding citizen." The other detective said, "A law‑abiding citizen doesn't get involved in hate literature and communist propaganda. " Sostre then repeats what he told the federal agents about his 'constitutional right to sell literature of my choice.' One of them replied, "O.K., Marty, have it your way."

 

While walking down Jefferson Avenue one day in the Spring of 1967 Martin noticed a group of youths standing in front of a local record shop listening to the loudspeaker. This gives him the idea of how to draw people to his store. He buys records and a loudspeaker; the youths start hanging out at his place. Drawing them into conversation Sostre explains the tenets of black nationalism, socialism, Afro‑American history.

 

"I taught continually ‑ giving out pamphlets free to those who had no money. I let them sit and read for hours in the store. Some would come back every day and read the same book until they finished it. This was the opportunity I had dreamed about ‑ to be able to help my people by increasing the political awareness of the youth."12

By June 1967 he was able to quit his job at Bethlehem Steel, devote full time to his bookstore. The ghetto was now in ferment, and in active revolt for several days in late June. Other shops in the area closed but the Afro‑American bookstore stayed open till 3:00 a.m. "providing a refuge (from the tear gas being indiscriminately sprayed in the streets by the police) for many passers by and freedom fighters." People crowded into his shop and "needless to say, I made political hay in denouncing the police brutality going on outside . . . Then, after a rousing speech, I would go to the shelf and pick up an appropriate book . . . Robert Williams' Negroes with Guns or Pre‑Civil War Black Nationalism or a pamphlet by Malcolm X or Liberator Magazine, and show them a photo or drawing or read an appropriate passage". The two weeks following the revolt, until his arrest on July 14 Sostre remembers as the best I ever had ‑ politically, that is ‑ even despite the fact that the firemen, in collusion with the police, broke out my windows and played two high pressure fire hoses inside the Bookshop under the pretext of putting out a fire which occurred in the tavern next door ‑ and never got near my shop. Although I suffered extensive water damage, my good friend Jerry Gross helped restock my shelves by donating several hundred new and used books, magazines and pamphlets. The plywood emergency enclosures covering the front of my store as well as the other three stores in the same building . . . gave me an idea which proved effective. In the fashion of the wall posters put up by the Red Guards in China, I started pasting thought‑provoking articles and photos of the revolt, anti‑Vietnam War articles and photos of the atrocities committed by the U.S., etc. Immediately passersby began to stop and read and discuss the articles, cartoons and photos; many would come into the store to buy books and magazines and discuss the articles. What I had done was to convert the entire front of the building on the southwest corner of Woodlawn and Jefferson into a huge community bulletin board

 

A few days before the cops raided the bookshop several people brought me newspaper and magazine clippings which they themselves had selected ... tangible proof of the approval of the bulletin board by the community.

The cops, however, did not like it one bit . . . A taxi driver . . . informed me that he had observed the local cops ripping the posters down after I closed the shop at 2 or 3 a.m. . . . I used more glue to paste them to make it harder to rip off. A sort of battle developed between the cops and me during the five days preceding the raid and the framing of Geraldine Robinson and me on the dope charge. I I

So on July 14, 1967 the State acted ‑ and we know now, nine years later, that the State meant the combined efforts of city police, division of "Narcotics and Intelligence", the Sheriffs department, the New York State Police, the FBI and possibly CIA and/or Military Intelligence which had designated Sostre as a dangerous revolutionary months before the Buffalo ghetto uprising occurred. (Involvement of the national intelligence apparatus is not an established fact in the Sostre case but a plausible inference: in Dayton, Ohio the trouble makers in the ghetto had been designated earlier and were arrested the moment rioting' occurred ‑ an item revealed in the Media, Pennsylvania FBI documents.) In any case Sostre was arrested on July 14 ‑two weeks after the "riot" in the Buffalo ghetto ‑ and charged with arson, riot, possession and sale of narcotics and assault. While under arrest at police headquarters he claims "the detectives went back to the bookshop, gained entry with the keys taken from me and stole everything that

wasn't nailed down. What remained, they deliberately wrecked."

 

Two weeks later, on August 1, 1967, Sostre is writing from the Erie County Jail urging his followers "not to go to the slaughter like sheep. Dissent carries risk, but the risks of silence or assent are even greater." At the time he still believes he will soon be out on bail; he has not been "cowed by the vicious beating inflicted on him by the police" and he assures his followers that when he gets out he will make his bookshop the main library of dissent and protest literature in Buffalo." Martin Sostre was not to leave jail for 9 more years. Bail denied, he was sent to the psychiatric ward of Meyer Hospital, "an effort to discredit my stand on Black Power and against the illegal war in Vietnam" (Letters . . . Jan. 5, 1968). In the hospital he refused the drugs they tried to give him. The psychiatrists and the hospital staff did not care for his lectures to the other patients on "black power, Vietnam, American racism" and were "glad to get rid of me. However, I planted a few good seeds before I left." He was returned to the county jail and finally tried in March, 1968, not for inciting to riot, arson but for allegedly selling $15.00 worth of heroin ‑ a charge since shown to be false. Calling himself a revolutionary black militant and a black Viet Cong, Sostre acted as his own lawyer, received a 41-year sentence and described his action as a victory over the oppressive State.

 

March 15, 1968, "is the weakness of this fascist beast; I have demonstrated that with all his front of power and law and authority he cannot control one militant Black brother when that brother is in rebellion. Threats of contempt of court cannot control n‑w for what the hell does 30 days contempt of court mean to one in rebellion facing 30 years? His having me gagged was ineffective and made him look foolish because he had to take the gag off in order to hold the trial and as soon as he took it off I talked the same thing. His having to employ goons to enforce his wishes by force is proof that I had broken down his authority. I am dramatizing this for all the brothers in Buffalo and elsewhere to see. I am setting the example of total rebellion even in the courtroom, against the oppression, frame up and kangarooism against me and my militant brothers all over the country. I am telling all the militants: 'Look brothers, what I am doing to the oppressor. If I can do it by myself, practically alone and already in this man's jail, imagine what 30 or 40 organized militant brothers can do on the outside if they should defy white authority! I am upsetting him and setting an example, which could have very serious consequences if adopted by other brothers all over the country.

 

An oppressor can rule the oppressed only so long as the oppressed submit to his law voluntarily. In other words, an oppressor must somehow, either through fear (as in our case, when he imposed his law upon our foreparents forcibly brought to this country in slavery) or trickery and deceit by employing Un6e Toms and sell‑out political and/or religious leaders to fool our people ‑ to induce the oppressed into accepting and obeying his law ‑ which is his authority. Law means authority. Once he accomplishes this he has it made. He can control and rule the oppressed with their cooperation! This is a slick psychological

trick, brothers and sisters, so I want you to dig this very close. I will make it clear by this known example. How did England, France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium rule the vast continents of Africa, America, Asia and India for such a long time? Did they do it by brute force like the U.S. is using in Vietnam? Of course not! If they had to go through those changes with the millions of people of Asia, Africa and India, they never would have made it; it would not have been worth it. The cost in lives and money expended in pacifying every town, hamlet, village and city in the entire continent would exceed the fruit of their exploitation. What they did was to induce, via force or payoffs, the native rulers to accept and obey the oppressor's law . . . The French ruled Vietnam that way until 1954 when the Vietnamese woke up and defeated them. Now the Vietnamese and their sell‑out leaders can only rule by martial law, which means force, because, the people are in rebellion against their oppressors. It's only a matter of time before the U.S. negotiates a ceasefire with the Viet Cong brothers and gets out of Vietnam, because when a people are collectively determined to throw off the yoke of oppression, no amount of force or troops that the oppressor musters can prevail against the will to resist. 15

What more can be said about the nature of imperialism ‑ here is exemplification of Rich Salter's thesis which so disturbed the secret police two years earlier. And now the war is coming home . . . from the Mekong Delta to the Buffalo ghetto. "White militants" says Sostre, "are our allies in the overall struggle just as the heroic Viet Cong who are fighting the enemy on their front 8,000 miles away".

 

There were at least 120 cops at Sostre's March, 1968 trial: the court room had been packed to exclude his own supporters: the Sheriff's Department alone supplied 40 men, some 50 detectives, an undetermined number of FBI agents and 25 court attendants called in for special duty. "If the white power structure," says Sostre, "felt the need for mustering that many goons and the need to adopt the police state tactics which they used, they were scared. "I"

Afraid of what? The State was afraid of everything . . . of the books people were reading . . . and their changing hair‑styles and smoking habits . . . and the burning of draft‑cards . . . and above all the emerging coalition between the civil rights and the antiwar movement, symbolized nationally by Martin Luther King, an item not unrelated to his violent death.

 

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