Assumed Guilty

Revealing how the fight against criminalization and incarceration became central to the Black Power movement

Assumed Guilty examines the history of the Black Power movement through the lens of its sustained confrontation with the United States criminal justice system. Moving through decades of activism, from the Nation of Islam’s early battles against police brutality and incarceration in the 1950s to the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army in the 1960s and 1970s, Zoe Colley discusses how the movement understood law enforcement, courts, and prisons as instruments of racial control rather than neutral arbiters of justice.

This book shows that as white power structures cast the Black Power movement as inherently criminal, Black Power activists inverted that logic, denouncing police, judges, and prison officials as the true perpetrators of violence and injustice. This counter-discourse, Colley argues, became central to Black Power ideology and strategy. Assumed Guilty offers a powerful reinterpretation of Black Power as a movement fundamentally shaped by its fight against criminalization—and by its insistence that justice could not exist where Blackness itself was treated as a crime.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.