Deciding Not to Die: A Ritual for Michael Kimble

or: I went to a nice show last Friday

I might write more about the current anti-ICE protests later. I don’t have a ton to say about them right now besides that they deserve everyone’s full support, and that we shouldn’t turn our support away from protests or protesters just because they are rowdy (or calm). And that peace police in Salt Lake City murdered a protester at a 50501 protest last Saturday, yet an antiracist activist who was shot by the same people is the one facing charges for it. The press is working hard to push the narrative that Arturo Gamboa drew a rifle on the crowd before he and a bystander were shot. There is clear video evidence to the contrary. Here’s an article about the situation.

Deciding Not to Die:
A Ritual for Michael Kimble

“Let none be forgotten. Let none feel alone. Our most sacred law—
the one law we do not break—is solidarity. Without it, we are scattered embers.
Together, we are the fire they will never put out.”
Dominic Black, “June 11^th: Never Forgotten”

Last Friday, I went to a benefit show at The Rhizome House, a social center in Cleveland. It was a benefit for a prisoner named Michael Kimble. Michael Kimble is serving life in prison for deciding not to die.

In 1986, the Black, gay Michael Kimble was walking in Alabama with his arm around another man. A white man, a known white supremacist, started calling the pair some slurs. Michael yelled back. The man attacked. Michael decided not to die. He drew a gun and shot and killed the violent bigot. In prison now almost 40 years, he has no regrets. He was politicized in prison, originally to communism, but he rejected the authoritarian structure of that movement and has been an anarchist organizing prisoners for years.

Prison exists to disappear people. Prison exists to make us forget that people were ever born, that they ever walked free. Warehousing people, often for their entire lives, is just about the most inhuman thing imaginable. So then, we must work to remember people. We must remember that Michael Kimble is alive, that he decided not to die.

Maybe the benefit show, then, was a ritual against forgetting. Maybe every song was dedicated to a man who can’t hear them. Maybe we danced in his name. Maybe every time his name is written, here or elsewhere, it works to undo the obliteration of his memory that the state desires.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

But that’s how I felt, dancing in a social center. That we can’t let each other disappear. That we have to matter.

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The show was organized by the abolitionist journal In The Belly. They were there tabling tshirts and copies of their journal, which is mostly sent to prisoners and mostly publishes writing by prisoners. Selling copies to supporters on the outside helps fund the whole project.

Two acts played that night, and each one felt right. Nature Nvoke are postpunk, and damn good. The singer wore an Angela Davis shirt in front of the Abolish Police banner that always hangs on the wall in the space. Messiah in Glitch bills itself as cyberpunk hip-hop, and it’s got the vibe of the industrial I listened to as a kid (a genre I listened to a solid fifteen years after its heyday). Hard, distorted beats paired with fierce, directed anger and lyrics.

Benefit shows mix genres more than most shows, because the thing that unites the bands is a willingness to support this or that cause. But there wasn’t any dissonance between the acts. It just felt like two sides of a coin.

The timing of the show was not a coincidence. Since 2004, we’ve celebrated June 11^th as the international day of solidarity with longterm anarchist prisoners. It’s a day—or a week—to focus our thoughts on those among us who are kept in cages for the crime of wanting all of us to be free. We work to keep people’s names on our tongues, to keep their names from disappearing. Because we might be disappeared ourselves one day. It’s certainly happened in history. I was talking to a Ukrainian anarchist a few weeks ago, and I asked why there was such a disconnect from the movement there in the 1910s to the movement that reemerged after the fall of the USSR. Did the movement go underground? Did it disappear? To paraphrase the person I talked to, “the movement went away because the Bolsheviks killed us all. They killed everyone they could find who could remember.”

It’s not a coincidence that the Anarchist Black Cross was first formed in the Russian empire to keep people from disappearing into prisons, under the Tsar or Bolshevism. The Anarchist Black Cross has kept up working for more than a century now, helping people (anarchists or not) from being buried away from the world while they’re still alive.

So this June 11^th, or June 13^th really, I went to a ritual for Michael Kimble, a ritual that didn’t bill itself as one. What is a show, what is live music, but ritual? Especially when it’s performed among peers at a social center, by and for people who care about making the world a better place, by and for people who are willing to take risks to see that happen, by and for people who want to hold each other up and refuse to let us fall between the cracks. People who, collectively, decide not to die and decide not to let one another be erased.

Here’s to Michael Kimble, a Black, gay anarchist who has been fighting in prison for four decades, who has been denied parole again and again, who is unashamed to tell the world that it needs to change, who is unashamed of having killed the bigot who attacked him.

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There are other longterm anarchist (and anarchic) prisoners too—and this isn’t to say that shortterm prisoners don’t deserve our support, that non-anarchist prisoners don’t deserve our support. But June 11^th is a day of support for longterm anarchist prisoners, whether they are in prison for “political” crimes or not.

I can’t point to each of these cases and say “this is a miscarriage of justice!” Sure, in Michael Kimble’s case, self-defense ought to be legal. But anarchists break the law all the time (so does everyone else). The difference between the law and what’s right is immediately obvious to everyone, and it takes all the propaganda the state can bring to bear to convince people that the law is some means by which to measure ethics. So when I mention these other cases, of these other anarchists in prison, I want to say that I support all of these prisoners, even the innocent ones.

Even in cases where people genuinely did harm, I can’t imagine how you can justify locking people into cages and stripping them of their humanity. If someone stole my car and I locked them in my basement for five years as punishment, every person who heard of it would think me as the monster in the situation.

Most of these anarchists are in prison precisely because they understood that fundamental evil at the root of modern society—authority, expressed so often by police and prisons—and took actions to make every one of us more free.

Sean Swain, too, is in prison for refusing to die, when he killed a man who broke into his home and threatened his life—but the man he killed was related to a court official. Marius Mason is a trans man and a veteran of the Earth Liberation Front who was recently forced back into women’s prison by the new administration. Malik Muhammad is Black and Palestinian Muslim anarchist who has been in prison since the George Floyd Uprising of 2020, spending most of his time in solitary confinement. Bill Dunne tried to free his comrades from prison in Seattle in 1979 and has been in prison since. Jennifer Amelia Rose is a trans woman who has spent more than ten years in solitary confinement as part of a much longer sentence for armed robbery and then participating in a prison uprising. Xinachtli is a community organizer from Texas who organized against police brutality while he was on the outside, who was then arrested for disarming a cop who drew on him, receiving a 50 year sentence for threatening an officer. He has been in solitary confinement for decades now. Oso Blanco is a Cherokee activist serving 55 years for robbing banks and defending himself against the FBI. Comrade Z has been writing from prison in Texas about the conditions there for years.

Internationally, Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino are Italian anarchists in prison for bombing a police academy in 2006. Davide Delogu is in prison in Italy for robbery. Joaquín Garcia was arrested for bombing a prison guard training facility in 2015 in Chile. Monica Caballero and Francisco Solar have been in prison for a series of attacks on police in Chile and Spain. Aldo and Lucas Hernandez are in prison in Chile for bombing the National Police headquarters. Sam Faulder is an anarchist in prison in England for a murder she maintains she did not commit. Ryan Roberts was arrested in 2021 at a demonstration in England and charged with four counts of arson. Vangelis Stathopoulos is in prison in Greece for an armed robbery that has been claimed by someone else. Nikos Maziotis is serving 25 years in prison for revolutionary struggle in Greece and was arrested in 2014 after a shootout with police. John Paul Wootton was tried before a military court in Ireland and convicted of killing a police officer.

In Belarus and Russia, a number of anarchist activists and partisans are in prison for their role in the fight against the authoritarian regimes in those countries. Some of those prisoners include Igor Olinevich, Sergey Romanov, Dmitry Dubovski, Dmitry Rezanovich, Deniz Aidyn, Yuri Neznamov, Daniil Chertykov, Nikita Oleinik, Roman Paklin, Andrey Chernov, Vasiliy Kuksov, Mikahil Kulkov, Ilya Shakurskiy, Dmitriy Pchelintsev, Anton Zhuchkov, Rozhkov Igorevich, Sidiki Kasemovich, Miftakhov Fanisovich, Akikhiro Gaevsky-Khanada, Aleksey Golovko, and Aleksandr Zaytsev.

I’m sure there are others I'm missing. I drew from this list, if you’d like to read more about people’s cases and learn how to support folks who are inside.