Study and Struggle organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. We provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi. These groups correspond with groups from across the country through our pen pal program. We regularly come together for online conversations hosted by Haymarket Books. The curriculum, built by a combination of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people, scholars, and community organizers, centers around the interrelationship between prison abolition and immigrant justice, with a particular attention to freedom struggles in Mississippi and the U.S. South.

Our focus on political education builds upon the lessons and legacies of revolutionary projects such as the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and the Young Lords. We believe that study is a necessary component of political struggle, and that study alone does not produce meaningful change. Rachel Herzing, co-founder of Critical Resistance and executive director of the Center for Political Education, writes that “political education isn’t just education about politics. It’s education for the specific purpose of making our politics more powerful. It is front line work.” And as scholar-activist Robin D.G. Kelley urges, both study and struggle must be rooted in love.