“In prison, Salah-El was able to find ways to live a rich life even in the face of a system built to repress him. He taught saxophone lessons, tutored hundreds of people in order to help them obtain GEDs and thus be eligible for parole, wrote extensively about prison abolition, completed and published an autobiography, was a correspondent for Gay Community News in Boston (even though he was not gay himself), and earned both a bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree. Above all, says Ahrens, ‘he was able to keep his personality to a large degree: very open, very loving, very engaged, very positive despite being in prison for 50 years.’ This, along with all of his accomplishments (that are impressive in their own right), was his ‘revenge to the system,’ according to Ahrens, who remarks that ‘they tried to grind him down and they couldn’t.’”

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