Fund Drive Special: What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection

KPFA - Hard Knock Radio

In a recent episode of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D engaged with Dorsey Nunn the executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children about Proposition 6 and the fight to remove current provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime. Davey D and Dorsey also discussed his new book, What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection. A decade behind bars spurs fifty powerful years of political and legal battles for freedom and human rights. “Whoever wants to assuage their doubts that radical change is possible—from the level of the individual to that of law, culture, and society—should make time to read Dorsey Nunn’s extraordinary memoir.”

While caged he received an education he never could have anticipated. His first lesson: Prison had a color scheme, and it didn’t match the larger society. On the inside, guards stoked racial warfare among prisoners while on the outside the machinery of the criminal legal system increasingly targeted poor Black and Brown communities with offenses, real or contrived. Nunn emerged from San Quentin after ten years behind bars, radicalized by his experience and emboldened by the militant wisdom of the men he met there. He poured his heart and mind into liberating all those he left behind, building a nationwide movement to restore justice to millions of system-impacted Americans. In this poignant, wry, and powerful memoir, Nunn links the politics of Black Power to the movements for Black lives and dignified reentry today. His story underscores the power of coalition building, persistence in the face of backlash, and the importance of centering the voices of experience in the fight for freedom—and proves, once and for all, that jailbirds can fly.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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