I Cannot Submit to Injustices Book Release
Event to be held Fri day, June 5th 7PM at Sostre-Pointer Liberation Garden, 1412 Jefferson.
On Friday, June 5th, at 7PM community members will gather for a book talk of I Cannot Submit to Injustices, a compilation of Martin Sostre writings. The event will be held at the Sostre-Pointer Liberation Garden at 1412 Jefferson Ave. and feature Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, a former Student Non violent Coordinating Committee and Black Panther Party, mentored by Sostre while incarcerated together in 1969. Sostre inspired Ervin’s book Anarchism and the Black Revolution. Ervin will be in conversation with Garrett Felber, author of the biography A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre. The Sostre-Pointer Libera tion Garden is located at the site of Martin Sostre’s former Afro Asian Book Shop, and where Martin Sostre and Geraldine (Robinson) Pointer were framed and arrested on July 15th, 1967. In the event of rain, the event will be held at Burning Books, at 420 Connecticut St.
Sostre was charged with illegal sale and possession of narcotics, inciting a riot, arson, resisting arrest, and assault. Pointer, who was working with him at the Afro Asian Book Shop, was charged with selling narcotics and interfering with an arrest. Authorities accused Sostre of con ducting $15,000 in week ly drug sales and using his basement to manu facture and distribute Molotov cocktails. By Sostre’s March 1968 trial, arson and riot charges were dropped, with drug charges reduced to a single $15 bag of heroin supplied by police informant Arto Williams, who later recanted his testimony. Sostre was sentenced to 31-41 years and Pointer to 7-15 years, each by all-white juries. Pointer lost custody of her five children before being reunited with them after two and half years of imprisonment. Following nine years of incarceration, Sostre was granted executive clemency on December 24, 1975, and released on February 9, 1976.
The event will include updates on Sostre and Pointer’s exoneration applications through the Justice for Geraldine and Martin Campaign, under review by Niagara County DA Brian Seaman, after Erie County DA Michael Keane disqualified him self from review stating “a close family relative” assisted Sostre and Pointer’s arrests. Keane’s refusal to review included a motion filed in March 2025 moving the applications to Chautauqua County in March 2025, later challenged and moved to Niagara County in September 2025 by State Supreme Court Justice Hon. Paul Wojtaszek.
Pointer, now eighty-two, stated “I’m looking forward to the exoneration and thank all the people that have helped me get this far. It will be a great day once I am exonerated and will finally feel free.” Regarding Keane’s refusal to review, Pointer proclaimed “we are not going to let these hurdles stop us. Just because they move it to a different county, doesn’t mean we’re going to stop fighting.”
Sostre’s biographer Garrett Felber noted “as the state continues to heap new injustices on a generations-old ones, the Justice for Geraldine and Martin Campaign has shown us that we do not need the state to create the new world that Martin Sostre and Geraldine Pointer imagined.”