The United States of America v. Darren Seals

Abstract

In January 2016, while I was co-teaching a college course with two incarcerated professors at Federal Bureau of Prisons Federal Correctional Facility McKean, the name of Darren Seals, a twenty-nine-year-old anti-police activist, was introduced by one of the educators into a lecture focusing on the history of the U.S. government murdering Black male political activists. At the time, the incarcerated educators made a compelling argument that Seals, one day, would also be murdered by the State, offering their own unique lived experiences and insights as members of underground anti-government movements. Fast forward to today, and the mythologies surrounding Darren Seals’s murder in September that year take center stage on social media accounts that focus on racial justice and police abolition in the United States. Seals’s unsolved brutal killing resonates throughout every podcast, every discussion board forum, and every video hosting platform.