We share the long-standing original values and analysis of Black & Pink:

We are feminist. We are anti-racist. We are anti-Zionist. We want queer liberation. We are against capitalism. And we want revolution. Prisons are part of the system that oppresses and divides us. By building a movement and taking action against this system of violence, we will create the world we dream of.

We also celebrate the beauty of what exists now: Our love for each other. The strength of our planet. Our incredible resiliency. All of the power we have to continue existing. While dreaming and struggling for a better world, we commit to living in the present.

Our work is based in the experience of people who are or were in prison. We also raise up the voices of formerly incarcerated people as members of our “free world” Leadership Circle. We know that those most hurt by the violence of the prison industrial complex have the knowledge of how to tear it down.

Flying Over Walls formed at the end of 2011. We began as the Prison Abolition and Solidarity Workgroup of HAVOQ, and began our letterwriting focus after several members of the HAVOQ Migrant Justice workgroup met up with the Montreal Prisoner Correspondence Project on the Undoing Borders Tour and agreed to take over responding to some of their penpal requests from incarcerated folks in California. Per folks in the Montreal PCP, at that time they were receiving  more requests for penpals from California than from all of Canada. They also stressed to us the importance of establishing direct relationships with those inside prisons if we wanted to deepen into prison abolition. 

When HAVOQ ceased organizational activities and entered into a mediation process at the beginning of 2013, we splintered off into our own independent group, calling ourselves Flying Over Walls. We attribute this name to a flyer with a unicorn flying over a prison wall which was designed for one of our events by the very talented Jacks McNamara. We continued to support and orient penpals, offer letterwriting nights, and began the first round of our study group in order to deepen our analysis and build our outside leadership team.

We then became a chapter of Black & Pink in 2014. This was the result of an international “roundtable” gathering in which we recognized how much overlap of efforts and inside member requests there was between our different organizations. Coming together as chapters under the umbrella of Black & Pink allowed us to streamline our efforts and more effectively build with and support our communities inside and outside of prisons.  We then joined CURB and began collaboration with a variety of other prison abolition organizations in the SF Bay Area and across California, including CCWP, All of Us or None, Justice Now, Critical Resistance, and Initiate Justice.

Most recently, we made the difficult decision to disaffiliate from Black & Pink Inc. (aka Black & Pink National) in 2023. Read our Disaffiliation Statement here.

We continue to build our knowledge and refine our values through letterwriting, organizational collaboration, study groups, film screenings, and popular education workshops as a means to develop solidarity with and gain understanding of the lived experiences of folks on the inside while also continuing to invite our larger LGBTQ communities into conversations about the effects of these systems on all our lives.