I remember the day I was released, August 21, 1971, because it was the day George Jackson, field marshal for the Black Panther Party, was shot and killed by guards at Soledad prison in California. After being locked in the stinking coffin of the Red Hat for three days I didn’t think my resolve to uphold the principles of the Black Panther Party could get any stronger. When I learned of George’s murder, my commitment only grew.
A few weeks later I was listening to the radio when I heard that prisoners at Attica penitentiary in upstate New York had taken 42 prison employees as hostages. Conditions at Attica had been notoriously bad for years. I heard rumors about it when I was in the Tombs. Prisoners were given a bucket of water and a filthy towel once a week instead of a shower; they didn’t have soap, medical care, or adequate food; and there was severe overcrowding. I tried to find news about the riot on the radio but deep in Louisiana there wasn’t any. Days later we found out that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered prison guards and various police departments to take back Attica. We learned later that prisoners at Attica were lied to by prison officials, who said that a negotiation would take place to end the riot and hostage situation. As helicopters hovered over the prison yard on the morning of September 13, prisoners were expecting members of the Department of Correction and the governor’s office to land in the yard to talk to them. Instead, prisoners were ordered to put their hands on their heads and lie down on the ground. Military-grade tear gas was released by the helicopters onto the yard. Without any warning, more than 500 armed uniformed state troopers, along with hundreds of national guardsmen, sheriffs, and police from several upstate New York counties, stormed the yard and fired indiscriminately, hitting unarmed prisoners and hostages alike. Prisoners who had formed a protective circle around the hostages were gunned down. Ten hostages and 29 inmates were killed.
None of the hostages were killed by prisoners, but on the day of the massacre officials reported prisoners had slit the throats of four hostages and castrated another one. One official told reporters outside the prison that he “saw” the castrated hostage “with my own eyes.” The following day the local medical examiner, Dr. John Edland, came forward with the truth: The ten dead hostages were killed by police bullets. No hostages had their throats slit. No hostage was castrated. The governor ordered two other autopsies, which corroborated Edland’s findings. In exchange for his integrity and bravery, Edland and his family received death threats. He was called a traitor and a “nigger lover.”
We wouldn’t know any of this until much later but based on my experience as a prisoner I knew that what happened at Attica did not go down the way it was being reported on the radio at the time. After the slaughter in the prison yard, the barbaric treatment of the prisoners who were left alive began. I was frustrated and angry and felt so much pain for the men slaughtered and brutalized at Attica. But even as I was horrified that these men, these human beings, were suffering such brutality at the hands of New York State authorities, I kept coming back to one thought: the prisoners at Attica had come together. The lines that usually divided prisoners—racial, religious, economic—seemed to have disappeared for 1,280 men in that prison yard. It validated what I learned from the Black Panther Party. The need to be treated with human dignity touches everyone. And the key to resistance is unity.
Chapter 15
Herman Wallace
I first heard Herman Wallace’s name when I was in Orleans Parish Prison. Like me, he came from New Orleans, was incarcerated for armed robbery, and had his world changed after meeting members of the Black Panther Party in prison. While I was learning from Panthers up in New York in the Tombs, he was learning about the party from Panthers in the parish prison. “In prison I met Chairman Mao, Marx and Engels, Chou En-lai, Fidel, Che, George Jackson, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, and especially Frantz Fanon,” Herman once wrote. “I learned a whole new mode of thinking.” He vowed to follow the Black Panther Party principles of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, as I had. I never knew him on the street but got to know him by sight in the parish prison. We were on separate tiers but passed one another from time to time on the way to or from court or on a lawyer call-out. Everybody called him Hooks because of his bowlegged walk. I was known as Fox, but he always called me Albert. We’d raise our handcuffed fists at our waists in solidarity when we saw each other. “Power to the People,” we called out.
When I got back to Angola Herman was there, but he was at Camp A, unreachable from the main prison where I was housed. One day I heard the health department had condemned Camp A and Herman was among the prisoners moved to the main prison. I went to look for him on the walk and found him in the Pine 1 dorm. When he saw me he smiled and we hugged. Herman had one of those smiles that light up a person’s whole face. He was unguarded and open to me, which made me trust him. In temperament, we were opposites. Hooks was an in-your-face extrovert, aggressive and bold, and I was more reserved and diplomatic, an introvert. But we had the same goals and the same morals and principles. He told me about organizing prisoners at Camp A. I told him what I’d been doing. We both knew nobody wanted us to do what we were doing—not the freemen, not the powerful prisoner kingpins who made money off prostituting other prisoners, not the drug-dealing prisoners or anyone who made a profit off the corruption that was rampant at Angola. We both knew there would be retaliation, that we would have to make sacrifices. I could see he was willing to accept that and he saw the same in me. Together we set out to create a chapter of the Black Panther Party at Angola. To this day I don’t understand how or why, but we believed we were invincible.
We held party meetings on the yard where we played football. As the men tossed the ball to one another on the football field in the evenings Herman and I talked to them. “In order to be liberated you must first liberate yourselves,” Herman told the men. “You don’t deserve to be treated like chattel slaves,” I said. “You are not property, you are men,” we said. “You have to find the dignity and pride within yourself,” I told them. “I am proof that it’s possible.”
We explained the concept of institutionalized racism and how it contributed to them being locked up—how police departments and courthouses discriminated against blacks. “I used to think I kept getting arrested because I had bad luck,” I told them. “It wasn’t bad luck. I was targeted because I am black, that’s why I kept getting arrested.” We told them we needed to come together as a group against the administration because it was the only way to make change; we had no power when we were only looking out for ourselves. We went over and over the principles of the Black Panther Party. Number 1: “We want freedom, we want the power to determine the destiny of our black community.” Number 4: “We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.” Number 7: “We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.” Number 9, “We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities.” Herman and I realized that a lot of these men had never before been told that they were anything good. The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves, Frantz Fanon wrote, and we found that to be true.
We were very aware of the sex slave market that existed in Angola but at first we were so busy trying to organize prisoners we didn’t focus on that. Then one day I was sitting on my bed when a kid who was raped by another prisoner sat down across from me. When I looked at his face I realized, for the first time in my life, the brutal consequences of rape. I was seeing the face of a person who had his dignity taken, his spirit broken, and his pride destroyed. It was one of the most heartbreaking moments of my newfound awareness. In his face, I saw a human being who was completely destroyed. Before, I had thought of rape as physical violence and I felt it was my duty, as a Black Panther, to try to prevent it. Now, I saw that rape went way beyond a physical act. Rape brought about the complete destruction of another human being.
I felt a new awareness in my core that harming another human being—in
any way—was morally wrong and completely unacceptable, and with that came a lot of shame, because I was flooded by memories of fighting and physically hurting people. I had been violent and cruel to survive the street. With the recognition that I’d been wrong came a great deal of pain. And a new moral principle was born within me: to do no harm. This was a profound moment for me as a man, and as a human being. This was me evolving at my center.
The next day I went to find Herman. I opened the door of his dorm and hollered that I needed to talk to him. We stood on the walk by the railing and I told him what happened and how angry and sad I was; how for the first time I realized that I felt as if some of the things I’d done to other human beings in my life were an attack on all humanity. He said he felt the same way and we discussed what to do about it. Later that day we brought it up with the prisoners who came to our meeting on the football field. As Panthers, we told them, we had to take a stand against rape. Not just to say it was wrong, but we had to do something to stop it. The prisoners agreed to help us. We would start by trying to protect the new prisoners coming into Angola. Black prisoners were bused to the main prison from the Reception Center on Thursdays. On those days we would meet the new prisoners and escort them to their dorms. (The unchecked rape happened in both white and black prisoner populations on fresh fish days, but black and white prisoners were sent down the walk on separate days.)
Herman and I called it an “antirape squad.” We set up guidelines for the other prisoners who wanted to stand with us: Work in pairs; never alone. Use violence only as a last resort. Every Thursday on fresh fish day we armed ourselves and went down the walk, introduced ourselves to the new prisoners, and told them they were now under the protection of the Black Panther Party. We escorted them to whatever dormitory they were assigned to and we explained the type of games that a prisoner played to sexually assault or rape another prisoner, or coerce him into becoming a sex slave. “Don’t borrow anything,” we told them. “Don’t take anything that’s offered, don’t ask for favors, don’t accept favors. If you do you are opening yourselves up to being in debt to sexual predators.” We told them if they needed anything to come to us. We’d help them find what they needed—whether soap, toothpaste, deodorant, or “zuzus,” the term we used for snacks like potato chips and candy. If we came upon anyone threatening another prisoner with rape we stopped it. Sometimes all it took was to say something—“Brother, leave that, go ahead on” or “This ain’t gonna happen”—and that would be enough. Other times we had to fight. We put the word out that if you messed with someone under our protection you had to deal with the Black Panther Party. As the presence of the party grew on the walk we knew the prisoner “shot callers”—those who had profitable gambling, drug, and prostitution businesses within the prison—were watching us. I never had a direct confrontation with any of them, but we always traveled in groups of two or three. That wouldn’t protect us from being attacked but it made us feel better.
Wherever we were, in the dorm, at our jobs, on the chow line, on the walk, Herman and I talked about the Black Panther Party. Some guys would make remarks to me like, “Damn, man, that’s all you talk about, the Panthers.” I didn’t deny it. For me it was always the Panthers. Our list of enemies was long. It wasn’t just the prisoner pimps and drug dealers, both white and black, who hated us. Snitches gravitated to us too, trying to get information they could sell. Security officers overheard us. We knew we were a threat to the status quo. I got scared of being killed sometimes. But I believed what I was struggling for was more important than me. It never occurred to me to stop what we were doing.
Herman and I had about six or seven months together in the main prison. During this time we formed the first official chapter of the Black Panther Party behind bars. It wasn’t a normal chapter. We didn’t have the reading material to pass out or share. We couldn’t hold daily political classes. We couldn’t watch over the men to see how they were developing in their political awareness or moral conduct. We couldn’t require the men to read two hours a day, as the Panthers did on the street. A few men who came to our meetings grasped the Black Panther Party concepts right away and pledged to honor them and did. Many who initially joined didn’t have the strength or will to keep going. Most men who came to our meetings didn’t make any kind of commitment to the party, but I liked to think they were influenced by what we talked about.
Chapter 16
April 17, 1972
On April 17, 1972, I got dressed, brushed my teeth, and waited for the freeman to unlock the door and call, “Chow,” for breakfast. There were usually two freemen assigned to every unit. During meals one guard stayed on the walk directing traffic while the other, usually more senior guard, went to the dining hall with the inmates in their unit. When they unlocked the doors for the Hickory dorms that morning all the other units had already been let out and the walk was crowded. I walked to breakfast with a prisoner named Everett Jackson. I didn’t know him but he was a legal clerk and I’d asked him to help me with my case. A prisoner named Colonel Nyati Bolt was also walking with us. We could see there was congestion ahead of us; inmates were being held back at the snitcher gate. Word came down the line there was a “buck,” the word we used for a workers’ strike in the dining hall. I wasn’t surprised. I’d been talking to the kitchen workers about their rights for weeks. The dining hall workers were refusing to work until they spoke with the warden. After about five or ten minutes the whistle blew and all of us on the walk were sent back to our dorms to wait out the buck. Prisoners who were out walking the grounds or working out at the weight pile also had to return to their dorms when the whistle blew. The dormitory doors were locked once we were inside. I lay down on my bunk. About 20 minutes later they blew the whistle for chow, the doors were unlocked, and we exited onto the walk again.
This time the line moved quickly because the strike was over. I again walked to the dining hall with Everett. In the dining hall, we sat together. Bolt sat with us. At some point I noticed that a prisoner named Chester “Noxzema” Jackson was also at our table. He wasn’t a friend, or a Panther, but he wanted to be a Black Panther and hung around the fringes of wherever Herman and I were. A former “gal-boy” and known snitch, Chester Jackson tried to pass himself off as a member of the party before we got to Angola. He wore a black beret and had a panther drawn on his jacket. He asked everyone to call him “Panther,” but it didn’t stick. Everyone called him Noxzema. He wasn’t a Panther and Herman and I didn’t trust him but we had a “wait-and-see” attitude about everyone. That’s what the Panthers taught. And, being in prison, we didn’t really have any other choice.
I wasn’t working that day so after breakfast I walked Everett to the control center where the inmate counsel office was located to get some paperwork I needed. He left me on the walk and went inside for the papers, then brought them back and gave them to me in less than 10 minutes. I went back through the snitcher gate and down the walk to my dorm and went back to sleep.
I woke to a scream of whistles blowing and a lot of yelling outside the dorm. A freeman was at the door, yelling, “All you niggers get up. Get on the walk and line up. Get outside.” I walked out and got behind hundreds of other prisoners. Freemen were running through the yard carrying machine guns and rifles.
We were at the end of the line and none of us knew what was going on at first. I thought maybe it had something to do with an incident the day before, when a freeman was attacked in a guard shack on the walk. A prisoner walked up to the guard booth and threw gasoline on the 20-year-old guard in the booth, Mike Gunnells, while another one threw some burning material into the booth, setting the guard’s clothes on fire. (Gunnells said he saw the prisoner Rory Mason lighting a piece of paper but didn’t identify the prisoner who threw the gas. Only Mason would be tried and convicted for the crime.) But I also knew it could be anything. Angola was a breeding ground for chaos in those days. There were the daily battles on the yard over prostitution, drugs, and gambling. There were
the daily conflicts between racist inmate guards and freemen against prisoners. There was an ongoing battle behind the scenes within the administration—a power play between the current warden, C. Murray Henderson; his right-hand administrator, Lloyd Hoyle; and the old families at Angola who had been running the prison for generations. The head of security, Hayden Dees, who came from a long line of Angola families, had been acting warden and expected to be named warden before Henderson was hired. When Henderson, who was from Tennessee, was hired in 1968 it was an unwelcome shock to the “old guard.” Henderson was an outsider. By all accounts, Dees had been cheated.
Tensions increased between Henderson and Dees when the Justice Department started looking into the prison in response to a prisoner lawsuit in 1971. An inmate named Hayes Williams and three other prisoners sued the governor and the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections alleging that the substandard living conditions at Angola violated their constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment. After the Williams lawsuit was filed, lawyers from the Justice Department got involved and Warden Henderson was pressured to integrate the prison, get rid of inmate guards, and create proper disciplinary and housing records for prisoners. Henderson, in turn, was trying to force Dees to make these changes. It wasn’t working. Dees was the most powerful person at Angola at that time, running the prison in every way except on paper, and he wanted to run things like a plantation, the way they’d always been run.
Solitary Page 10
