Solitary
Page 13
Our victories were few, but each victory made up for the losses before it. It was an adrenaline rush to win. We had to deal with some prisoners who suddenly wanted to shake their bars about everything. They’d say, “Man, his cinnamon roll is bigger than mine” or “I only got one piece of bread and he got two.” I had to talk to those prisoners and make them understand that not every problem meant you have to go through the most extreme form of protest to get it resolved. Sometimes you can do other things. If a man got gassed, even if it was just pepper spray in his cell, it affected the whole tier because the gas would spread. There is no such thing as gassing one prisoner; whenever they gassed anyone we all felt it.
Herman and I were only on the same tier in CCR for about a month when a freeman showed up at my cell door and told me to pack. I asked him why and he said, “You’re moving.” I said, “No, I’m not.” He walked away. I talked to Herman. “Man, I’m not going, I’m fighting these motherfuckers,” I said.
We knew they’d be back with gas. Hooks yelled down the tier to warn everyone as I looked around my cell for something to use as a weapon to defend myself with when they came in my cell. I grabbed the motor out of my fan and put it in a sock and then put that in another sock. The sock was hidden in my waistband behind me when seven or eight freemen showed up holding cut-off baseball bats, billy clubs, and leather blackjacks. One of them carried restraints they wanted to put on me.
Herman and the rest of the tier started shaking their bars and yelling at them. “Leave that man alone.” “Don’t jump him, motherfuckers.” My door was opened and they told me to come out. When I refused, a freeman holding a blackjack took steps toward my cell and I raised my arm holding the sock. A guard yelled, “Look out, he’s got something in his hand,” and pulled the freeman out of the cell. They shut the door again. Captain Hilton Butler appeared with a CS gas launcher and started firing it directly at me. One of the gas cartridges hit my chest. A very strong gas, the kind created to be used outside to disperse crowds, was filling my cell. I could hear the other prisoners on the tier screaming at me, “Put your head in the shitter. Put your head in the shitter.” I put my head in the toilet bowl and flushed. Usually the vacuum created when the water leaves the bowl gives you a breath of air. It wasn’t enough. I started kicking the bowl until it broke in pieces. I leaned down and put my face directly above the hole where the pipe was. Between breaths I picked up pieces of the toilet bowl and threw them at Butler to prevent him from aiming the gas gun directly at me. He moved to the front of the cell next to mine, Herman’s cell, and pointed the gun around the corner through the bars into my cell, firing blindly. Hooks was cursing at him and screaming for him to stop and threw whatever he could toward him. I don’t remember how long it lasted but eventually Butler stopped firing.
After a while Butler told me if I’d come out and let them put the restraints on me they wouldn’t jump or beat me. I didn’t believe him but I was close to passing out. The mucus in my throat was choking me. I couldn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to die in my cell. When they opened the door, I walked into the hall and let them put the restraints on me. They didn’t beat me. Walking down the tier I could see that everyone in the other cells was sick from the gas. I heard Herman’s voice behind me, hoarse from screaming, still yelling. They ended up moving King and Herman too. While they were fighting to move me, they told King they were moving him to B tier. He didn’t resist because he wanted to be on the tier with me and Herman. First, they put him on what we called the short tier, on the first floor, which had 13 cells, while they moved me. They put me in King’s old cell on D tier. Then they moved King to B tier. Later, they moved Herman to A tier. That night they stripped everybody’s cell in CCR and took our mattresses, turning CCR into a dungeon to punish everyone for my actions.
They thought they would stop our organizing by separating us but all they did was spread our influence. Wherever they put us, we started over, organizing our tiers. Pooling resources. Educating prisoners. Setting examples by our own conduct. In this way, we taught men the power of unity. Our efforts worked better on some tiers than others. It depended on the men. One time I was on a tier with a prisoner who was dangerous, a real bully, and he had a house slave mentality. He wouldn’t protest with us. Whenever we were on a hunger strike for something he would take food off trays of other prisoners’ who weren’t eating. Prisoners started spitting on their food to prevent him from doing that.
In June 1972, we got word that the Louisiana House of Representatives had passed a series of bills by Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor that would eliminate inmate guards at Angola, racially integrate prisons, and implement health protocols that would be overseen by the Louisiana Department of Health. State and prison officials would not implement any of these for years to come, but Representative Taylor was persistent. She had long been advocating for better conditions at Orleans Parish Prison and Angola and was used to being criticized for it by the racist white establishment. A week after Brent Miller was killed, the adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard, Lieutenant General David Wade, who at one time in his career oversaw correctional programs in the state, even blamed Representative Taylor for Miller’s death. “I feel very strongly about the damage that she has done . . . by stirring up the unrest at Angola,” he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “As a result, we had a guard killed last week.” In this same interview Wade called Representative Taylor a “phony” and said, “She’s interested in appearing on television and stirring up a lot of trouble.” When she visited the prison, he said, “they [referring to black prisoners] go wild.” Representative Taylor never stopped pressing for reform. Her courage, as a black woman living and working in the racist “white man’s world” of the South in the sixties and seventies, was remarkable and still inspires me.
That summer we were arraigned for the murder of Brent Miller. Two freemen came to my cell and put me in full restraints and walked me to a van parked just outside the gate. Herman, Gilbert Montegut, and Chester Jackson were already in the van. I got in and we were sitting there with the door open when Brent Miller’s brother Nix drove up in a pickup truck and skidded to a stop alongside us. He jumped out swaying drunk and waving a shotgun, screaming at us, “Where are those sons of bitches? I’ll kill you niggers.” He took aim at our heads. I didn’t move. None of us did. The freemen standing around the car were yelling at Nix. “C’mon Nix, you don’t want to do this,” one said. “Put the gun down.” Another yelled, “They’re going to die in the electric chair. If you kill them you’ll go to prison.” I was staring straight down the long road that leads to the front gate of Angola when I saw a car coming toward us with a light flashing on top. It was Hilton Butler, the captain who fired the gas grenades on our tier. He drove up to the front gate and jumped out of his car, cigar in his mouth, full head of red hair. “Nix, Nix, you son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Didn’t I tell you don’t bring your fucking ass up here and get in trouble. Get yourself home.” He grabbed the gun out of Nix’s hands. “They killed my brother,” Nix yelled. Butler held the gun with one hand straight out from his side and said, “You get your fucking ass home before you wind up in jail.” Nix got in his truck and drove off, then turned the truck around and came back cursing us out his window. A few minutes later he peeled off. None of us said anything. They closed the van doors and took us to a courthouse in St. Francisville where the charges against us were read and we were assigned a public defender.
Herman, King, and I had so many battles with the administration during the seventies that they run together in my mind now. Any one of our protests could have gone on for a few hours or a whole day, and there were some that lasted day and night. I broke at least three or four toilets in CCR over the years before they switched to stainless steel commodes. Somewhere around this time they were gassing us so often a captain who had been summoned to King’s tier by a prisoner protest asked him, “What do you all want? I had so much gas on me last night my wife wouldn’t let me get in bed.”
In adjusting to day-to-day life in the cell as the months and years passed, every aspect of survival was a battle. Being able to read in that environment, with the noise. Recognizing the signs of when a prisoner was going to act out, when I would need to defend myself or stop something from happening before it happened. Doing calisthenics every day within the confines of the cell. I became living proof that we can survive the worst to change ourselves and our world, no matter where we are. Behind our resistance on the tiers, Herman, King, and I knew that only education would save us. It still amazes me that the three of us came to the same conclusion sitting in our cells on different tiers. Education and looking outward, beyond the prison. If we were going to avoid becoming vegetables, we had to keep learning and keep our minds focused on the world outside Angola.
Sometimes a freeman would leave a newspaper between the bars of the first cell on my tier and it would be passed down the tier for anyone who wanted to look at it. Every time there was a newspaper on the tier I read it. When we were finally allowed to have radios and newspapers, I listened to a lot of news. I subscribed to the newspaper. All three of us did, and we had heated debates and discussions about what was going on in the world, played out in notes and letters we passed, or sometimes we checked ourselves into the dungeon so we could talk. In those days, a prisoner could tell the tier sergeant his head was hurting or he was having problems and needed to be alone to think and he could be put in the dungeon. They only had one dungeon in the building that housed CCR and Death Row. There were two big cells. They wouldn’t put the three of us in the same cell but two of us would be in one and the third in another. We could spend time together and had many conversations and debates in the dungeon.
During this time, we started teaching ourselves the law. We knew getting the shit kicked out of us over and over wasn’t changing anything. We would never be able to match them physically. There was a prisoner on D tier named Arthur Mitchell who had a lot of success filing lawsuits against the prison. For that reason, the guards didn’t fuck with him. I borrowed a dictionary of law terms from Arthur and started checking law books out of the prison library.
I read case law, day and night, standing, sitting, or lying in my bunk. Some days I sat on the floor of my cell with four or five law books open around me. I heard through the prison grapevine that a white prisoner on Death Row named Big John was real good at the law and I wrote him a letter about my case. I knew I had an issue: the grand jury that indicted me in West Feliciana Parish, where Angola is located, had only been composed of white men. Women and blacks were excluded. That was a constitutional violation. Big John helped me in letters back and forth between us, carried by trustees or sometimes by an inmate counsel who visited both of our tiers. I filed a motion in the court pro se, without a lawyer, to quash the indictment because the grand jury had excluded women and blacks. Then I forgot about it. Herman, King, and I were fighting for our lives in CCR. I turned my thoughts away from my unconstitutional indictment, and even my upcoming trial. Both seemed far off. I wasn’t experienced enough in the law to know better. I was focused on learning how to use the law to get relief in our day-to-day lives. Years later I would discover the court never ruled on that motion.
Before we could file a lawsuit related to prison conditions, we had to show that we attempted to resolve any issue we had by filing what was called a “petition of grievance” with the warden. If we didn’t get a response in two weeks, we could file a lawsuit in the courts. In 1985, this process became much more complicated. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections installed a new grievance procedure, called the administrative remedy procedure (ARP), which required a prisoner who was reporting abuse or any issue to file the complaint, first with the officer over the camp or cellblock where he was living. If the issue was denied, he had to file it with the warden. If the warden denied it, he had to file with the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. If he didn’t get relief there, he had to file what was called a “petition of review” in state court. If the petition of review was denied, he could then file his lawsuit in state court. If a prisoner alleged a constitutional violation, however—for example, cruel and unusual punishment or a lack of equal treatment or of due process under the law, violating the 8th or 14th Amendment—he could skip filing the petition of review in state court and go directly to federal court. But he’d still have to go through the ARP process within the prison system. By instituting this new procedure, at the urging of the Department of Corrections and legislators, officials delayed the time it took for a prisoner to be heard in court by six months to a year. It was a technique to slow down the process and discourage prisoners from filing civil suits against abuse and poor conditions.
For more than 100 years state and federal judges refused to adjudicate prisoner abuses at all in their courts because legally, according to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are slaves of the state. The same amendment that abolished slavery in 1865—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States”—includes the clause “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Judges used this clause as an excuse not to deal with violations and abuses against prisoners. They even had a name for it, calling it the “hands-off doctrine.” In the 1960s the Supreme Court started making rulings that gave prisoners constitutional rights, opening the doors for prisoners to sue state officials in federal court.
It took me a while to understand the legal terms and language used in the courts and how the court system worked. If I came across a passage I didn’t understand in the law books, I read it over and over again. I’d read a single passage 40 or 50 times until I was somehow able to absorb the meaning.
King filed on not being allowed to go outside for exercise—not having yard time—under the 14th Amendment, equal protection, pointing out that Death Row was allowed yard, and we were housed under the same conditions. If it wasn’t a “threat to security” for Death Row prisoners to have yard, he pointed out, it shouldn’t be a threat for CCR prisoners to have yard. Herman and I filed on other conditions that we felt violated our constitutional right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. Our first lawsuits in the early seventies—and all Angola prisoner lawsuits at that time—were grouped under what everybody called the Hayes Williams suit: the lawsuit suit filed by Hayes Williams and three other prisoners in 1971, which outlined how conditions at Angola violated prisoners’ 8th and 14th Amendment rights regarding cruel and unusual punishment and due process. In June 1975, after the trial for the Hayes Williams lawsuit, Judge E. Gordon West of federal district court found Angola guilty of violating prisoners’ 8th and 14th Amendment rights. He wrote that conditions at Angola “would shock the conscience of any right thinking person” and placed the prison under federal control. The district court ordered Angola and the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections to improve conditions and decentralize prisons. It would take two years before an agreement, called a consent decree, would be established with new rules and guidelines under which Angola administrators would be forced to operate.
The first lawsuit I won, around 1974 or 1975, was against the Department of Corrections rule that didn’t allow prisoners to wear any items of clothing with brand names or logos. At that time, you couldn’t find sweatpants without logos. It put an unnecessary burden on prisoners. I filed a petition of grievance stating we should be able to wear sweatpants with logos, which the warden denied. I asked the court to review that decision and won. In the ruling, the judge told officials how stupid the rule was; not in those words. She said it didn’t make any sense because it was almost impossible to buy any item of clothing that didn’t have some logo or brand name on it.
Between filing grievances, going to court, and our constant protests on the tier to be treated humanely, we gradually gained privileges that had not been allowed in CCR before. Over time we were granted permission to have individual fans, radios,
and books in our cells. We could subscribe to newspapers and magazines. In the midseventies, we got screens on the windows that kept the mosquitos out. Sometime in the late seventies, Herman, King, and I were actually allowed to share a record player. We could only pass it between tiers when a decent captain was on duty; he would have to give the OK for a guard to carry it between our tiers. Each of us would use it for a few days, then pass it down to prisoners on our tier who wanted to use it. To move it from cell to cell on the tier we left it outside our door at the end of our hour and a freeman or orderly would move it to the next prisoner’s cell door. Eventually we were allowed to have cassette players in our cells. Any or all of these privileges could be taken away at any time, and they were. Then we’d protest again.
Chapter 20
My Trial, 1973
By the time I went to trial, in 1973, the Black Panther Party had long been struggling. COINTELPRO had done so much damage to the party across the country: incarcerating Panthers, killing Panthers, pitting Panthers against one another, planting fake evidence, demonizing the Panthers to society, and threatening Panthers’ family members. The young organization never had a chance to resolve philosophical differences and internal struggles while it was under constant attack. Party leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver split in 1972 and Cleaver left the country. Panthers all over the country started to go underground for their own survival; some had been under constant surveillance.
After our indictment in 1972, Malik Rahim gathered New Orleans Panthers and other activists at his mother’s house and started a support committee for us called Free the Angola 4. Chester Jackson and Gilbert Montegut were not members of the Black Panther Party, but to the outside world they were linked to us as Panthers. In June of that year we were written up in the Black Panther newspaper. The New Orleans Panthers held events to raise funds to hire lawyers and circulated flyers about us. New Orleans Panthers Marion Brown, Althea Francois, Shirley Duncan, and others, many of them college students, visited us. As support for us grew, local activists Harry “Gi” Schafer and his wife, Jill, a white couple, joined our support committee and quickly took on leadership roles. They had been heading the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on LSU’s New Orleans campus since 1969. One of them volunteered to be the treasurer of our committee. Black lawyers from Baton Rouge came to Angola to meet with us. A young white lawyer named Charles Garretson, recently out of law school, also visited us.