In September, she wrote about our visit on Counterpunch.org:
I know the question people will ask when they hear I’ve taken up the cause of the Angola Three: Why me, why now, why 12,000 [miles] around the world to a remote prison to take up this case? And I am reminded of a quote I read on the wall of an Indian bank years ago. It was Gandhi who said, “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.”
Albert Woodfox is not weak, by any means. But he, like his compatriots Herman Wallace and Robert [King], is worth my efforts and the efforts of all who believe that you must fight injustice where you find it.
Anita’s husband, Gordon, asked Herman to put him on his list and went to see him at Camp J. On her next visit to me, Anita told me we didn’t have to worry about raising money for lawyers anymore. Our support committee, which had been holding bake sales to try to help us financially, could focus on publicity and political actions now. Anita came back several times, sometimes with Brooke Shelby Biggs, a journalist who worked with Anita and who got on Herman’s list; when Herman was not at Camp J, we could all visit together. Anita and Gordon Roddick changed our lives, ramping up the volume on our case immediately. When constant requests to the mainstream press failed to expose our stories, Anita paid to place ads about us in national magazines. She wrote about us on her blog and spoke about us and the abuses of solitary confinement to the BBC and British newspapers, which were more receptive than the mainstream American press. She talked about us wherever she went.
On October 2, 2002, Scott filed my application for postconviction relief. So much work had gone into it. I wondered how I could ever thank Scott. He worked so hard and made so many personal sacrifices to get to this point. About a week later Herman and I were sent programs for the 35th-anniversary reunion of the Black Panther Party through the mail by a friend. I got a note from the mail room telling me I wouldn’t be allowed to have it because it was “gang related.” The note told me it was returned to sender. The program sent to Herman, however, was delivered to his cell at Camp J. Shortly afterward, a guard went into his cell and confiscated it. Herman immediately wrote to the warden asking about rules concerning mail being confiscated at Camp J. He never got a response. The next day several lieutenants came to his cell door telling him to pack up all his property. He had been at Camp J for six months so he thought they were taking him back to CCR. Instead he was escorted to Cuda, the Camp J building that held the dungeon, where all his possessions had been dumped and scattered across the lobby floor. They walked him through the lobby as officers were intentionally manhandling his property. He saw photographs of his family members on the floor; guards kicked his toiletries across the room; all this was “staged to provoke rage,” he wrote to a friend. “I chose to bite my tongue and said nothing other than to ask the reason I was being placed in the dungeon. I was told I would find out sooner or later.” On October 28, after 17 days in the dungeon, Herman was taken to disciplinary court and learned he was found guilty of having “racist and gang-related” material—the program for the 35th-anniversary Black Panther Party event. They sentenced him to three more months at Level 2, suspending the sentence for 90 days to prolong his time there, and gave him 30 days of cell confinement. “It’s a torture of the mind,” Herman wrote, “giving someone privileges and then finding a way to snatch them from you. It’s to demean you. To control you.” They put him in a cell with 24-hour cameras trained on him.
Two weeks later Herman was back in his regular Camp J cell when his door opened at 6:20 a.m. and he was told to go to the front of the tier. He was locked in the shower while his cell was shaken down again. Guards came and took him out of the shower and put him in the dungeon. After two days, the warden told him the shakedown crew found a screwdriver and a shim in his cell. He was once again sentenced to Level 1. “My prison record has been an exemplary one,” Herman wrote to a supporter. “I have never been charged with having a handcuff key, shim or knife, ever . . . but now, at the age of 61, I’m being accused of possessing contraband.” His cell was shaken down weekly, he pointed out. “What sense would it make for me to leave such dangerous contraband in my cell knowing the harm it could bring me?”
Herman started documenting the experiences of the other prisoners from the Camp J dungeon, telling those who were willing to share their stories publicly that he would make sure people in the outside world would know about them. One prisoner told him he’d been held in four-point restraints for 13 days. Another was charged two dollars on three occasions for Mace used against him. One was writing a letter to his mother in his cell one day when a guard told him to remove the skullcap he had on, which he wore when he recited his prayers. When he didn’t remove it right away he was gassed, and during the gassing he fell onto his cell floor and went into a seizure. When he regained consciousness, he was being beaten for not getting up when ordered, while being unconscious. Another prisoner told Herman he was losing the feeling in his arms after being forced for months to have his hands cuffed behind his back whenever he left his cell. One prisoner told Herman he had reached a point where he was afraid he might hurt himself. When he asked authorities for help he was gassed. He wrote to Herman: “They are refusing me mental and medical treatment so I’m cutting myself to get help.” The prisoner unscrewed a lightbulb that night, broke it, and cut himself. “I won’t take it anymore—ever again,” he wrote to Herman. He was taken to the hospital, his wounds were sewn up, and he was put back in his cell. The next day the prisoner was taken to a disciplinary board hearing, where he was moved back to Level 1 and given 30 days of cell confinement. He was told he had to pay for his medical treatment, for ambulance transport, and for the lightbulb he broke. After disciplinary court, he was put back in his cell and the guard mistakenly left him wearing the jumpsuit he wore to the hearing. The prisoner took off his jumpsuit and looped it around the top bar of his cell door and tried to hang himself with it. An inmate “tier walker,” paid 20 cents an hour to watch for suicidal behavior, saw him hanging, grabbed his legs through the bars, and held him up while everyone on the tier screamed and called for help. When the warden and a colonel arrived, they accused the tier walker of giving the prisoner the jumpsuit he used to hang himself. “I’m smack in the middle of this madness,” Herman wrote to a friend.
Herman managed to get the stories of the Camp J prisoners out to artist Rigo 23, a longtime supporter and friend, and Rigo put these stories, along with excerpts of Herman’s letters and interviews with the other prisoners, into a booklet. “No one should have to put up with such cold barbarism as you would find here,” Herman wrote to Anita Roddick in 2002, in a letter that she posted online. “No one should allow it to go on; unfortunately, for right now, it is still going on. Every day, more and more of our spirit reaches out and looks out from behind these walls of shame.”
Angola warden Burl Cain, interviewed by the New Orleans Times-Picayune about our civil lawsuit against 30 years of solitary confinement, told the reporter we were “crybabies.” He said Herman and I “chose a life of crime” and should “look in the mirror and quit looking out. It’s about time for them to look at themselves,” he said.
Anita wrote to us and asked us to contribute essays for her book A Revolution in Kindness. Herman, who was sneaking food to prisoners in four-point restraints at Camp J, wrote an essay for her about teaching chess to prisoners. “I received a letter from Anita Roddick thanking me for my contribution to A Revolution in Kindness,” Herman wrote to a friend from his Camp J cell. “I’m the one who should be thanking her, a billion times, but I don’t want to bore her.” (After the book was published Anita tried to send it to us but it was banned from Angola for potentially “inciting violence.”)
Herman and I both knew he was being targeted because of our lawsuit. Prison officials were experts at using the dis
ciplinary court at Camp J to torture and abuse prisoners. They’d build a case against a prisoner, write him up, take him to disciplinary court, sentence him to more time—and the cycle continues. He’d never get out of the program. This was their way to legally inflict pain and suffering. Herman never complained in our notes back and forth. I knew he was suffering though. I also knew they would never break him. He released a poem he wrote in Camp J to our supporters:
They removed my whisper from general population
To maximum security
I gained a voice
They removed my voice from maximum security
To administrative segregation
My voice gave hope
They removed my voice from administrative segregation
To solitary confinement
My voice became vibration for unity
They removed my voice from solitary confinement
To the Supermax of Camp J
And now they wish to destroy me
The louder my voice the deeper they bury me
I SAID, THE LOUDER MY VOICE THE DEEPER THEY BURY ME!
Power to the People!
Free all political prisoners, prisoners of war, prisoners of conscience!
On December 7, 2002, to mark the fourth anniversary of my retrial, King, along with several members of the Coalition to Support the A3, and other prison activists held a demonstration at Angola’s front gate, this time to protest the inhumane conditions at Camp J and the false allegations that were being used to keep Herman locked up there. Dozens of Angola security officers and armed sheriff’s deputies from West Feliciana Parish surrounded the protesters. Plainclothes state troopers photographed them. King told reporters who had gathered, “Camp J is a torture camp. Numerous suicides result from inmates being held there.”
The protesters stayed for 90 minutes. On their way back to New Orleans they drove in a convoy, fearful of law enforcement in that area after being surrounded by armed officers during their peaceful demonstration. Our supporters wrote to Herman, worried that their protests made things worse for him. They asked him if they should stop protesting. “Never,” he wrote back. “Protest more.”
I was writing a letter later that month when it started to rain. The skies darkened outside and it got hard to read. I called down to the tier officer, “Yo, man, turn the light on in cell 14.” He ignored me. I called out again, thinking he hadn’t heard me. No light. I asked him at least five different times to turn my cell light on. He didn’t. I called down to him to get the supervisor. He said, “You ain’t running nothing, I’ll turn the light on when I want.” Usually, I never lost control of my emotions. A guard could be trashing my cell in front of me, throwing my clothes on the floor, turning my mattress upside down, reading my personal mail and I might tell him to take his hands off my legal mail if he touched it, but I wouldn’t show any emotion. That day my emotions got the better of me. I started shaking the bars. I shook the bars and yelled and screamed and didn’t stop until the guard appeared at my cell door. He told me to step back. I complied. He told me I was spending the night in the dungeon and handed me a jumpsuit to put on.
As the door closed on my cell in the dungeon I sat on the bare mattress. I thought of my sister. The first time Violetta had breast cancer she got better. I knew the cancer might come back but I was unprepared when she got sick again. Violetta was a child when she started visiting me in prison. On the street, I protected her. Ten, twenty, thirty years later she still looked at me as if I kept her safe. Her loving acceptance never wavered. When former Panthers and activists came to support me at my 1998 trial my sister thanked them for coming and hugged them. She wasn’t intimidated or afraid of TV news crews outside the courthouse. “We want him to come home,” she said simply. “It’s time for him to come home.”
At her five-year checkup, toward the end of 2001, Violetta found out that the cancer had returned. She told me on a visit that the cancer had spread to her lungs. On August 10, 2002, Violetta died. She was 50 years old. The only request my sister ever made of me in more than 30 years was to be at her funeral. On her last visit to the prison she begged me to be there. She was weak and pale and so thin. I knew she was in pain. I told her I would, to comfort her. After her death, I wrote to prison authorities asking if I could attend my sister’s funeral. My request was denied. I received photographs of Vi’s funeral service. Her husband, my childhood friend Michael Augustine, visited me afterward. My brother Michael came twice that month. I talked to Vi’s daughters and son on the phone. A3 supporters who went to her funeral came to see me.
I thought of us as children, picking strawberries behind our grandparents’ farm. My sister’s beauty was so natural, so effortless. Her devotion to me had always grounded me. I felt the pain of losing her in my soul.
In April 2003, King welcomed activists to the Critical Resistance South Regional Conference in New Orleans by reading a statement from the Angola 3, in which we emphasized the importance of organizing against solitary confinement and a racist prison and judicial system. Later that month, on April 17, he and our supporters were back at the front gates at Angola, marking 31 years since Herman and I had first been locked down, celebrating our resistance and protesting our wrongful convictions for the murder of Brent Miller. This anniversary gathering would become an annual event.
The following month, at an approved contact visit of Anita Roddick, Robert King, and several of our supporters with me, Zulu, and an inmate friend of ours named Roy, high-ranking prison officials came into the visiting room and terminated the visit within 20 minutes of everyone’s arrival. They escorted King and our other visitors from the premises, telling them they had to leave and remove their cars from the prison parking lots within minutes. Anita, in the backseat of one of the cars, was on the phone to warden Burl Cain’s office before they were out of sight of the prison. Later, prison officials said the visit was interrupted because King was a “security risk.” They put Roy in the dungeon, accusing him of lying on his visiting form. The prison accused King, who was known as Robert King Wilkerson in prison, of lying about his name when in reality, after King was released from Angola and for the first time in his life got his birth certificate, he learned that his name and birth date were not what he thought they were. On his birth certificate he was Robert Hilary King, which was the name that he would use thereafter on his driver’s license and every other legal document. The prison sentenced Roy to Camp J and moved him there. After our attorneys got involved and proved Roy didn’t violate any prison rules, he was moved back to CCR.
Later that month, a federal appeals court ruled that King, Herman, and I had the right to sue Warden Cain and Richard Stalder, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, alleging we suffered cruel and unusual punishment in CCR. After that news, the persecution of Herman continued. He was held at Camp J for nine more months. During that time, Marina Drummer was writing newsletters to our supporters and expanded our email list, taking actions to align with other groups to enlarge our base of support. I got to know people on our support committee who visited me in prison, and many of them became friends. They told me about their political beliefs and actions; I was always moved by these visits.
In August 2003, King and artist Rigo 23 flew to South Africa as guests of Nelson Mandela’s Institute for Global Dialogue, and there they met with African National Congress leaders. King spent the following month speaking in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, and Cape Town, and on Robben Island. At Angola, Herman and I stayed in touch as best we could through letters passed by trustees. A new year came. When they finally brought Herman back to CCR, in February 2004, I could see the skeleton underneath his skin. He had lost more than 30 pounds at Camp J. The fighting spirit in his eyes was unchanged.
Chapter 44
Cruel and Unusual
One way Herman and I could track King’s movements was through our mail. When we received sudden batches of letters and cards from one place,
we knew he’d been there: Amsterdam, Belgium, Paris, London, Lisbon, Rio. He traveled extensively throughout the United States too: Washington, DC; Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston. His words moved people to action. Dozens of supporters, journalists, and new friends wanted to talk to us and took our collect calls from prison.
We were all frustrated because the civil lawsuit we filed in 2000 against our solitary confinement seemed to be stuck in court. State officials used seemingly endless delay tactics, filing numerous appeals asking that the suit be dismissed, arguing that prison and state officials should be immune from such lawsuits. All that changed in 2005, when a team of New York–based lawyers led by George Kendall took on our civil case pro bono. George, a former staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Eleventh Circuit Capital Litigation Project, had worked closely with the Innocence Project and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund on policy issues and taught courses on criminal justice issues at several schools, including Yale Law School, the Florida State University College of Law, and the St. John’s University School of Law. George had heard about our case from Nick Trenticosta. At first George was only involved in our civil suit claiming that our constitutional rights were being violated by our being kept in solitary confinement for decades. To get started, he sent four lawyers to Angola to go through thousands of Louisiana State Penitentiary paper records. The task took more than two weeks. He put together a team of brilliant young lawyers to work on our case, including Carine Williams, Corrine Irish, Sam Spital, and Harmony Loube. Later, Katherine Kimpel and Sheridan England, in Washington, DC, joined the legal team (focusing on solitary confinement conditions), and Billy Sothern and Robert McDuff, in New Orleans, also joined (focusing on my criminal appeal.) (Years after we met George in 2005, his team would take on my criminal appeal, and then Herman’s.)
Solitary Page 29
