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CounterPunch
September
10, 2002
A
CounterPunch
Exclusive
The Case of
the Angola Three
by Anita Roddick
Albert Woodfox, Herman "Hooks" Wallace,
and Robert "King" Wilkerson grew up in the racially
charged late 1960s and early 1970s in the poverty-stricken public
housing projects of New Orleans.
All three were imprisoned for petty crimes.
While there, they founded the first prison-based chapter of the
Black Panther Party in an effort to protect their fellow prisoners
from sexual exploitation and gang violence, and to challenge
the racism, brutality, and corruption of the notoriously crooked
prison administration. The administration, naturally, saw them
as troublemakers.
At the time they were organizing inside
Angola, the Black Panthers were under fire across America. They
were the target of a secret FBI program called the Counterintelligence
program (Cointelpro) to quash political dissent in an America
torn asunder by civil strife over the Vietnam War and the aftermath
of the half-realized civil rights movement. Progress on racial
equality hadn't reached Louisiana by 1972, and would take even
longer to gain any foothold at Angola. The prison--all 18,000
acres of it--had been a slave plantation prior to the American
civil war. Even after it became a prison, it remained a working
plantation, with black prisoners forced to work in the cotton
and sugar cane fields for their meals. Today prisoners--over
80 percent of them black -- work in the same fields where slaves
worked two centuries ago, for four pennies per hour.
White guards and administrators often
came from families in which generations worked at the prison;
many were lifelong members in high standing of the segregationist
Ku Klux Klan, and happy to admit it. They didn't like to see
black organizing, in fact, they deeply feared it.
When a white prison guard turned up dead
in a black dormitory at Angola in 1972, the powers that be leapt
into action, terrorizing black prisoners with unprovoked beatings
and the forcible shaving of afros, which were correctly viewed
as political symbols of black pride. Eventually, they pinned
the crime on Woodfox and Wallace, the reputed ringleaders of
the new Black Panthers chapter at Angola. The absurdity of the
case against them was appalling: Fellow inmates were paid off--one
for just a carton of cigarettes a week--to falsely testify that
Woodfox and Wallace were the killers. One of the eyewitness was
legally blind. The prosecution conveniently lost key evidence;
other exculpatory clues were never followed up. In front of all-white
juries, Woodfox and Wallace were convicted and sentenced to life
in prison. The prison sent them to its closed-cell restricted
cellblock (CCR)--a fancy term for solitary confinement. They've
been there ever since.
Less than a year later, Wilkerson--another
known Panther -- was convicted of murdering a fellow inmate.
Again, evidence was lost and testimony was coerced and paid for.
Another man confessed to the crime and was convicted for it,
but the authorities refused to take that fact into account in
Wilkerson's trial. After a conviction in front of another all-white
jury, Wilkerson joined Wallace and Woodfox in CCR. He remained
there for 29 years until 2001, when he was exonerated after proving
massive prosecutorial misconduct, and freed.
Attorneys for Woodfox and Wallace are
currently trying to win them new trials, at which they hope to
introduce new evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, as well as
new evidence of the men's innocence.
The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile,
has filed suit charging that three decades in solitary confinement
constitutes cruel and unusual punishment--a violation of the
men's civil rights--and calling for Woodfox and Wallace to be
released into the general prison population, as well a monetary
restitution for all three.
For the administrations part, it claims
it locked the Angola Three away for their own physical protection.
But the truth is more sinister; Woodfox says they isolated the
three activists because they wanted to contain a kind of "moral
contagion," to stanch the flow of revolution inside the
prison walls. Woodfox and Wallace see themselves as the subjects
of a kind of political quarantine.
Anita Roddick
is the founder of the Body Shop. Her political writings can be
read on her website anitaroddick.com.
Her latest book is Take
It Personally: How to Make Conscious Choices to Change the World.
She can be reached at: anita@anitaroddick.com
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September
9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Losing
Ground Zero
Chris Floyd
Speak,
Memory
The October Surprise Revisited
Alan Maass
What's
Missing from Springsteen's The Rising
Jack McCarthy
Karl
Rove's War
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Advertise
This!
Robert Jensen
Still
Time to Stop the Insanity
Rania Awwad
Ethnic
Cleansing by Starvation
September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
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