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Honor The Memory Of Herman Wallace-1941—2013-Former Panther in Solitary for 41 Years
Workers Vanguard No. 1032 |
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Herman Wallace succumbed to liver cancer on the morning of October
4, nine days shy of his 72nd birthday. A Black Panther who organized fellow
prison inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, known as “the
bloodiest prison in the South,” Wallace had been free for just three days after
over four decades in solitary confinement.
Along with fellow Panthers Albert Woodfox and Robert King, Wallace
fought against the racist segregation and barbaric abuses rampant at Angola.
When a white prison guard was fatally stabbed inside the prison in 1972, Wallace
and Woodfox were targeted for their political activism and framed up for the
killing. King was also held in solitary for 29 years, falsely charged and
convicted of the murder of a fellow inmate. Each of these men, who came to be
known as the Angola Three, was convicted by all-white juries.
Robert King was released in 2001 after his conviction was
overturned. But James “Buddy” Caldwell, Louisiana’s state attorney general and
ambitious Democrat-turned-Republican, went on to obsessively work to block every
judicial overturn of the convictions of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox.
Woodfox remains locked up in solitary to this day despite having his conviction
overturned by a federal judge in 2013—the third time a court has
overturned the conviction—because Caldwell has again appealed his release.
A defiant Wallace made a statement before his death declaring: “I
want the world to know that I am an innocent man and that Albert Woodfox is
innocent as well.... The state may have stolen my life, but my spirit will
continue to struggle along with Albert and the many comrades that have joined us
along the way here in the belly of the beast.” In an act both sadistic and
vindictive, the state of Louisiana responded to the court order releasing
Wallace by indicting him again the day before his death.
This outrage is similar to what the government is doing to
74-year-old Lynne Stewart, an outspoken leftist attorney with a history of
defending radicals, black militants and the poor who remains imprisoned despite
being terminally ill with Stage IV breast cancer. Convicted in a 2005 “war on
terror” show trial for representing Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist cleric Sheik
Omar Abdel Rahman in court, Stewart has been denied medical release despite an
outpouring of appeals on her behalf. All opponents of racial oppression and
prison torture must demand: Free Albert Woodfox and Lynne Stewart
now!
A statement by angola3.org at the time of Wallace’s death read:
“Herman Wallace’s early life in New Orleans during the heyday of an unforgiving
and unjust Jim Crow south often found him on the wrong side of the law and
eventually he was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for armed
robbery.” Wallace had landed in a hellhole of massive proportions. Angola was a
former slave plantation named for the Portuguese colony in Africa where slaves
had been captured. The land was purchased by a former Confederate officer in
1880. Using the murderously cruel convict lease system, the owner housed inmates
in what used to be slave quarters.
As recently as the 1970s, Angola’s all-white corrections officers
were called “freemen” and lived with their families on prison grounds, with
inmate servants called “house boys.” According to Robert King’s autobiography,
From the Bottom of the Heap (2008), prison guards stripped prisoners,
shaved their heads and made them run a gauntlet of bats and clubs; incoming
prisoners were sold as sex slaves.
At Angola—the largest maximum security prison in the country—some
85 to 90 percent of those imprisoned die within its walls. It is run by an
evangelical zealot, Warden Burl Cain, who believes, literally, that the only way
out of the place should be through redemption by Jesus. Grotesquely, Angola has
become a popular stop for Christian fundamentalist tour groups. Mother
Jones (23 March) reported: “In a 2008 deposition, attorneys for Woodfox
asked Cain, ‘Let’s just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is
not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller [the slain guard].’ Cain responded,
‘Okay, I would still keep him in CCR [solitary].... I still know that he is
still trying to practice Black Pantherism’.”
It took remarkable courage for the Angola Three to “practice Black
Pantherism” in their patch of hell, establishing the only recognized prison
chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the nation. In a radio commentary
released on October 12 to coincide with Wallace’s memorial service in New
Orleans, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a leading BPP member in his youth,
said: “The late L.A. BPP Deputy Minister of Defense, Geronimo Ji-Jaga (Pratt)
once called them the most courageous Panthers of them all, for daring to
organize in the heart of Angola.”
Of his own nightmare and his struggle, Robert King told
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in a February interview: “A lot of people
that end up in solitary confinement also end up on the psychiatric ward in
Angola or some other institution.” As an article in Slate (7 October)
noted, the U.S. invented systematic solitary confinement. Referring to the
1820s, the article remarked: “At the time, the system was considered
extraordinarily progressive, given that it did not involve mutilating or
executing prisoners for their crimes. It was also quite ineffective, as isolated
prisoners tended to go insane.” Wallace, along with King and Woodfox, filed a
civil suit seeking to abolish long-term solitary confinement. The suit is still
being pursued following Wallace’s death.
The Angola Three collectively spent over 100 years in solitary,
held in six-by-nine-by-twelve-foot cells for at least 23 hours a day. But they
refused to be bowed. These men were motivated by revolutionary struggle as they
understood it. Their persecution speaks to the capitalist rulers’ burning hatred
for the Black Panther Party, which represented the best of a generation of black
militants. The Panthers were targeted for systematic extermination: In the
1960s-early ’70s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program gunned down 38 Panthers, while
hundreds more were imprisoned on trumped-up charges.
As revolutionary Marxists, we never shared the Panthers’ black
nationalist program. At the same time, we insisted that it was the duty of the
workers movement to defend the Black Panther Party against vicious state
repression. Herman Wallace’s story and that of the Angola Three illuminate the
workings of the capitalist justice system in all its hideous, racist reality.
Our task is to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will lead
the proletariat in sweeping away the entire apparatus of capitalist terror
through the conquest of state power, finally uprooting black oppression and the
system of wage slavery. Befitting their determined struggle, the Angola Three
will be honored in a workers America.
********
'Angola 3' member Herman Wallace dies three days after being freed from 41 years of solitary
- / Herman's House via AFP - Getty Images
Herman Wallace at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola in an undated photo. He was confined to solitary confinement for more than 40 years.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the immediate release of Herman Wallace, a member of the so-called "Angola 3," who served more time in solitary confinement than any other inmate, Wallace’s attorney George Kendall told NBC News.
Wallace, the former Black Panther who was only nine days away from turning 72 years old, died at a friend’s home with friends and family near his bedside, Kendall said.
“He was very comfortable and surrounded by loved ones,” said Kendall. “He was grateful that he was alive on free soil.”
The judge said on Tuesday that Wallace's petition was granted because women were excluded from the grand jury in his case four decades ago, violating the Fourteenth Amendment.
The state was given 30 days to notify Wallace if it planned to re-indict him, the court ruling said.
Originally serving time for unrelated cases of armed robbery, Wallace and fellow prisoner Albert Woodfox were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972, and placed in isolation at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison.
A third inmate, Robert King, was also convicted of murder, but his conviction was overturned in 2001, after 29 years of isolation.
Wallace and Woodfox, who have continued to deny involvement in the guard's killing, have been the subjects of documentary films. In July, Amnesty International called for their release on humanitarian grounds, claiming that "no physical evidence links them to the crime; potentially exculpatory DNA evidence has been lost, and the testimony of the main eyewitness has been discredited."
Welcoming the judge's decision, Wallace left the prison Tuesday night, Kendall said.
In a letter published in the San Francisco Bay View on Sept. 12, Wallace wrote that doctors had given him two months to live after they stopped his treatment altogether on Aug. 31.
Wallace died in a hospice-type setting, Kendall said, and added that Wallace “is a testament to the human spirit.
“He was determined that (solitary confinement) was not going to break him,” he said.
Woodfox's case is pending before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
NBC's Becky Bratu contributed to this report.
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