PANTHERS STILL ENCAGED IN ANGOLA
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
" ... for people of color, doing time is only one among many terms of
imprisonment legitimized by the concept of race."
--John Edgar Wideman, "Behind the Razor Wire: Portrait of a Contemporary American
Prison System" (New York: NYU Press, 1998)
If ever there was any question of the slave parentage of the American prison system, one glance at the massive penitentiary known as Angola in steamy Louisiana removes all doubt. Once a group of slave plantations, it earned its name from the southwest African kingdom which was colonized by the Portuguese in the 1600s. It was from this region of Africa that a majority of Black slaves were taken in chains to people Louisiana's rice plantations, and it is here, Angola, where the state concentrated its penitentiary, and its attempt to stifle righteous Black resistance to racist repression.
It is here that a young prison guard joined the mound of dead bodies manufactured in Angola, and several young Black men, members of the state's Black Panther Party, were unjustly targeted, tried, and two convicted in his killing.
The year was 1972, several months after then-U.S. President Nixon's visit to China. It was the year the late Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot and paralyzed while campaigning for the U.S. presidency.
One year later, Watergate exploded across the nation, and four imprisoned members of the Black Panther Party were formally tried for killing the prison guard. One, Gilbert Montegut, was acquitted; two, Albert Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace, were convicted; and another, Chester Jackson, turned state's witness and snitched. Both Woodfox and Wallace have served a quarter of a century in continuous solitary confinement, locked down 23 hours a day.
There is every indication today that both men were framed for the killing. Indeed, after Montegut's acquittal, even Angola's then-warden, C. Murray Henderson, later admitted that Montegut was framed because of his "militancy." (Disbarred, Spring 1999, p. 14)
Ironically, ex-warden Henderson, convicted of shooting his wife five times, is doing a 50-year sentence for attempted murder.
The crime's only "witness"--now dead--was a notorious prison snitch named Hezekiah Brown, known as a "soft cop." What wasn't known at the time of trial was that Brown was at and after the time of the stabbing not only a snitch, but a paid snitch, who received "one (1) carton of cigarettes per week," according to a letter from Angola warden F.C. Blackburn to C.P. Phelps, secretary of corrections, on April 7, 1978. The letter refers to "the original agreement with Brown" made by ex-warden Henderson years before, in "partial fulfillment" of their agreement "with respect to his testimony in the state's behalf."
Several years ago, Woodfox submitted to a polygraph examination, and his denials of involvement in the stabbing were found to be "truthful."
Like Montegut, Woodfox and "Hooks" Wallace were tried because they were "militant" members of the Black Panthers who organized the deeply oppressed brothers of Angola to rebel against that repression. They were so skillful that, before the killing, they organized a prison chapter of the BPP, an astonishing feat given the site.
As they face life without parole in solitary, it is past time for people to organize for their life in freedom. They are political prisoners of the highest caliber who deserve your support.
They need immediate legal aid to file appeals.
Please contact: Angola 2 Support Committee, P.O. Box 15644, New Orleans, LA 70175; (504) 227-5946; or www.prisonactivist.org/angolatwo.
Free the Angola 2!
Copyright Mumia Abu-Jamal 1999