24 Protest at Angola Prison

By: bardamu on Sunday, April 20, 2003 - 03:36 PM

Two dozen defiant protestors went to the notorious Angola Prison north of Baton Rouge on Saturday to call for the release of Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, the remaining two members of the Angola 3. Among them was Robert King Wilkerson, the third member, who was held there for 29 years in a six foot by nine foot cell 23 hours a day. Now two years after his release [he] has come back to Angola to call for a release of Wallace and Woodfox, an end to Camp J, the infamous torture camp and the worst of Angola's CCR, or solitary confinement, camps, as well as the resignation of current warden Burl Cain. "I feel good going back, doing what I'm doing," said Wilkerson, who has spent over half his life on the other side of the gates of Angola. "It's something I see as a natural process. I feel that going back is necessary."

The racially mixed group of protestors, one from as far away as England, marched and chanted outside of the front gates of the country's largest and possibly most brutal maximum security prison. They were carefully watched by a squad of sheriffs and tower guards as they occupied a parking lot a stone's throw from the double rows of razor-wire topped fences and in view of the windows of the prisoners on Death Row. Some protestors wore afros and others had black panther pins, and held signs depicting Wallace and Woodfox, one saying "uncage the panther," a reference to Wallace and Woodfox's roles as organizing members of the only officially recognized Black Panther Party chapter inside a prison. Others spoke of the cruelty of the criminal justice system in Louisiana, which has some of the highest incarceration rates in the nation. This is the second ever demonstration at Angola, aside from prayer vigils for those condemned to die, the first being held on December 7 of last year. The demonstration ended with loud chants of Ohuru-sa-sa, Freedom Now, from Swahili, a language spoken in much of Africa, for the same.

The Angola 3 have been recognized around the world as political prisoners, under conditions much like the cases of jailed African-American activist Mumia Abu-Jamal and American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier. Wallace and Woodfox were convicted in 1972 for the murder of a prison guard and have spent the last 31 years in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, in an effort to separate them from other prisoners who they were organizing for reform in Angola. Since then two of the three remaining witnesses have recalled their testimony, saying they were bribed, and Woodfox has shown prison records that state that the other witnesses were paid off as well. Such notable figures as Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under President Johnson, have spoken for the release of Woodfox and Wallace.

Currently the ACLU is suing the State of Louisiana on their behalf, citing the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights that prohibits cruel and unusual punishments. Prison officials have not denied the political nature of the isolation of the Angola 3 and other Black Panther Party members. This followed the national trend towards suppression of the Black Panther Party in the early seventies, one of the largest chapters of which was in New Orleans. In the words of Hayden Dees, a former associate warden, there was a need to keep a "certain type of militant revolutionary inmate, maybe even a communist type," in lockdown. The timing of the ACLU case is coincidental with George Bush's contention in a State of the Union Address shortly before the war on Iraq that Saddam Hussein was torturing political prisoners.

Albert "Chui" Carter, who spent eighteen years in Angola and ten years in Camp J, possibly the longest of any prisoner, was there as well and spoke of the backwardness and horror of Angola. The 18,000-acre prison is a former slave plantation that was a private prison, said to be under the direction of a former confederate general, until the turn of the century. Chui confirms other reports that Angola was a very repressive environment for those sent there. New convicts were presented by guards as "fresh fish" to the other inmates, and the first library was not until the mid-seventies. "They'd kill you—bust your head—if they caught you with a law book" at that time, said Chui.

Another protestor, Assata Olugbala, was there to protest on behalf of her husband, a prisoner whom she met while visiting Angola. Towards the end of the rally, she led an all-women's chant of "set our men free." Many cite the high incarceration rate among black men as a critical factor in the breakdown of black families in Louisiana.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.angola3.org

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