After more than 43 years in solitary confinement, Albert Woodfox is a free man and joins us today for his first broadcast interview. The former Black Panther spent more time in solitary confinement than anyone in the United States, much of it in a six-by-nine cell for 23 hours each day. Albert Woodfox was released Friday after he entered a plea of no contest to charges of manslaughter and aggravated burglary of a prison guard more than four decades ago. Prior to Friday’s settlement, his conviction had been overturned three times. Albert Woodfox was serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola when he and fellow prisoner Herman Wallace were accused in 1972 of stabbing prison guard Brent Miller. The two men always maintained their innocence, saying they were targeted because they had organized a chapter of the Black Panther Party to address horrific conditions at the Angola prison, a former cotton plantation. Woodfox, Wallace and and a third man, Robert King, became collectively known as the Angola 3. For decades, Amnesty International and other groups campaigned to free the three men. Woodfox was the last remaining member of the group to be released. Today we speak to Woodfox and King, who was freed in 2001 when his conviction for killing a fellow inmate was overturned. Herman Wallace was freed in 2013, just days before he died from cancer.
After Albert Woodfox’s first conviction was overturned, Louisiana successfully tried him a second time in 1998. Then, in 2014, a federal judge ruled he should be set free on the basis of racial discrimination in his retrial. When then-Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell announced plans to try Woodfox yet again, U.S. Middle District Court Judge James Brady ordered his release based on five factors: quote, “Mr. Woodfox’s age and poor health, his limited ability to present a defense at a third trial in light of the unavailability of witnesses, this Court’s lack of confidence in the State to provide a fair third trial, the prejudice done onto Mr. Woodfox by spending over forty years in solitary confinement, and finally the very fact that Mr. Woodfox has already been tried twice and would otherwise face his third trial for a crime that occurred over forty years ago,” unquote. But the U.S. Fifth Circuit then approved Woodfox’s continued detention. Albert Woodfox was released on Friday after he entered a plea of no contest to charges of manslaughter and aggravated burglary.
Albert Woodfox talking:
when my mom passed away, I had made a request to go to her funeral and say my final goodbye. Warden Burl Cain denied that request. And the same thing happened with my sister when she passed away. My family and friends had made arrangements to allow me to go and say goodbye. Again, Warden Burl Cain denied that. So, for some years now, there has always been this emptiness when it came to my mom and my sister, because I never had a chance to say a final goodbye. And so, that’s why it was important that one of my first acts of being free was to relieve that burden off of my soul.
{Angola, this what’s known as a plantation prison, known for the country in Africa where enslaved men and women were brought from and serving at that plantation, enslaved at that plantation. Then it became a prison, where thousands of mainly African-American prisoners are held.}
I lived in a concrete cell with bars in the front of it. As you enter the cell, there is a metal bunk attached to the wall, and there is also a combination sink and toilet bowl against the back wall.
we got one hour a day. You know, when we were first put in CCR in ’72, myself, Herman Wallace and Robert King, we knew that if we had any chance of maintaining our sanity and, you know, not allowing the prison system to break us, that we had to keep our focus on society and not become institutionalized where we were only concerned with the things that were going on in the prison.
when we first were put in CCR, they used to let everybody out who wanted to shower on the tier, to take the hour together. But as time passed and some of the inmates started to protest some of the things that were going on, then, in order to dilute unity, they started letting us come out one at a time.
reading was one of the tools we used to remain focused and to stay connected to the outside world. Read History books, books on Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin—you know, just any kind of literature that I could basically get a hold of.
At that time, the visiting system, you were allowed 10 people on your approved visiting list, and each person could visit twice a month. But, you know, because of the long distance and the economic situation, my family was not able to come as much as they would have liked to. So, they tried to come at least once a month.
Robert King talking:
For us—for me, personally, I think it was joyous. The jubilation in which—you know, that Albert may not have felt, the crowd felt it. We were overjoyed. Not that he wasn’t. The clouds that perhaps, you know—the clouds that were over him probably prevented the jubilation from being present, but it was there, and the crowd showed it. So it was a good thing for the crowd. It was a good thing for me personally. I think it was—it was a victory for justice finally being rendered, if you want to call it justice. Justice delayed, of course, they say, is justice denied. But nevertheless, it happened. And so, I was overjoyed that it had, quote, “finally” happened, because we had been here so many times and disappointed and let down so. But it was a joyous occasion, and Albert is here now, and he’s acclimating himself to his environment, his new environment.
Albert Woodfox talking:
at the time, myself and Herman Wallace was very active in the prison population, trying to organize resistance to some of the corruption that was going on, the brutalities, guys being murdered almost every day or brutally beaten. And so we think that when Officer Miller was killed, we automatically became public enemy number one as far as the security staff and the administration at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. And it was—although it was a shock, it was not a surprise. I was the first one of the A3 to be locked up in the dungeon for the Brent Miller killing. And the next day, I was moved to CCR, where I remained until my freedom on my birthday, February 19.
{Brent Miller’s widow has long said she did not believe that prisoners Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace killed her husband. She released a statement last June saying, quote, “I think it’s time the state stop acting like there is any evidence that Albert Woodfox killed Brent. … [A]fter a lot of years looking at the evidence and soul-searching and praying, I realized I could no longer just believe what I was told to believe by a state that did not take care of Brent when he was working at Angola and did not take care of me when he was killed,” unquote.}
I was—you know, I guess, for lack of a better word, I was shocked when I learned that she had taken a position that, after looking at the evidence and, you know, just—I guess it just never felt right to her that we were a part of whoever killed her husband. And I think it was very brave on her part to publicly state that.
{Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry issued a statement about the state’s plea agreement with you, saying, quote, “After carefully considering all of the facts and circumstances surrounding this case and its procedural history, as it stands today—our team of prosecutors believes this plea is in the best interest of justice.” Landry was recently elected to replace the former Louisiana attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, who had successfully appealed to prevent Albert Woodfox’s release last year after a federal judge ordered him freed. Another key figure no longer active here is longtime Angola Warden Burl Cain, who said he would keep Woodfox in lockdown, regardless of his crimes, since, quote, “I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism,” unquote. Cain resigned last year after he came under investigation for violating prison policy by entering into real estate deals with family members of Angola prisoners.}
Burl Cain and Buddy Caldwell made this case personal, so personal to the point where they totally disregard the Constitution, statutory law, due process, lack of evidence, and just decided that, you know, I was guilty, Herman was guilty, and they would do everything they could to keep us in jail until we both died. Unfortunately, they almost succeeded. But as tragic as it was to lose Herman, he died a free man.
{no contest plea}
the plea, nolo contendere, it’s a plea—for me, it was a plea for my freedom, not a plea of guilt. And I had to factor in the fact of, you know, my age. I have some serious health issues, and I wasn’t getting the proper treatment for these issues. I wanted to get back to my family. And, you know, my lawyers, my attorneys, they worked so hard to make this a reality. So, when this opportunity came up, as distasteful as it was, it gave me the opportunity to reunite with my family.
Billy Sothern talking:
former Attorney General Caldwell had such a deeply—deep misconceptions about Albert and this case. He referred, fairly recently, to Mr. Woodfox as one of the most dangerous men on the planet. So, this is someone whose appraisal of this case has never made any sense. He also committed to refusing to test a bloody fingerprint that was found at the crime scene, that was never matched to anybody, that specifically did not match Albert, did not match his co-defendants, did not match anyone that it had been tested against. But they had the fingerprints of all of the inmates at Angola on that day in 1972 and steadfastly refused to compare that fingerprint against other inmates, which of course could have identified the real killer. Buddy Caldwell’s words on that were, “Well, we won’t be fooled by those fingerprints.”
So this is someone who had such misconceptions about this case that really any sober-minded person replacing him and making an honest assessment of the case was going to come to it without all of his biases and prejudice and come to different conclusions. And we really believe that that’s part of what happened, is that a more reasonable assessment was made about the case, a more reasonable assessment was made about Albert, because, frankly, no one could have been more unreasonable than Buddy Caldwell.
for 46 years, Albert has been incarcerated there at Angola. And he has struggled and Robert has struggled and others have struggled to improve things. And it’s a testament to these men that they essentially outlasted some of the very, in many ways, mean-spirited people who were very dedicated to seeing that their circumstances never changed. So, advocating on their own behalf, developing followers all around the world, you know, Albert, Robert, others have been able to outlast, in a very improbable way, even figures like Burl Cain and Buddy Caldwell, who seemed so entrenched here.
nolo contendere means essentially what it means is that Albert gets freed. And the legal proposition is essentially that Albert can maintain his innocence, that he—and he has maintained his innocence, as he has consistently for 43 years, but that it’s an acknowledgment that the—that there is evidence that could support a conviction.
And, of course, Albert has been wrongfully convicted two times by an array of witnesses who lied to secure his conviction. We litigated everything incredibly strenuously in this case, and we were very dedicated to make sure that the injustice that had previously occurred in Albert’s case twice, with two convictions, did not repeat itself. And we litigated issues like excluding the prior witness testimony of Hezekiah Brown, other witnesses, and they wanted to just bring in these transcripts of these witnesses. But, in fact, these witnesses had lied, and, in fact, the government had suppressed evidence that would have allowed Albert to impeach these witnesses at their earlier trials. And you will not be surprised to find out that notwithstanding very aggressive and competent litigation on that point by myself and Robert McDuff, Albert’s other trial attorney, we lost those issues at the trial court just recently. We appealed those, and it was our intention to appeal those all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, but we lost that appeal on those issues to the—in the First Circuit Court of Appeals. So, those testimonies were coming in.
And I’ve been practicing in Louisiana long enough to know that I need to make a realistic assessment of the courts here and that the injustices that had previously occurred in Albert’s case, we could not be guaranteed that those would not occur again, because this is a West Feliciana Parish jury in the heart of Louisiana. We litigated, for instance, that the venue needed to be changed, because, of course, Albert could not get a fair trial in a community where he is infamous and where there’s prison guards and associates of the prison in almost every home. We did a 43-year survey of the incredibly damning media portrayal of Albert. And we lost that motion.
So the trial was going to be back in West Feliciana Parish. This bogus testimony was going to come back in. And in addition to all of that, we have Albert’s health problems, and we have his long struggle, and he had an opportunity for freedom. And that was absolutely the choice that we advised him to take, because, for us, Albert’s—the incredible things that he’s done in prison will only be greater now that he’s out. And he deserved the opportunity to be out, and he deserved the opportunity not to have to trust a Louisiana jury to make the right choice in this case, when they’ve done the wrong thing two previous times.
{In 2013, as he lay dying in Angola, in prison, dying of cancer, a judge ruled that he should be released immediately. The prison warden said he wouldn’t be coming back to the prison immediately, and the judge said if he didn’t release Herman Wallace—an ambulance had pulled up to the prison—that the warden himself would be imprisoned. But before he left that prison, Albert Woodfox and Robert King got to say goodbye.}
Albert Woodfox talking:
Attorney General’s Office would not allow Herman, Robert and myself to have a conference with our attorneys, we had to ask the court to intervene. So, they were under court instructions to, at least once a month, to allow us, all three of us, to meet together with our attorneys. These visits were taking place at Hunt’s, because, at the time, Herman was battling cancer. Robert was free, and I was being held in the David Wade correctional institution. So they had to transport me. But on this particular visit, Herman was very ill, and they didn’t expect him to live beyond the weekend, but somehow he did. And the DOC wanted to cancel the visit. So I was desperate to see Herman, because I knew how sick he was. So a suggestion was made that they would let the visits go, if I would agree to keep my restraints on. And one of the restraints on is called a black box. It’s supposed to be used for travel only. It kind of locks your hands in a very uncomfortable and painful position. But, you know, nothing short of death would have stopped me from going to see Herman that one last time.
And so, when I got there, Robert and two of the attorneys was in the hospital room with him. And you could see, you know, that he was battling. And I kind of felt like he knew he was dying, and—but he was determined to last for that one last visit, you know. And during—you know, he was laying in the bed, and King and I and the lawyers, you know, we were just talking amongst ourselves, talking to him, trying to find some way to comfort him, as well as ourselves. And one of the attorneys was called away, Ms. Carine Williams, and she had a conversation with George Kendall, who was our lead attorney, that Herman’s conviction had been overturned, and he had been ordered released immediately. And, you know, I was—you know, all of us, we were just shocked, stunned, elated. And, you know, we just didn’t know what to do. So we just tried to comfort him and talk to him and try to get him to understand what had happened. And for me, I had to leave at 3:00, so I didn’t get a chance to see him actually leave. But, you know, it was just a great, great moment. It kind of made up for all the pain and suffering that all three of us went through being locked in solitary confinement.
{ Alfred and King are still pursuing a civil rights lawsuit. And your attorney, George Kendall, who’s handling this civil case, said Friday, in a statement, quote, “Although we are overjoyed that Albert Woodfox is finally free, it is indefensible he was forced to endure decade after decade in harsh solitary confinement conditions, longer than any prisoner in the history of the United States. Albert survived the extreme and cruel punishment of 40 [plus] years in solitary confinement only because of his extraordinary strength and character. These inhumane practices must stop. We hope the Louisiana Department of Corrections will reform and greatly limit its use of solitary confinement as have an increasing number of jurisdictions around the country.” Now, of course, this has happened both at the local level as well as federally, with President Obama announcing solitary reforms in an executive order and recently announcing in an op-ed that he wanted to reduce solitary confinement for juveniles.}
Herman, Robert and myself, we had been transferred to a punishment camp in Angola called Camp J, because we had participated in a hunger strike to force the administration to give us, you know, some humane treatment and provide us with an avenue in which we could help ourselves, improve ourselves. So, you know, we had always—this was not the first suit we had to file about long-term cell confinement. And, you know, when we was released from Camp J, we decided that we need to try to challenge this again, we need to try to change this barbaric treatment of locking a man in a cell for 23 hours a day for decades. And for us, it was about that, and it continues to be about that.
I think, as a result of our suit, and thanks to the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3 and Amnesty International and other groups around the country and around the world, we inspired other guys in solitary confinement in other states, in other prisons, to try to do something about these conditions. So, we’ve put this solitary confinement issue before American people, before the people of the world, and it just started building, you know, and it got to the point where it wasn’t just about the Angola 3, but it was about solitary confinement.
Robert King talking:
Albert and Herman, they preceded me into prison, and they went into the main prison population, and it was there that they began to establish, you know, some of the teaching of resistance, and doing it peacefully, peaceful protest. Of course, they was met with, you know, anything but peace. So, it was Herman, Albert and other sympathizers and empathizers of the Black Panther Party movement that—you know, that got together and began to struggle against this. I was still being held in the New Orleans Parish Prison at the time. And so, it was as a result of their initial efforts that begun all of this.
And some months later, after I was sent to Angola, after all of this had happened, including the death of Mr. Miller, they, you know, knew I was affiliated or I was a part of the Black Panther movement, a protest movement or whatever you want to call it. Anybody protesting was a Black Panther at that time anyway. And they decided that they would send a record along with me that I was an instigator, an agitator and a troublemaker. And so, that was their reasoning for locking me up. However, they had to do it in a legal manner. They placed me under investigation, and they investigated me for the entire 29 years that they held me in prison in solitary confinement.
The murder of Brent Miller, even though I was 150 miles away, I had never met the man in my life, I didn’t know him. And I was under investigation. were in prison, in another prison. Of course they knew where I was. They knew where I was, but this is the—you know, this is the legal system. A lot of time, a prisoner is convicted on conjecture, by implication. And this is what happened to me. They had me—if I hadn’t been in prison, believe me, at the time Mr. Miller was murdered, I would probably not have gotten out from—they would have charged me with this crime. But when I came back, when I came—when they did send me to prison, I saw what was going on, Amy, and what I did was I joined—you know, I joined not so much as—of course, I had become an alleged member of the Black Panther Party, but by this time I had joined the movement, I had joined the struggle. And so, it was incumbent upon me to struggle along with Herman and Albert, because they placed me in the same environment in which they had pluck Herman and Albert out of population and put them in. So they placed me in that same environment. And I knew Albert. I had met Albert, like I say, in prison. And I knew Herman, met him also in prison. And we had somehow incorporated the same philosophy. We believed that the things that were happening in prison was unjust, and we wanted to try to end that, put a stop to it. And again, it was incumbent upon me to join with Herman and Albert to try to prevent this.
Albert Woodfox talking:
for me, as Robert said, you know, he had been transferred to Angola. And when Herman and I was in population—you know, the saddest thing in the world is to see a human spirit crushed. And that’s basically what happened with these young kids that was coming to Angola. And we decided that if we truly believed in what we were trying to do, then it was worth taking whatever measures necessary to try to stop this. So we formed anti-gang squads. And every day, when they would bring these young kids down, we would go and we would offer them friendship and protection. And for a while there, we were able to stop the sexual slave trade that was going on in Angola at the time. And as you said earlier, a lot of the security people there were profiting from this.
{But what was it inside you that enabled you to keep yourself together? And were you able to keep yourself together through these 43 years? Did you have breaks?}
a lot of people have asked me how. I wish—you know, the only thing I can say is I inherited some pretty great traits from my mom. And a lot of things that she tried to teach me when I was a young teenager, you know, didn’t make sense, and all of a sudden it started to make sense.
And, you know, we’re talking about a 40-year period. You know, I went through claustrophobic, which I still suffer from at times, panic attacks. You know, we’ve been through physical attacks by security. But somehow, I always found the strength to continue. One of my inspirations was Mr. Nelson Mandela. You know, I learned from him that if a cause was noble, you could carry the weight of the world on your shoulder. Both King, I and Herman thought that standing up for the weak, protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves, was a noble cause.
You know, we—I mean, there were some horrendous conditions. Food and other things that were meant for the inmate population were being taken by security people. And, you know, if you wanted to get some tool or something, or raincoat or something, to go work in the field, you had to buy it or enter into some alliance or whatever to get the tools that were meant for you. And so, you know, it was a lot of things to struggle about, and that’s what we did.
Angola was segregated at the time, and we worked hard to try to bridge—build a bridge with the white inmates, because, you know, the divide-and-conquer philosophy was a part of the prison. And, you know, it’s kind of hard to put something that’s inside of you into words where everybody can understand. But that’s basically what happened. You know, we just knew that someone had to be strong enough and willing to sacrifice everything to stop some of these horrible things that were going on in Angola.
the evaluation process by classification in mental health and all that, I got the highest marks you can get for it. It was determined that I was not a predator. It was determined by independent people at the prison. But yet, Warden Cain and some of his security staff just didn’t know it, you know, and they continued to call me and Herman, who was locked in a nine-by-10 or nine-by-six cell, the most dangerous men in the world, you know? We went for years and years and years without any disciplinary reports and stuff. None of that seemed to matter.
You know, institutionalized is when guys become concerned with the prison and what’s going on and contribute to the prison cause. You know, for us, the object was not just to survive, but to continue to grow and improve ourselves as human beings. When you become institutionalized and look inward, you pretty much give up on being a part of society. And we knew that our own humanity depended upon us not losing our right to be a part of society, even though we were in prison. And that, you know, it gave us strength. You know, we were not fighting for the prison, but we were fighting for society, we were fighting for all of the injustices that happened in America and around the world.
Billy Sothern talking:
{Louisiana, the heart of the world’s prison capital, where more people are behind bars than any other state per capita, an incarceration rate 13 times that of China. Louisiana also ranks among the highest in the country in terms of the number of people per capita who are exonerated after serving years in prison for crimes they did not commit.}
if we look at Albert’s case, obviously, we see many things about Albert and the case that are so exceptional. But a lot of the things about Albert’s case that led to his wrongful conviction are actually representative of this totally dysfunctional system. If you look back through the course of Albert’s case, we see the suppression of evidence by the prosecution. We see ineffective assistance of counsel for people who can’t afford their own lawyers. We see an appellate process that’s incredibly resistant to providing new trials, even when it’s the manifest and right thing to do. So, while of course it’s amazing that after 43 years Albert Woodfox is now out of prison, it’s also horrifying that it took 43 years for this injustice to be corrected.
And, you know, when we look at the pretrial situation that we were just in, the question we need to ask ourselves is: You know, can we trust a jury to get—to reach the right result in this case? And I think, problematically, the answer to that question is not a clear yes. You know, we’re left with a situation where we could never be quite confident that we had everything that we needed to have. We’re left in a situation where 43 years after the fact, we have to investigate a case that was never properly investigated. And, you know, we’re left with a jury in a parish where Albert couldn’t have gotten a fair trial. So, I think, again, if we look at some of those things, we see the—we see writ large the crisis of indigent defense in Louisiana and criminal defense in Louisiana, where there just is a greatly unequal playing field, unequal resources. And if we look what’s going on in Louisiana right now, there’s this incredible crisis with funding for indigent defense, where prisoners who—inmates and criminal defendants who face charges just as serious as the one in this case, are not being afforded the right to counsel that the Constitution provides, but in fact are provided with sometimes very well-meaning and well-intentioned lawyers who are thoroughly overburdened, who have no access to investigation and who can’t meaningfully create balance in what’s supposed to be an adversarial process.
So, those are many of the same things that we see in Albert’s case. And when we look at the case, even though so much of what happened happened so long ago—1973, 1998—can we be confident that those things are not happening in Louisiana today? Absolutely not. Many of the same things that led to Albert’s wrongful convictions in those two instances are persistent features of the criminal justice system in Louisiana.
There is no financial settlement connected to the resolution of the criminal case. The civil case is ongoing, and I hope that the same spirit of resolution that led to the resolution of the criminal case also leads to resolution of the civil case, as well.
You know, one of the features of any system of prosecution here in the United States is that the prosecutors are just afforded an enormous amount of discretion to determine how these cases are charged, to determine whether these cases are credible. So, in any instance, it’s incredibly important that you have a prosecutor who isn’t being totally unreasonable in the case. And for many, many years, that’s exactly the situation where Mr. Woodfox was in, where the principal decision maker, the prosecutor in this case, Buddy Caldwell, was just extraordinarily unreasonable. So, it was our view that anyone would have taken a more reasonable approach to the case and that a fresh set of eyes on this case would lead to a better result. And I think that that’s a big part of what happened.
Albert Woodfox talking:
Closed cell restriction(CCR) has moved around, you know, in the last 40 years. But basically Nine-by-six, nine feet long, six feet wide. But we have been housed in cells smaller than that and some larger than that. You know, you try to develop a routine, and you try to, you know, keep changing it up, whether it’s the time or the content, the substance. You know, you just try to keep whatever you do connected to society. And it was very difficult for us because the very same people we were trying to help, usually these guys had a low level of consciousness, and so we had to try to be teachers, but at the same time we had to not allow ourselves to be sucked into the institutionalized vacuum that exists in prison. And so, you know, I don’t have a specific on how we survived. A lot of it had to do with us—for us, the influence of the party. You know, I’ve always said that the voice of the party was—for me, was stronger than the voice of the street. And it was when I began to change myself, to see myself in a different light—all of us, you know.
usually when someone loses a parent in prison, you know, they are allowed to go to the funeral and, you know, say goodbye, a cleansing of the soul. I found it very strange and very cruel that Warden Cain, who spoke about faith-based beliefs and how he changed Angola, that he could deny me the right to say goodbye to my mom, that I had to wait almost 20-some years to say—to be able to say goodbye, just to tell my mom in my heart and in my soul how much I loved her and that she would always be a part of me.
And, you know, when Michael and I—and one of the things that was frustrating is that the day I was released, by the time we got to the cemetery, it was closed, so I had to wait another day. And, you know, going to say goodbye to my sister and my childhood friend, who was also my brother-in-law, and—you know, it just wasn’t enough. I just had to see my mom. And once that was done, it was like this big weight was lifted off my soul. You know, one of the good things about Robert and I being with Herman is that we were both able to say goodbye. And I think that’s very important. It’s a big part of being a human being, you know, being able to say hello or being able to say goodbye to loved ones.
Robert King talking:
what a contrast, but it was—the fact that I was able to see him (Wallace), you know, before he died and to kind of join in with the voice of Albert and the rest of the attorneys that he would eventually be freed, or he would be free that day, I think it was a good thing. He recognized that—he understood that it was he that—I think initially he thought we were speaking about Albert’s case had been overturned and gone free, but I think he eventually understood that it was him. And it was a good feeling to see the recognition in his eyes that he knew he was going to be free. So that was a good thing for me, and it gave—it gave me some hope to believe that Albert would also be free, but under different circumstances. And that did happen.
But while I was in CCR, my thoughts and sentiments about it wasn’t any too much different from—you know, from Albert. And if you want to know how I maintained, you know, some form of sanity, I think it was our—because of our political belief, I think. We had developed a political consciousness, and I think that kind of eliminated—that kind of aided us, gave us sort of like a board to hold onto, to cling to. We were in prison, but we didn’t allow prison to get in us. And there’s a difference. You know, of course, you suffer and you suffer the impact and the effect of prison, but, on the mind, you won’t let that distract you from your main purpose, your main objective. And the objective is to survive, and to survive in chains, though alter those conditions. And so this is what we were prone to do. We had no choice.
When you hit bottom, there’s no place but up to go. And Angola was the bottom. They even call it the bottom, and rightly so. And so, we were trying to get out that bottom. And ain’t but one way to get out the bottom, is to try to come up and do some things to kind of offset the situation, you know, the sad situation that was going on in prison. But it was a comfort also to our own mind. I mean, we were politicized. We had understood that we were—or why we were being targeted and punished, and this gave meaning to why we should struggle more so, because, you know, it was an unjust reason and unjust position we were in. And we had to struggle against this.
Albert Woodfox talking:
both King and I, we feel our obligation to some of the comrades that’s still in prison, have been in prison for 30, 40 years. And, you know, thanks to the hard work that Robert did from the time he left Angola, it has given me the opportunity to take a couple of weeks or more to find out who I am and how I’m going to survive in society. But Robert and I—you know, the Black Panther Party may not exist, but we still exist. And we continue to—we will continue to struggle to free some of our comrades, and to, you know, stand shoulder to shoulder and try to take on all of the injustices that we can that goes on in America every day.
honestly, what gives me hope is King. And he could have quit anytime. In 15 years or more, he has never broke faith. He has struggled for my freedom. My brother, who has supported me for 47 years, has never missed a month of coming to see me. There have to have other human beings like my brother and my best friend in this world, and they are going to need help, and they’re going to need support. So my hope is to find some of these men and women, and in the case, young kids, and be as instrumental and having some type of influence in the direction they go and the value system that they may develop or to develop principles of the highest standard. I think humanity is not as bad as it could be, but it’s not as good as it should be. And I can play a very big part in doing that.
__________
Albert Woodfox
longest-standing solitary confinement prisoner in the United States. He was held in isolation in a six-by-nine-foot cell almost continuously for 43 years. On Friday, Woodfox was released from a Louisiana jail. He is a member of the Angola 3.
Robert King
member of the Angola 3 who spent 29 years in solitary confinement for a murder he did not commit. He was released in 2001 after his conviction was overturned. He’s written a book about his experience, From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King.
Billy Sothern
one of the trial attorneys representing Albert Woodfox, one of the Angola 3, who was released from prison on Friday. He is the author of Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City.
— source democracynow.org, democracynow.org