Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

by Albert Woodfox

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

It never occurred to us to tell anyone they beat or robbed us. It was accepted. That was just the way life was at that time.

The code was: you didn’t rat, you took your beef, and if you did something that somebody else got busted for—and it didn’t look like he’d get out of it—you came forward. I prided myself on following the code. Even back then I had enough sense to have some honor.

The only part that bothered me about being fired was that I’d just figured out how to unbolt the TVs.

Stories in prison are endless daydreams, described in detail, and—in the black dorms—spoken in the flow and rhythm of Ebonics. The beauty of Ebonics is that it’s so specific, and forever changing. So were our stories in prison.

The DA dropped all the charges against me for lack of evidence except the armed robbery at Tony’s Green Room. All those other fake charges stayed on my record though.

I met the public defender who was representing me once before my trial. I was found guilty.

I watched as men and women my age wearing leather jackets and berets moved through the neighborhood, selling newspapers and talking to people. They escorted women on “check days” to get their groceries, protecting them from being robbed on the way to the store. I couldn’t have described it at the time, but they were unifying Harlem, bringing people together. I found out they were members of the Black Panther Party.

Then a prisoner on the tier gave me a book called A Different Drummer, by William Melvin Kelley. It opened my mind.

I knew how Tucker felt. Like him, I wanted to burn my past to the ground. At one time my greatest dream was to go to Angola prison. Maybe that’s all I’d been allowed to dream.

In the late sixties, Illinois Black Panthers Bob Lee and Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the party, formed an alliance with a group of white youth from Chicago’s poverty-stricken North Side whose roots stretched back to Appalachia. The white group called themselves the Young Patriots Organization and wore Confederate flags on their jackets.

The sight of black men legally carrying guns was so terrifying to the establishment that even the National Rifle Association (NRA) supported a measure to repeal the California gun law that allowed the public to openly carry loaded firearms.

At various times party members referred to police, politicians, DAs, and judges as “pigs.” I did too. It comes from George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, in which one of the characters, a pig, is a corrupt, power-hungry opportunist who turns against his followers and betrays the principles of democracy.

We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.

?

Desperation will make men do irrational things.

On the outside, nothing had changed from the day I had escaped the courthouse 20 months earlier. I was a black man with a long prison sentence ahead of me. Inside, however, everything had changed. I had morals, principles, and values I never had before. Looking out the window of the plane, I saw into the window of my soul. In the past, I had done wrong. Now I would do right. I would never be a criminal again.

Our survival depended on understanding what the authorities were attempting to do to us, and sharing that understanding with each other.

Sometimes I felt cheated, knowing that being born black pretty much determined where I’d wind up. I thought it was sad that I had to come to prison to find out there were great African Americans in this country and in this world, and to find role models that I should have had available to me in school. What

The need to be treated with human dignity touches everyone. And the key to resistance is unity.

The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves, Frantz Fanon wrote, and we found that to be true.

Rape brought about the complete destruction of another human being.

With the recognition that I’d been wrong came a great deal of pain.

Our resistance gave us an identity. Our identity gave us strength. Our strength gave us an unbreakable will.

If a man got gassed, even if it was just pepper spray in his cell, it affected the whole tier because the gas would spread. There is no such thing as gassing one prisoner; whenever they gassed anyone we all felt it.

Brewer spoke out again and he was bound and gagged. So was King, who hadn’t said a word. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs. Duct tape was put across their mouths. They were forced to sit like this throughout their trial.

She wrote that to be real, a sacrifice must hurt, and empty us. I could relate to that. She wrote that more than our own weaknesses, we must believe in love.

“Ninety-nine percent of your success was because you really wanted to read,” I said. Within a year he was reading at a high school level. The world was now open to him.

The first book I gave him was Native Son, by Richard Wright.

Sacrifice was required in order to achieve change.

You learn there are layers to people. You look for the good. This can set you up for disappointment.

Every day you start over. You look for the humanity in each individual.

I actively stayed away from negative conversation on the tier.

I trained myself to see change as an opportunity rather than a threat. I developed a mental toughness. I told myself that I could survive anything but death.

I learned that dreams and fantasies are not bound by physical limitations, because there are no limitations of the mind or the imagination.

Herman, King, and I—with no behavioral problems and few write-ups—would never be released.

There were always guards, however, who enjoyed the absolute power and control they had over another human being, guards whose whole life and identity were tied up in the way they acted out against prisoners.

had no proof of employment. Every black man and boy knew what it was like to be picked up by police for no reason. You could be hanging out on the corner with your friends when police on patrol would stop, get out of the car, and tell everybody to get up against the wall.

We wanted the other prisoners to see that our struggle for dignity was more important than our own safety and our own freedom and our own lives. We had to be strong so the prison administration could not break us.

In my forties, I chose to take my pain and turn it into compassion, and not hate. Whenever I experienced pain of any origin I always made a promise to myself never to do anything that would cause someone else to suffer the pain I was feeling in that moment. I still had moments of bitterness and anger. But by then I had the wisdom to know that bitterness and anger are destructive. I was dedicated to building things, not tearing them down.

“If there is no struggle there is no progress,” Frederick Douglass wrote. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power cedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

By age 40 I had learned that to be human is to grow, to create, to contribute, and that fear stops growth. Fear retards the process of growing. Fear causes confusion and uncertainty. Fear kills one’s sense of self-worth. By eradicating fear on the tier, I learned that men can deal with each other better. They can get along. I wondered if in society, we could build a world in which we do not fear one another.

“There’s nothing wrong with a grand juror having some knowledge of a case, even if they happened to have written a book about the case.”

Absurd

humanity. Being out of the cell after 24 years was strange. When I was in CCR at Angola, everyone I talked to was always in front of me, standing at the bars outside my cell.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.

It was as if prison officials and the sheriff’s deputies were so determined to pin the blame on me and Herman that they knowingly and willingly ignored evidence and other leads, which could have proved who really killed Brent Miller.

There is no oversight of prosecutorial conduct in this country, even though reckless and irresponsible actions by prosecutors, who are out not for justice or truth but only for their own careers and to win, have enormous lifelong consequences on people’s lives that can never be undone.

“I am free of Angola,” he often said, “but Angola will never be free of me.”

It was Gandhi who said, “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.”

I knew from experience the judicial system is not concerned with innocence or justice. (The state had already recognized I had a meritorious grand jury discrimination claim filed in 1973 but chose to ignore it.) An innocent man could be hanged and the court system would only rule on what kind of rope was used for the hanging.

“By 1999,” Judge Dalby wrote, “these plaintiffs had been in extended lockdown more than anyone in Angola’s history, and more than any other living prisoner in the entire United States.”