Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

by Albert Woodfox

Growing up in the Jim Crow South she had a lot of practice surviving on very little.

Courage means you master that fear and act in spite of being afraid.

If you were raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was virtually over. You became a “gal-boy,” a possession of your rapist. You’d

In prison, you are part of a human herd. In the human herd survival of the fittest is all there is. You become instinctive, not intellectual. Therein

[If] any white man in the world says “Give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one. —James Baldwin

It’s a common myth that the Black Panther Party was a racist organization. Racial hatred was never taught in the party.

The mainstream media turned the Panther salute of a raised clenched fist for Black Power into a rebuke against other races, which it was never intended to be,

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.

Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.

day within the confines of the cell. I became living proof that we can survive the worst to change ourselves and our world,

according to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are slaves of the state. The same amendment that abolished slavery in 1865—”

We were dismissed or ignored by the numerous lawyers and legal aid organizations we wrote, asking them to look at our cases.

“The mouth can say anything but the ass is proof.”

“You couldn’t look white men in the eye, you had to have your head down when you walked around, all socially designed to keep African Americans as an inferior people.”

Every black man and boy knew what it was like to be picked up by police for no reason.

Nelson Mandela wrote that the challenge for every prisoner is “how to survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs.”

By the time I was 40 I saw how I had transformed my cell, which was supposed to be a confined space of destruction and punishment, into something positive. I used that space to educate myself, I used that space to build strong moral character,

In my forties, I chose to take my pain and turn it into compassion, and not hate.

Malcolm gave me direction. He gave me vision.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. —Mexican proverb used by the Zapatista movement

If you want to smear an African American man’s reputation, all you have to do is say the word “rape.” It is a bell that can’t be unrung.

One of my supporters sent me the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and, luckily, it got through. I shared it with the prisoners on my tier, telling them what a powerful book it was. There were issues in the book we used to discuss in the 1970s.

“Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.”

Racism today isn’t as blatant as it was 44 years ago, but it is still here, underground, coded.

The systemic hatred of a human being based on his or her skin color or hair texture or cultural heritage or gender or sexual preference is pointless.