When Panthers raised a clenched fist, it was for unity. If you raise an open hand your fingers are separate, you are vulnerable. When you close those fingers and your hand comes together into a fist you have a symbol of power and unity. 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, instead of a call for unity, which is what it was. A raised fist was for unity between Panthers, unity within black communities, and unity with anyone waging the same struggles for the people, for empowerment and equality and justice.
Countless peoples’ movements for human rights around the world have raised fists as a form of protest and solidarity, and outsiders seem to understand those struggles for human rights. However, when black men raised a fist, it was seen as something different, a threat. I think of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, African American athletes who won gold and bronze medals for the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. After they raised their fists and bowed their heads on the winners’ stand, they were torn apart in the American press. They were called “renegades” who were “angry, nasty, ugly”; their actions were described as an “insult” and “embarrassment” to the United States. Some people wanted to take their medals away. How many people ever knew they were speaking from a well-thought-out human rights platform created by the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an organization of nonprofessional black athletes they belonged to?
Smith and Carlos raised their fists for Muhammad Ali’s right to protest the Vietnam War and refuse to be drafted, and for the return of his championship belt that was stripped from him. They raised their fists to demand the removal of Avery Brundage, the anti-Semitic, white supremacist head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), who was responsible for resisting a U.S. boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. They raised their fists to demand the IOC hire more African American coaches and to protest the inclusion at the Olympic Games of countries ruled by apartheid. They stood without their shoes on to call attention to poverty in black communities in the United States and wore beads and scarves around their necks to protest lynching. Smith, who broke the world record in that 200-meter race, and Carlos sacrificed personal fame, future endorsements, and possibly jobs to stand against apartheid, the Vietnam War, discrimination, poverty, lynching, racism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacy—but what most people saw, and many condemned, was two black men who dared to raise their fists.
The phrase “Power to the People” was a rallying cry for black people and for all disempowered people to come together and fight for what we all didn’t have: equal education, equal opportunities, equal justice, equal treatment, and respect. 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. On the street, the word “pig” was—and still is—used to describe any corrupt official, anyone in power who betrayed the people, any policeman who brutalized people, white or black. Black policemen who hurt people, black DAs who framed people were, and are, pigs. When you have no power you often use language as a defense mechanism. We lived in a world where a black person who stood up for other blacks could go to jail. In many cases language was all we had.
When I first became interested in the party I was acting more on emotions than intellect. I was a knucklehead with a newfound sense of awareness. My ability to form theories and understand ideas was very limited at that time. The party’s 10-Point Program was my guide to doing the right thing. I was impressed by the principles, even though I didn’t understand the depths of them. As I began to educate myself I began to understand more and more the social forces—mostly economic forces—that caused Bobby Seale and Huey Newton to formulate the 10-Point Program. Even though I didn’t understand what was behind it when I first read it, I knew what it was saying.
10-Point Program of the Black Panther Party
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.
Chapter 12
NYC Prison Riot
The Panthers were moved off my tier after a few months. As the steaming-hot summer progressed in New York City, life in the overcrowded Tombs remained horrible. The food was unsanitary. The tiers were filthy. We couldn’t get towels or other supplies; prisoners had to hire lawyers to receive medical care. Tensions were rising. There were 14,000 prisoners incarcerated in New York City in 1970. More than half had not even been found guilty of a crime—they were waiting for trials or to see a judge. The Tombs was built for 900 prisoners; at least 1,500 of us were being held there. The cells were so crowded that during mealtimes, prisoners had to take turns sitting at the table in their cell or alternate sitting on the floor or standing while eating. We were all aware that the prison was on the brink. The word through the grapevine that summer was that a protest was coming.
The protest broke in August. It started above us, on the ninth floor. We heard loud banging, then all of sudden the gigantic glass block windows from above us exploded like bombs on the ground. The men upstairs hollered down to us through the pipe chase, telling us how to push the windows out on our floor: rip off the tabletops in the day room, and use the table legs as battering rams to knock out the window blocks. Prisoners stood in the opened windows, calling down to spectators. Some made signs on sheets and hung them outside the prison. On my tier, prisoners took strips of sheets and knotted them around the bars of the locked gates at the front of the cellblock so security officers couldn’t open the gates with their keys. We piled up mattresses against the gates. It would take only seconds for those officers to break through when they wanted to, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Desperation will make men do irrational things. Prison officials eventually agreed to meet with prisoner representatives from each floor in the library. I went with two or three other men from the eighth floor.
The prisoners from the ninth floor took the lead and read a list of grievances they’d written. “We the inmates on the ninth floor of Tombs city prison, Manhattan, New York, submit this petition of grievances and we solicit your attention in this matter,” one prisoner read. He went on, noting prisoners had to wait on average eight months to a year for a trial. Bails were excessively high. Prisoners weren’t given preliminary—or any—hearings. They were pressured by the Legal Aid Society, the state-funded agency representing most prisoners, to make guilty pleas. Prisoners were not given access to law books from the library. Blankets were dirty, mattresses were infested with bedbugs, cells built for one were sleeping three. The kitchen served moldy bread, rotten potatoes, and half-cooked powdered eggs. The prison was “ridden with body lice, roaches, rats, and mice.” Prisoners had to wear the clothes they had on when they entered prison for months.
Our most urgent demand, the letter stated, was to end the excessive violence against prisoners, largely directed against black and Puerto Rican pris
oners, by officers wielding “blackjacks, nightsticks, fist, and feet,” who beat prisoners to unconsciousness, after which, prison doctors colluded with officials to write up fake accident reports.
“It is a common practice for an inmate to be singled out,” the prisoner read, “. . . because he did not hear the officer call his name or because the officer did not like the way this or that inmate looked or because of the manner in which the inmate walked or because the officer brings the turmoil of his own personal problems to work with him, and together with other officers, beat the defenseless inmate into unconsciousness, often injuring him for life physically and mentally or both.
“These acts,” he continued, “would not and could not happen without the knowledge and consent of the Commissioner of Correction, the Assistant Commissioner of Correction, the Warden of Tombs Prison, the Deputy Wardens of Tombs Prison, and the Captains of Tombs Prison.” He added, “We reject all official denials [to the effect] that such things do not happen here, as we have experienced these sadistic attacks.” It was common knowledge by every official in that room, and every prisoner, that nothing goes on in prison without the prison staff being aware of it. As the saying goes, the prisoner read, “Not one leaf of a tree could turn yellow without the silent knowledge and consent of the tree itself.”
The prisoners ended their statement asking that there would be no repercussions of any kind against the inmates who participated in the protest, and that the list of prisoner grievances would be released to the press. Not all prisoners who participated in the protest were beaten after we returned to our tiers, but the goon squad, a group of five or six corrections officers in vests and helmets brandishing sticks and bats, went to the ninth floor first. Many prisoners were sent to other prisons, including me. The document of prisoner grievances and demands that the prisoners on the ninth floor wrote and read aloud to prison authorities was not released to the press by the authorities.
I was taken to the Queens House of Detention, which we called New Queens. Since no actions were taken by officials to improve conditions for prisoners in August it wasn’t a surprise to any of us when the Tombs erupted again, two months later. Facilities in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, and in Queens where I was staying joined in solidarity. This time the protests lasted for more than a week. Local papers reported that during the uprising 1,400 prisoners had control of 23 hostages. My tier didn’t take hostages but we barricaded the end of our tier with mattresses and lockers. Our demands included: no more than two men to a cell, the right to exercise religious freedom and follow related dietary guidelines, more sanitary conditions, edible food, adequate medical care, and affordable bail. One of the prisoner demands was for bail hearings to be held in public, to show people that black and Puerto Rican prisoners consistently received excessively higher bail for petty crimes than did white defendants. After eight days riot police stormed the prisons across the city.
Guards and police retook the city’s jail with brutal force. At New Queens, there was no way to hold them off. It wasn’t even close. We had a wall of mattresses and boxes. They had gas guns, shields, bats, and axes. They sprayed canisters of CS gas onto the tier and chopped through our barricade and sprayed more tear gas on us. The CS gas, meant to be used outside to control riots, was blinding inside, burning our eyes, mouths, nostrils, and lungs and making it almost impossible to breathe. While we were choking and disoriented they forced us back into the cells on the tier, beating us with riot sticks and baseball bats.
We were ordered to strip naked in the cells. As we undressed, guards with ax handles, billy clubs, blackjacks, and bats lined up on either side of the hallway outside our cells. One by one we were called out by our cell number and ordered to the day room. As each prisoner was forced into the hall he was beaten and poked in the genitals with nightsticks; bats and clubs rained down on him. The men in the first four cells had the shortest distance to go. The farther back your cell, the more you got beaten. I was in number 15, the last cell on the tier. When they got to my cell I cupped my genitals with one hand and put my other arm over my head and came out running. A couple of prisoners ahead of me had fallen and the guards were stomping them. I could see unconscious prisoners being dragged to the day room. I ran over a floor slippery with blood from busted heads, mouths, and faces. With each running step my only thought was, “Don’t fall, don’t fall,” over and over. I felt the blows all over.
I made it to the day room without falling but had been badly beaten. I felt excruciating pain in my left arm. Blood was pouring from a gaping wound on the top of my head. In the day room they herded us like animals and forced us to lie on top of each other while guards made cruel and racist remarks like, “Put that dick in him, nigger.” Prisoners who refused to lie on the other men were beaten mercilessly. I didn’t want to be on the bottom of this pile so I ran and jumped up on top of the stacked bodies. Other prisoners were moaning: “Lord help me. Don’t let me die. I can’t breathe.” Some of them were screaming.
The cries of the other prisoners hurt me the most. I was in physical pain but the greater pain was seeing men break. I understood their agony and suffering, but in my mind no matter what happens, you don’t cross a certain line. Crying, begging, calling some of the guards “boss,” saying, “Please don’t hit me,” “Please, man, have mercy on me,” or “I’m going to be good.” The things they were saying were so degrading. It was humiliating to me to see men reduced to that. I was in a lot of pain, but I was determined not to beg these animals. I was not going to plead. I was not going to ask for anything. Even while being screamed at, poked with nightsticks, with blood rushing out of my head, I didn’t say a thing.
While we were being forced to lie in a pile in the day room guards went into our cells and threw away our property—eyeglasses, photographs, letters. When they finished trashing our cells we were ordered back onto the cellblock, where they put five or six men in each cell. There was no room for all of us to sit and everyone was badly injured. That night was agony. The next day they took me to Lenox Hill Hospital, where a doctor put a cast on my fractured arm and stitched up my head. Back at the prison they packed five of us into single cells again. We stayed like that for about a week.
After four or five days, they came around with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I don’t know how long it was until we had a hot meal. It took a long time to heal. To this day I have problems with my hip from being hit there with a bat. My scalp has a scar where my head was busted. But I never regretted taking part in the protest.
I was moved back to the Tombs and was sitting in the day room waiting for a court appearance when a guard told me my lawyer was there to visit me. I didn’t have a lawyer. When I walked into the room the attorney said, “Charles?” The lawyer offered me a deal meant for a real Charles Harris who was locked up somewhere in New York. He told me if I pleaded guilty to a burglary charge he could get me two to three years on Rikers Island, but I had to make the plea deal that day. I’d heard prisoners talk about the work crews at Rikers, and how the crews were brought to work on the streets every day. If I could get a job in one of these work crews I thought I might be able to escape. I pleaded guilty. Later that day they took me to Rikers. After I was processed, they told me my job would be working on a street-cleaning crew in Brooklyn. I felt hopeful for the first time in months.
That night there was a blizzard. When I woke up the next morning the windows were white with snow. We weren’t allowed to go outside to our work details. The next day, more snow. They kept us inside for a week. I was in the day room when I heard a corrections officer call, “Where is Charles Harris, aka Albert Woodfox?” My prints had finally come back. They moved me off the tier and put me in a one-man cell in an empty wing.
At first being segregated from everyone else didn’t bother me. I was too busy worrying about the possibility of being killed by police when I got back to New Orleans. I thought they would kill me for escaping. The idea of going back to Angola also weighed on me. But by this time my
level of consciousness had been raised by the Black Panther Party and I had become politicized. Things would be different. I didn’t know how, but that’s how I felt. Now that they knew who I was I could finally write to my mom. I told her I got caught, that I was in jail. She got somebody to write back to me once. Before they could ship me back to Angola I had to be tried on the bogus aggravated robbery charge brought by the bookie. I was sent back to the Tombs.
Solitary Page 8