Word started coming down the line among the prisoners that a security guard had been killed. That surprised nobody. There were also a hundred crimes or fights a guard could stumble upon that would get him killed. And there were a thousand reasons a prisoner would be pushed to the brink and erupt in rage, revenge, and violence against a freeman at Angola. Working in the fields without gloves, being beaten in restraints, earning 32 cents a day for 16 hours of work, lack of medical care—prisoners were forced to use home remedies that they were taught by their families to treat their injuries. Men were forced to bow their heads and endure constant disrespect, name-calling, threats, and physical violence from prison officials and security guards. You can only kick a dog so many times before he turns around and bites.
Meanwhile, there was also a struggle for human and civil rights sweeping America at that time, and a growing number of prisoners and prisoner groups were doing what we were doing with the Black Panther Party, speaking out and calling for resistance. Outside the prison some black lawmakers were pushing for prison reform. In February of that year, two months before the guard’s murder, U.S. Rep. John Conyers from Michigan addressed a national hearing on penal reform that was held in New Orleans, organized by Louisiana state representative Dorothy Mae Taylor and the Black State Legislators Association. Conyers’s appearance made the front page of the newspaper because he called all black prisoners in America “political prisoners,” because, he said, “they came out of an environment that made crime conducive for them to survive.” Two black former prisoners who spoke at the hearing described atrocities at Angola. One, Andrew Joseph, said he witnessed guards firing into a gathering of prisoners who were protesting bad food, shooting prisoners “down like dogs.” Another, Lazarus Smith, said he saw “as high as 60 men” die of wounds for lack of treatment at Angola. He said he once stabbed a prisoner in a fight and a guard “rode him [the wounded man] around the grounds until he died.”
None of this publicity went over well with those in charge at Angola. For all their strife, Henderson and Dees seemed to agree on this: no black person had a right to speak up against the brutality and poor conditions at Angola. (Prison officials successfully blocked Representative Taylor from visiting Angola more than once.) Any prisoner who complained or resisted became a “militant” in their eyes and had to be put down, whether he had political beliefs or not.
In retrospect, when word came down the line that a prison guard had been killed that day, I should have known right away what was about to happen, but I didn’t. Slowly the line moved toward the clothing room, where Hayden Dees was questioning prisoners one by one with local law enforcement.
When I got to the door of the clothing room Dees and a local deputy sheriff named Bill Daniel were standing behind the counter with three or four freemen on either side of them. Dees looked up at me when I walked in. “Woodfox, you motherfucking nigger, you killed Brent Miller,” he yelled.
“No, I did not,” I said.
Deputy Sheriff Daniel pulled a revolver from under the counter, pointing it at my face. “I’ll blow your fucking brains out, nigger,” he said. “If you think I’m scared of you because you’re a Black Panther you don’t know who I am, motherfucker. You Black Panthers need to bring y’all ass down to St. Francisville, we’ll show you something.”
I wouldn’t show any fear. “Man, you better get that fucking gun out of my face,” I said.
They cursed me and ordered me to strip. I took off the gray sweatshirt, blue jeans, and rubber boots I was wearing and they tossed my clothes into a pile in the corner. Someone handed me a tattered white jumpsuit to put on. They handcuffed my wrists to my waist on a leather strap and put restraints on each of my ankles, connected by a chain. I was barefoot. Two guards on either side of me, one carrying a machine gun, walked me out the door, through the snitcher gate, and up to the dining hall, where we turned right and passed through the control center to the dungeon. In the stairwell of the dungeon they beat me. Then they half pushed, half carried me up the stairs and locked me in the shower at the front of the tier. They closed the shower door and removed the restraints through the bars. They knew if they removed the restraints in the shower I would keep fighting them. All day men were brought in. The blows and the prisoners’ pleas and screams in the stairwell echoed through the walls. Some prisoners would curse at the guards and try to fight back; others begged for mercy. They packed five men into cells made for one. They didn’t put anyone in the shower with me.
I didn’t know Brent Miller except by sight but I knew of the Miller family. Miller and his brothers were raised at Angola, and the family went back generations at the prison. His father ran the prison’s hog farm. That explained the beatings. They weren’t out for justice, they wanted revenge. Fuck them, I thought. Any human feeling I might have felt for Brent Miller or the Miller family had just been beaten out of me.
I wondered where Herman was. Herman and I always knew one day they would find an excuse to get us off the walk. The suddenness of being locked up reminded me that in prison, everything can change in the blink of an eye. All through the night freemen and deputies brought prisoners into the dungeon, beat them in the stairwell, and packed them into cells like sardines. I was still alone in the shower. I don’t know how much time passed before Brent Miller’s older brother Nix and seven or eight other freemen came onto the tier.
“There that nigger is, in the shower,” he yelled, pointing at me.
“Open the shower door,” he yelled to the freeman.
The freeman said, “The warden said don’t let nobody in the shower.” I heard him say something like, “If you want to open it I’m leaving the key in the box and you can open it yourself.”
Nix and his friends were already walking toward me.
“You motherfucker, nigger, you killed my brother,” he yelled.
They were standing in front of the shower now.
“Come to these bars, motherfucker, come to the fucking bars,” he screamed.
I yelled back, “Are you losing your fucking mind? I’m not coming to the fucking bars. Come in and get me.”
Some of the prisoners in the other cells started making noise, banging in their cells and hollering. “Leave that motherfucking man alone,” they called out, shaking their bars. “Come down here and jump me.”
I was standing now, watching the shower door, expecting it to slide open at any moment. I was too furious, too full of adrenaline to be scared. They could have pulled me out of the cell and beaten me to death. I would fight back with all I had. One of the tier guards must have called a ranking officer because somebody showed up and ordered Nix and his group off the tier.
After they left I sat back on the floor, leaning against the concrete wall, and watched the entrance to the tier. At first, I thought they had put me in the dungeon because they were making an example of me. I knew they had no evidence, no proof, nothing that would link me to Brent Miller’s murder. I did not kill that man. But the longer I sat in the shower, the more I believed they might try to set me up. I was the first person they locked up. They had walked me in broad daylight across the yard to the dungeon, with armed guards on either side of me. By now everyone in the prison knew that my name was for sale. They didn’t need evidence.
Later I learned Brent Miller had been stabbed to death in the Pine 1 dormitory. He was 23 years old. Former inmates told our investigators years later that prisoners who lived in Pine 1 were allowed to go back into their dorms that night; Brent Miller’s blood was still on the floor.
Chapter 17
CCR
The next day freemen came to the shower and put shackles on my ankles. My wrists were handcuffed to my waist by a leather strap. These restraints would become standard for me for decades to come. They walked me to a car and I got in. A captain next to me started elbowing me in my chest, face, and ribs. They drove me to a building just inside the front gate that housed the Reception Center and Death Row. Inside was a cellblock called Closed Cell Rest
ricted, or CCR: another name for solitary confinement. In the stairwell they beat me viciously. I couldn’t fight back or defend myself because of the restraints. I tried not to fall so they couldn’t kick me, but they tripped me. One of them kicked me in the eye. They grabbed me and dragged me up the stairs, still punching and kicking me. They took me to one of the tiers in CCR. I later found out this was B tier. They opened the security gate leading onto the tier and took me to cell 15. They put me inside and continued to punch and kick me. When they left, they closed the door and told me to come to the bars. I stepped to the bars and held my handcuffed hands up so they could uncuff them. They removed all the restraints through the bars.
Inside the cell there was a bare bunk attached to a wall on the left, a ceramic toilet and sink attached to the back wall, and a small metal table and bench attached to the wall on the right side of the cell. There was no mattress or blanket. I started to check myself to see what injuries I had. My body was badly bruised from being beaten but I was still able to move around the cell on my own. I walked to shake off the pain. The cell was nine feet long and six feet wide. I could take four or five steps up and back the length of the cell. When I heard the security door open at the end of the tier I stood at the bars and listened, trying to recognize voices.
I called down the tier to ask the prisoners their names when security left the tier. They called back. I didn’t know them. In the late afternoon, the guards brought Herman in and put him in the cell next to me. He had been beaten badly in the dungeon and in the stairwell of CCR. I couldn’t see him but we stood at our bars next to each other and talked. Herman used to live in the Pine 1 dorm and knew Brent Miller. That morning he had left Pine 3, where he lived now, went to breakfast, and was at his job in the tag plant when they were all pulled out to be questioned. He said multiple people must have seen him at breakfast and at the tag plant that morning. We talked about how we could let our families and party members know what happened to us. We both thought that the Black Panther Party would save us and there would be a movement to free us. I thought there would be mass protests in the street. “The people will rise up and not let us be railroaded,” Herman said. That’s how naive we were. (We didn’t know it, but by that time the FBI’s COINTELPRO, working with other federal agencies, local police, prosecutors, and the judicial system, had pretty much gutted the party. There was still a Black Panther newspaper and die-hard members around the country, including in New Orleans, but the infrastructure and unity of the party as we knew it were in ruins. Herman and I still didn’t know that; we didn’t even know what COINTELPRO was.) Freemen came onto the tier to taunt us, telling us we were going to die in the electric chair. They told us we’d be put first in line for the chair, ahead of everyone else waiting for execution.
The beatings of prisoners in retribution for Brent Miller’s death did not stop with us. Prison administrators felt the need to reestablish control of the prison and the way they chose to do it was through fear and by using brutality. We heard through the grapevine that prisoners were beaten for days and that prison officials allowed local deputies and farmers from outside the prison to come in and “help.” Some men were dragged from their cells in the middle of the night for “questioning.” A prisoner named Shelly Batiste wrote an account of the abuse that he managed to get out of the prison. It was published in the Black Panther newspaper:
Prisoners were beaten unmercifully . . . left to suffer from head and body injuries and acute burns with no medical attention. We were all locked in 5' by 8' cells (in groups of four, five and six, etc.). We are unable to sleep because there is only one mattress in each cell. The food is cold and has been cut. We aren’t allowed to shower. . . . The guards have come to the dungeon several nights, in consecutive order, dragged Brothers out of their cells, through arbitrary selection, for looking like what they have called militant and then have beaten these Brothers unmercifully. One Brother in Angola, Wayne, was so viciously beaten he had to be taken to a hospital in Baton Rouge, and a guard checks his cell every hour to see if he is still living. The others who weren’t beaten nearly to death were made to sit while 2, 3 or 4 pigs cut their hair in all directions, then made to crawl back in their cells. Their shock treatment consists of baseball bats, iron pipes, pick handles, gas and mace sprayed in Brothers’ faces, so those who attempt to fight off the blows can’t see. The Brothers who weren’t locked down, but continued to work in the fields are being worked seven days a week; shots are being fired at them. They can’t get out of line, they’re beaten with bats and forced to say they are “whores”; and after these sadistic accomplishments, they are forced to finish working in a badly bruised condition.
The day Brent Miller was killed, Deputy Warden Lloyd Hoyle was interviewed by the New Orleans Times-Picayune and told a reporter there was no explanation for the incident. On the morning of April 18, the paper published his account. “The thing we’ve got to remember,” Hoyle said, “is that we’ve got quite an adverse-type population up here. It could have been any number of things.” Hoyle also said there was no information to link the incident of the guard being burned in the shack on the 16th with Miller’s murder.
Sometime that day or the next morning, Warden Henderson gave reporters a different story. In the afternoon edition of the State-Times newspaper on April 18—the day after Deputy Warden Hoyle told reporters there “could have been a number of things” behind the guard’s murder—Warden C. Murray Henderson was quoted as saying that “black militants” murdered Brent Miller and that his “investigation” into Miller’s killing had already turned up “four or five prime suspects.” (Going by the timing of this published report Henderson blamed “black militants” before every black prisoner on the walk had even been questioned. No white prisoners had been interviewed at this time.) Henderson also told the paper that on the previous Sunday, the day the guard was burned and the day before Miller was killed, prison officials had “intercepted” a typewritten letter that was addressed to the Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate, taking credit for the burning of guard Mike Gunnells that day. (A letter assistant warden Hoyle apparently had no knowledge of.) Warden Henderson said in that letter Angola officials were found “guilty” of “extreme racism” at a “people’s court” allegedly held the same day the guard was burned. The letter supposedly went on to say that the public was as guilty as “the racist pigs who hold us captive,” and said “more will come.” It was signed, “The Vanguard Army, Long Live the Angola Prison Involvement.”
I’d never heard of the Vanguard Army and don’t believe the letter, if it existed, was written by a prisoner. No black prisoner could get access to a typewriter in 1972. There were no typewriters in the black dorms, none in the dining hall or kitchen where I worked, none in the tag plant where Herman worked, certainly none in the yard or in the fields. The only prisoners who may have had access to a typewriter were inmate clerks, and they were white. Prison authorities had a way to identify prisoners by their handwriting; they had samples on file for every prisoner in Angola. Similarly they had access to every typewriter at the prison and could have tested each to see where the letter was typed. If a letter giving authorities a motive for Miller’s killing had been intercepted on Sunday, wouldn’t the deputy warden have known about it on Monday when he spoke to reporters? The letter was never produced at any trial related to Brent Miller’s murder.
In the account Warden Henderson gave the State-Times that was published the day after Miller’s killing, on April 18, Henderson also said he believed the “sit-down strike of inmate workers” in the dining hall that took place the morning of Miller’s murder was staged as a “diversionary tactic” to draw guards away from the walk. Guards were not called away from the walk that day. There were always only two guards per unit on the walk. Standard protocol was that during meals, one of those guards accompanied prisoners to the dining hall and the other was left on the walk. The morning of the strike that didn’t change. One guard who was on the walk that morning would later say
that he didn’t even know there was a kitchen workers’ strike. Contradicting himself, at the end of the State-Times article Henderson admitted as much, saying, “The man [Brent Miller] was supervising four dormitories by himself in an area where the original plans called for it to be manned by five. We’ve had a chronic problem in leaving a man by himself in an area like that. We’ve constantly asked for more money for more supervision but we haven’t been able to get it.” Henderson’s claim that “militants” killed Miller, insinuating it was because he was white, would stick. The day after the State-Times article the Associated Press headlined an article about the killing “Militants Said Cause of Death, ‘Black Power’ Backers Blamed at Angola.”
The freemen came onto our tier and cut everybody’s Afro, saying there was a new rule that everybody’s hair had to be short. Eventually they brought each of us a mattress, a blanket, and some of our possessions. I started getting notes on my food tray saying things like, “You’re going to die,” “Eat this food and you eat my dick,” or “This food will kill you,” all signed by “the KKK.” I threw out the food. I received many letters threatening me. I could tell they came from inside the prison because there were no stamps on the envelopes. I searched the food on my tray for ground glass for the next year, even when there wasn’t a note.
We were locked down 23 hours a day. At first, I ignored the pressure of the cell. There was so much going on. And I never for one moment thought I’d be confined to such a small area for more than a few weeks or months at the most. Once a day, usually in the morning, all 16 of our cell doors opened at the same time and we were let out onto the tier for an hour. During that time we could shower and walk up and down the hall on the tier. Sometimes I looked out the window across from my cell. There was no outside exercise yard for CCR prisoners. There were prisoners in CCR who hadn’t been outside in years. We couldn’t make or receive phone calls. We weren’t allowed books, magazines, newspapers, or radios. There were no fans on the tier; there was no access to ice, no hot water in the sinks in our cells. There was no hot plate to heat water on the tier. Needless to say, we were not allowed educational, social, vocational, or religious programs; we weren’t allowed to do hobby crafts (leatherwork, painting, woodwork). Rats came up the shower drain at the end of the hall and would run down the tier. We threw things at them to keep them from coming into our cells. Mice came out at night. When the red ants invaded they were everywhere all at once, in clothes, sheets, mail, toiletries, food.
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