For a while he and his older siblings lived with his grandmother. She taught him how to cook. There weren’t enough beds in her two rooms, so he and his brother slept on the floor. Eventually, he wrote, “I could not understand how my parents worked so hard and yet were so poor.” As a teenager, he got into more petty crimes and spent time in the juvenile justice system. “You would sit around and wait for visits on Sunday,” he said. “You feel alone, heartbroken, like it’s you against the world.”
In January 1967, he was arrested on a bank robbery charge. The following year he was convicted and received a 50-year sentence. In 1969, he escaped to the roof of Orleans Parish Prison, jumped to the rooftop of the building next door, and got to the street with several other inmates. He was caught in Florida and brought back to the parish prison, where he was put in the dungeon. His shoes had shrunk in the rain, so he took them off. Malik Rahim, one of the New Orleans Black Panthers I’d met when I was on C-1 at the parish prison, happened to be in the dungeon when they brought Herman in. Seeing that Herman wasn’t wearing shoes Malik asked him what size he wore. Herman told him and Malik took off his own shoes. “Hey, brother, listen,” he said, handing Herman his shoes, “you can have mine. My comrades won’t let me go without.” Malik walked away from him barefoot.
That was Herman’s introduction to the Black Panther Party. From the Black Panthers, he found connection and purpose. He went on to join the party in the parish prison and participated in prisoner actions there. “We destroyed every commode, sink, and face bowl we could,” he said. “Mattresses were stacked at the front of the tiers and set afire to prevent prison authorities from physically attacking us.” After two days of a siege, the sheriff said he would negotiate with the prisoners without reprisal and gave the prisoners the opportunity to voice their grievances to CBS news cameramen he allowed into the prison. The sheriff told the reporters the problem was overcrowding and lack of funding, pointing out that there were four and five men in cells built for two. This sheriff kept his promise and didn’t take vengeance on the prisoners who protested.
(Unbeknownst to me until later, Herman was also in the parish prison when my tier took a hostage in order to speak to Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor; his tier also nonviolently took a hostage. Both hostages were released unharmed after prisoners talked to Representative Taylor.) Joining the Black Panther Party was the defining moment in Herman’s life. Forty-one years later Herman was as devoted to the principles of the party as he was in the beginning. He proudly wore the iconic image of the black panther, created by artist and former Panther Emory Douglas, hand-drawn on his hat and clothing, even though he would often get a write-up for it.
Robert King grew up in New Orleans and Gonzales, Louisiana. His backyard in Algiers, the second-oldest neighborhood in New Orleans, and the only one on the western bank of the Mississippi River, actually bordered Malik Rahim’s backyard for a while when they were children. King’s grandmother raised him in a close-knit but impoverished family. She died when he was 15. Shortly afterward, King and two friends were walking down the street when they were stopped by police because they “fit the description” of men who had robbed a gas station. King was sent to the State Industrial School for Colored Youth, a state reformatory in Scotlandville, 13 miles north of Baton Rouge. After that he had several minimum-paying jobs but lost many of them due to being picked up on “vagrancy laws.”
Police used vagrancy laws and “loitering” charges to meet their weekly quota of arrests, picking up black men and charging them with having “no visible means of support,” whether or not those men had jobs or even owned their own businesses. A lot of black men in the sixties had small jobs that supported them but weren’t official “businesses.”; they’d walk the neighborhoods, sharpening knives or selling vegetables, for example. Ragmen came through with old shirts or pants. On the corner they’d yell, “Raaag maan,” and people would come out and pay a dollar for this, two dollars for that. A lot of people made new clothes with these used clothes. The man selling the clothing and rags 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. They’d pat everybody down, ask what everyone was doing, and tell everybody to show proof of work. Then they’d get on their walkie-talkies and call the paddy wagon, charge anyone without a paycheck stub or other “proof” with loitering or vagrancy, and put them in jail. Police could legally hold the men for three days on vagrancy charges. After being in jail for three days men lost whatever jobs or means of support they had and had to start over.
Like most black men in those days King was forced to choose between providing for himself and his family or watching them starve to death. This was not a difficult choice to make. At 18 he was sent to Angola for the first time on a robbery charge and then he came back again when he was 23, which was when I first met him. Back on the street he picked up boxing and became a semiprofessional fighter; this is the time when he was known as Speedy King. At 28, King was arrested and charged with an armed robbery he did not commit. At his trial, his codefendant testified that he only picked King out of a mug shot lineup because he’d been tortured by police into making a false statement. In spite of that testimony King was convicted and sentenced to 35 years. He met members of the Black Panther Party and joined the party in Orleans Parish Prison. Later he’d say it was in prison that “things began to open themselves up to me regarding injustices. I felt it was a hard pill to swallow. I felt under slavery.”
I trusted Herman and King implicitly. With other men in prison, there were only degrees of trust, depending on the person’s character, or lack of character. It was something I had to evaluate as I interacted with each person. When I was with Herman or King it was different. My defenses were down. I trusted them not to do anything that would hurt me physically or emotionally. I trusted them to have my back, no matter what. I never had to worry if King was going to be there, if Hooks was going to be there. No matter what I did they would be there for me. They trusted me in the same way.
This kind of trust is very rare behind bars. In prison, you have to question everything around you. Prison teaches you that most acts of kindness have strings attached; something in return will be expected at some point and what is expected might be conduct you find appalling, a violation of your moral code and system of values. To preserve your dignity and honor, you learn to reject what people offer. Because Herman, King, and I trusted one another, there was kindness in our lives.
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.” He wrote about how being kept with his comrades on Robben Island helped him survive. “For together our determination was reinforced,” he wrote. “We supported each other and gained strength from each other.” So it was for me, Herman, and King. We supported each other and gained strength from one another. Whenever I thought I could not take another step for myself, I found the strength to take that step for Herman and King. We had to be strong so we could keep our minds and spirits free while being locked up 23 hours a day. We had to be strong so we could show other prisoners that in the fight against oppression, there is no letting up, no backing down. 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.
I loved and cherished their friendship. I didn’t know how so much loyalty and devotion could exist between three men. We had been through so much brutality, so much pain and suffering that we had every right to be hard, bitter, and hateful toward almost everyone and everything in life. But instead, we did not allow prison to shape us. We defined ourselves.
We didn’t agree on everything. We could argue like cats
and dogs. It was never personal though. We were three strong men who had different positions on some political issues and we’d get into it sometimes. But even in anger and frustration we held each other in the highest possible regard. I never doubted they were honest in their ideas and feelings and analysis. We listened to one another. We each saw great character in the others. Herman and King would rather lose their lives than betray me and I felt the same way about both of them. We never lost the faith.
Herman wrote a poem that, for me, expresses who we had to be to survive. We were men of steel.
Man of Steel
My keepers believe I’m the man of steel,
Ripping and running, in and out of my life,
As if this shit ain’t real.
They frame me for murder—and when their conspiracy
is exposed, and they are all deposed, the judge
declares—case closed.
Equal access to Justice, equal access to rule,
Doctrines never meant for the man of Steel but to
terminate 40 years of his indomitable will.
Maybe my soul is that of concrete
Maybe it is that of the wind
Maybe it is that of fire
Maybe it is the spirit of the people—the spirit of my ancestors,
Whatever my keepers wish my soul to be,
The man of steel is always free.
Chapter 31
Contact Visit
In 1986, 14 years after I was locked down in CCR, prison authorities moved everyone from CCR and Death Row to Camp J cellblocks so they could make repairs and renovations to the old building. We were all put in Gar Unit at Camp J, the punishment camp, where King had been sent for two years in the late seventies for protesting strip searches. Camp J prisoners had fewer privileges than we had at CCR—no store, for example, less food at mealtimes, no salt or pepper, fewer books. While being housed at Camp J, CCR prisoners were supposed to be able to live by the same rules and regulations that we had at CCR—and not the Camp J rules—but there was always a tug-of-war. The Camp J major wanted things his way. We went on hunger strikes or would refuse to go into our cells when they tried to impose Camp J rules on us and gradually we won back privileges. Some things we couldn’t change: The cells were much smaller. When we went to the shower we were locked in. We had a lot of arguments with security around that. Most of us only needed 10 or 15 minutes in the shower. Once we were locked in we had to wait until the guard came to unlock the door before we could get out, so we might have to spend 30 or 45 minutes or more in the shower. That would cut into our hour outside the cell.
Our “yard” time took place in small pens. There was no way to run, we could only jog or walk in circles. The windows were frosted so we couldn’t see out of them. I filed an ARP about the frosted windows when I got there. I researched the statutes that described how much sunlight prisoners were supposed to get. (Even at Camp J prisoners were allowed to take law books out of the library because it was required by law.) I won that because there was established law supporting me. They had to swap the frosted glass for glass we could see through.
They did install black-and-white TVs for us at Camp J and, for the first time ever, we got to see cable TV stations while we were there. We had petitioned for cable long before we were sent to Camp J. The main prison had already had access to cable TV for years. We found out it came through for us when an inmate counsel visited after talking to the warden. “Say, man,” he said, “they granted you cable here now. Y’all just got to go to channel 5 for Cinemax.” I’ll never forget, the World Series was on TV, we changed the channel to 5, and the first thing we saw was a naked woman walking on the beach from some foreign movie. That was the end of the baseball. A couple of the guys were really into sports and complained. There was some back-and-forth on the subject but since we lived by a majority-rule policy that was a short vote. I think it was something like 12 to 3 for the foreign movie.
At Camp J visiting was worse than it was at CCR. We had to wear restraints during the noncontact visit. The screens were so dark that in order for visitors and prisoners to see one another’s form we had to stand back from the screen. At CCR Herman, King, and I could be in the visiting room at the same time if our families came together, and we encouraged them to do that. We wouldn’t be able to see one another—we’d be brought to the visiting booths one at a time—but we could talk to one another, even though there were dividers between us. Our families laughed about how we’d be able to conduct full conversations with each other looking straight ahead. On the other side of the screen our families pushed their chairs back against the wall, which allowed us to see all of them and talk together. This was a ray of humanity for us. At Camp J, however, we were locked in individual visiting sheds, alone with whoever was visiting us, so we couldn’t talk to one another on visits, and our families couldn’t visit us together.
While we were housed at Camp J the prison started a bullshit work line for CCR prisoners that lasted a few months. We’d be allowed out of our cells for a few hours a day—either morning or afternoon—to work in the fields. There were two shifts for each time period—they kept me, Herman, and King on separate shifts. We were fed all our meals locked in our cells.
One day I became ill out in the field. I tried to keep working but when I felt the energy drain out of me I sat down on the ground. I had no strength whatsoever. Sergeant David Ross rode over on his horse and told me to get up and start working. I told him I couldn’t work anymore, I needed to go to the hospital. He told me he wasn’t calling the EMTs, and to get back to work. He rode away. When he came back I told him I needed to see a doctor because I was very sick. He said he wasn’t calling an ambulance and told me to get up. Then everything went white. I must have lain down. Sergeant Ross finally called the EMT. When he arrived he couldn’t get a blood pressure reading so they transported me to the hospital. They treated me at the hospital but later the medical staff denied it, covering for the guard. The doctor said nothing was wrong with me and filed a disciplinary report against me, saying that I was malingering.
I filed a civil suit against Sergeant Ross, the doctor, and the EMT, alleging they’d violated my 8th Amendment right under the Constitution to be free of cruel and unusual punishment, as well as my 14th Amendment rights, because Ross denied me equal treatment and protection under the law by ignoring statutory law, rules, and regulations governing the treatment of prisoners.
During the discovery phase I obtained medical records from the hospital that showed I’d been treated for heatstroke even though the doctor said there was nothing wrong with me. The medical records showed that when they brought me in the doctor examined me, then placed me in an air-conditioned room and gave me water to drink. At trial, I referred to those medical records when the doctor, attempting to cover up for Sergeant Ross, testified that he didn’t treat me. The EMT said the reason he couldn’t get a blood pressure reading from me that morning was that his gauge malfunctioned. On cross-examination, I asked him if he wrote an incident report on the broken blood pressure gauge and he said no, so I asked him if he was working every day with a broken blood pressure gauge and he said no, he turned it in to the hospital. I asked him how he could turn in a broken blood pressure gauge without filing an incident report on it, therefore jeopardizing the lives of prisoners by leaving in service a blood pressure gauge that either malfunctioned or was broken.
In the end, the judge gutted the suit, dismissing the part of the case that had all my evidence against the doctor and the EMT. He said I hadn’t shown “deliberate indifference” on the part of the medical staff, so the jury could not take under consideration all of the medical proof that showed a cover-up. The only part of the suit the jury could consider was whether or not Sergeant Ross deliberately violated my 8th Amendment and 14th Amendment rights. The day of my trial, one of the two prisoner witnesses who worked in the field line with me and saw and heard everything that happened refused to testify. The other had amnesia on the wi
tness stand and therefore gave misleading testimony. Given the fact the judge dismissed the part of the case that contained most of the evidence, all that was left for the jury to consider was my testimony and the testimony of Sergeant Ross. Based upon my experience in dealing with the court system and the fact that during my testimony the state brought up my previous arrests and convictions—the most recent being my conviction for the murder of prison guard Brent Miller—I felt there was no way that the jury would rule in my favor. I was right.
In 1987, I was working on a different case in my cell and asked the library to send me a copy of the Hayes Williams consent decree from 1975 for background research. When I started reading it I realized I’d never seen the full document before. The consent decree we were given in the seventies had been edited; I now saw that agreements in the consent decree that would have benefited CCR prisoners—like having contact visits—had been redacted by officials who didn’t want us to have any knowledge of our rights under the consent decree. I immediately wrote notes to King and Herman and filed an ARP on it. Hilton Butler, the former captain who had gassed us repeatedly in the seventies, was the warden of Angola at that time. He was now forced to grant us contact visits. CCR had never had them before; now CCR prisoners were allowed to have one contact visit a month.
Solitary Page 21