Former Panther in Solitary for 41 Years

Herman Wallace

1941—2013

Herman Wallace succumbed to liver cancer on the morning of October 4, nine days shy of his 72nd birthday. A Black Panther who organized fellow prison inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, known as “the bloodiest prison in the South,” Wallace had been free for just three days after over four decades in solitary confinement.

Along with fellow Panthers Albert Woodfox and Robert King, Wallace fought against the racist segregation and barbaric abuses rampant at Angola. When a white prison guard was fatally stabbed inside the prison in 1972, Wallace and Woodfox were targeted for their political activism and framed up for the killing. King was also held in solitary for 29 years, falsely charged and convicted of the murder of a fellow inmate. Each of these men, who came to be known as the Angola Three, was convicted by all-white juries.

Robert King was released in 2001 after his conviction was overturned. But James “Buddy” Caldwell, Louisiana’s state attorney general and ambitious Democrat-turned-Republican, went on to obsessively work to block every judicial overturn of the convictions of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Woodfox remains locked up in solitary to this day despite having his conviction overturned by a federal judge in 2013—the third time a court has overturned the conviction—because Caldwell has again appealed his release.

A defiant Wallace made a statement before his death declaring: “I want the world to know that I am an innocent man and that Albert Woodfox is innocent as well.... The state may have stolen my life, but my spirit will continue to struggle along with Albert and the many comrades that have joined us along the way here in the belly of the beast.” In an act both sadistic and vindictive, the state of Louisiana responded to the court order releasing Wallace by indicting him again the day before his death.

This outrage is similar to what the government is doing to 74-year-old Lynne Stewart, an outspoken leftist attorney with a history of defending radicals, black militants and the poor who remains imprisoned despite being terminally ill with Stage IV breast cancer. Convicted in a 2005 “war on terror” show trial for representing Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in court, Stewart has been denied medical release despite an outpouring of appeals on her behalf. All opponents of racial oppression and prison torture must demand: Free Albert Woodfox and Lynne Stewart now!

A statement by angola3.org at the time of Wallace’s death read: “Herman Wallace’s early life in New Orleans during the heyday of an unforgiving and unjust Jim Crow south often found him on the wrong side of the law and eventually he was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for armed robbery.” Wallace had landed in a hellhole of massive proportions. Angola was a former slave plantation named for the Portuguese colony in Africa where slaves had been captured. The land was purchased by a former Confederate officer in 1880. Using the murderously cruel convict lease system, the owner housed inmates in what used to be slave quarters.

As recently as the 1970s, Angola’s all-white corrections officers were called “freemen” and lived with their families on prison grounds, with inmate servants called “house boys.” According to Robert King’s autobiography, From the Bottom of the Heap (2008), prison guards stripped prisoners, shaved their heads and made them run a gauntlet of bats and clubs; incoming prisoners were sold as sex slaves.

At Angola—the largest maximum security prison in the country—some 85 to 90 percent of those imprisoned die within its walls. It is run by an evangelical zealot, Warden Burl Cain, who believes, literally, that the only way out of the place should be through redemption by Jesus. Grotesquely, Angola has become a popular stop for Christian fundamentalist tour groups. Mother Jones (23 March) reported: “In a 2008 deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, ‘Let’s just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller [the slain guard].’ Cain responded, ‘Okay, I would still keep him in CCR [solitary].... I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism’.”

It took remarkable courage for the Angola Three to “practice Black Pantherism” in their patch of hell, establishing the only recognized prison chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the nation. In a radio commentary released on October 12 to coincide with Wallace’s memorial service in New Orleans, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a leading BPP member in his youth, said: “The late L.A. BPP Deputy Minister of Defense, Geronimo Ji-Jaga (Pratt) once called them the most courageous Panthers of them all, for daring to organize in the heart of Angola.”

Of his own nightmare and his struggle, Robert King told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in a February interview: “A lot of people that end up in solitary confinement also end up on the psychiatric ward in Angola or some other institution.” As an article in Slate (7 October) noted, the U.S. invented systematic solitary confinement. Referring to the 1820s, the article remarked: “At the time, the system was considered extraordinarily progressive, given that it did not involve mutilating or executing prisoners for their crimes. It was also quite ineffective, as isolated prisoners tended to go insane.” Wallace, along with King and Woodfox, filed a civil suit seeking to abolish long-term solitary confinement. The suit is still being pursued following Wallace’s death.

The Angola Three collectively spent over 100 years in solitary, held in six-by-nine-by-twelve-foot cells for at least 23 hours a day. But they refused to be bowed. These men were motivated by revolutionary struggle as they understood it. Their persecution speaks to the capitalist rulers’ burning hatred for the Black Panther Party, which represented the best of a generation of black militants. The Panthers were targeted for systematic extermination: In the 1960s-early ’70s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program gunned down 38 Panthers, while hundreds more were imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

As revolutionary Marxists, we never shared the Panthers’ black nationalist program. At the same time, we insisted that it was the duty of the workers movement to defend the Black Panther Party against vicious state repression. Herman Wallace’s story and that of the Angola Three illuminate the workings of the capitalist justice system in all its hideous, racist reality. Our task is to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will lead the proletariat in sweeping away the entire apparatus of capitalist terror through the conquest of state power, finally uprooting black oppression and the system of wage slavery. Befitting their determined struggle, the Angola Three will be honored in a workers America.