It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Times-
Picayune
. “As a result, we had a guard killed last week.” In this same
interview Wade called Representative Taylor a “phony” and said, “She’s
interested in appearing on television and stirring up a lot of trouble.” When
she visited the prison, he said, “they [referring to black prisoners] go wild.”
Representative Taylor never stopped pressing for reform. Her courage, as a
black woman living and working in the racist “white man’s world” of the
South in the sixties and seventies, was remarkable and still inspires me.
That summer we were arraigned for the murder of Brent Miller. Two freemen
came to my cell and put me in full restraints and walked me to a van parked
just outside the gate. Herman, Gilbert Montegut, and Chester Jackson were
already in the van. I got in and we were sitting there with the door open when
Brent Miller’s brother Nix drove up in a pickup truck and skidded to a stop
alongside us. He jumped out swaying drunk and waving a shotgun, screaming
at us, “Where are those sons of bitches? I’ll kill you niggers.” He took aim at
our heads. I didn’t move. None of us did. The freemen standing around the
car were yelling at Nix. “C’mon Nix, you don’t want to do this,” one said.
“Put the gun down.” Another yelled, “They’re going to die in the electric
chair. If you kill them you’ll go to prison.” I was staring straight down the
long road that leads to the front gate of Angola when I saw a car coming
toward us with a light flashing on top. It was Hilton Butler, the captain who
fired the gas grenades on our tier. He drove up to the front gate and jumped

---

out of his car, cigar in his mouth, full head of red hair. “Nix, Nix, you son of
a bitch,” he yelled. “Didn’t I tell you don’t bring your fucking ass up here and
get in trouble. Get yourself home.” He grabbed the gun out of Nix’s hands.
“They killed my brother,” Nix yelled. Butler held the gun with one hand
straight out from his side and said, “You get your fucking ass home before
you wind up in jail.” Nix got in his truck and drove off, then turned the truck
around and came back cursing us out his window. A few minutes later he
peeled off. None of us said anything. They closed the van doors and took us
to a courthouse in St. Francisville where the charges against us were read and
we were assigned a public defender.
Herman, King, and I had so many battles with the administration during the
seventies that they run together in my mind now. Any one of our protests
could have gone on for a few hours or a whole day, and there were some that
lasted day and night. I broke at least three or four toilets in CCR over the
years before they switched to stainless steel commodes. Somewhere around
this time they were gassing us so often a captain who had been summoned to
King’s tier by a prisoner protest asked him, “What do you all want? I had so
much gas on me last night my wife wouldn’t let me get in bed.”
In adjusting to day-to-day life in the cell as the months and years passed,
every aspect of survival was a battle. Being able to read in that environment,
with the noise. Recognizing the signs of when a prisoner was going to act
out, when I would need to defend myself or stop something from happening
before it happened. Doing calisthenics every day within the confines of the
cell. I became living proof that we can survive the worst to change ourselves
and our world, no matter where we are. Behind our resistance on the tiers,
Herman, King, and I knew that only education would save us. It still amazes
me that the three of us came to the same conclusion sitting in our cells on
different tiers. Education and looking outward, beyond the prison. If we were
going to avoid becoming vegetables, we had to keep learning and keep our
minds focused on the world outside Angola.
Sometimes a freeman would leave a newspaper between the bars of the
first cell on my tier and it would be passed down the tier for anyone who
wanted to look at it. Every time there was a newspaper on the tier I read it.
When we were finally allowed to have radios and newspapers, I listened to a
lot of news. I subscribed to the newspaper. All three of us did, and we had
heated debates and discussions about what was going on in the world, played

---

out in notes and letters we passed, or sometimes we checked ourselves into
the dungeon so we could talk. In those days, a prisoner could tell the tier
sergeant his head was hurting or he was having problems and needed to be
alone to think and he could be put in the dungeon. They only had one
dungeon in the building that housed CCR and Death Row. There were two
big cells. They wouldn’t put the three of us in the same cell but two of us
would be in one and the third in another. We could spend time together and
had many conversations and debates in the dungeon.
During this time, we started teaching ourselves the law. We knew getting the
shit kicked out of us over and over wasn’t changing anything. We would
never be able to match them physically. There was a prisoner on D tier
named Arthur Mitchell who had a lot of success filing lawsuits against the
prison. For that reason, the guards didn’t fuck with him. I borrowed a
dictionary of law terms from Arthur and started checking law books out of
the prison library.
I read case law, day and night, standing, sitting, or lying in my bunk.
Some days I sat on the floor of my cell with four or five law books open
around me. I heard through the prison grapevine that a white prisoner on
Death Row named Big John was real good at the law and I wrote him a letter
about my case. I knew I had an issue: the grand jury that indicted me in West
Feliciana Parish, where Angola is located, had only been composed of white
men. Women and blacks were excluded. That was a constitutional violation.
Big John helped me in letters back and forth between us, carried by trustees
or sometimes by an inmate counsel who visited both of our tiers. I filed a
motion in the court pro se, without a lawyer, to quash the indictment because
the grand jury had excluded women and blacks. Then I forgot about it.
Herman, King, and I were fighting for our lives in CCR. I turned my thoughts
away from my unconstitutional indictment, and even my upcoming trial.
Both seemed far off. I wasn’t experienced enough in the law to know better. I
was focused on learning how to use the law to get relief in our day-to-day
lives. Years later I would discover the court never ruled on that motion.
Before we could file a lawsuit related to prison conditions, we had to
show that we attempted to resolve any issue we had by filing what was called
a “petition of grievance” with the warden. If we didn’t get a response in two
weeks, we could file a lawsuit in the courts. In 1985, this process became
much more complicated. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and

---

Corrections installed a new grievance procedure, called the administrative
remedy procedure (ARP), which required a prisoner who was reporting abuse
or any issue to file the complaint, first with the officer over the camp or
cellblock where he was living. If the issue was denied, he had to file it with
the warden. If the warden denied it, he had to file with the Louisiana
Department of Public Safety and Corrections. If he didn’t get relief there, he
had to file what was called a “petition of review” in state court. If the petition
of review was denied, he could then file his lawsuit in state court. If a
prisoner alleged a constitutional violation, however—for example, cruel and
unusual punishment or a lack of equal treatment or of due process under the
law, violating the 8th or 14th Amendment—he could skip filing the petition
of review in state court and go directly to federal court. But he’d still have to
go through the ARP process within the prison system. By instituting this new
procedure, at the urging of the Department of Corrections and legislators,
officials delayed the time it took for a prisoner to be heard in court by six
months to a year. It was a technique to slow down the process and discourage
prisoners from filing civil suits against abuse and poor conditions.
For more than 100 years state and federal judges refused to adjudicate
prisoner abuses at all in their courts because legally, according to the 13th
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are slaves of the state. The
same amendment that abolished slavery in 1865—“Neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States”—includes the
clause “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted.” Judges used this clause as an excuse not to deal with
violations and abuses against prisoners. They even had a name for it, calling
it the “hands-off doctrine.” In the 1960s the Supreme Court started making
rulings that gave prisoners constitutional rights, opening the doors for
prisoners to sue state officials in federal court.
It took me a while to understand the legal terms and language used in the
courts and how the court system worked. If I came across a passage I didn’t
understand in the law books, I read it over and over again. I’d read a single
passage 40 or 50 times until I was somehow able to absorb the meaning.
King filed on not being allowed to go outside for exercise—not having
yard time—under the 14th Amendment, equal protection, pointing out that
Death Row was allowed yard, and we were housed under the same
conditions. If it wasn’t a “threat to security” for Death Row prisoners to have
yard, he pointed out, it shouldn’t be a threat for CCR prisoners to have yard.

---

Herman and I filed on other conditions that we felt violated our constitutional
right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. Our first lawsuits in the
early seventies—and all Angola prisoner lawsuits at that time—were grouped
under what everybody called the Hayes Williams suit: the lawsuit suit filed
by Hayes Williams and three other prisoners in 1971, which outlined how
conditions at Angola violated prisoners’ 8th and 14th Amendment rights
regarding cruel and unusual punishment and due process. In June 1975, after
the trial for the Hayes Williams lawsuit, Judge E. Gordon West of federal
district court found Angola guilty of violating prisoners’ 8th and 14th
Amendment rights. He wrote that conditions at Angola “would shock the
conscience of any right thinking person” and placed the prison under federal
control. The district court ordered Angola and the Louisiana Department of
Public Safety and Corrections to improve conditions and decentralize prisons.
It would take two years before an agreement, called a consent decree, would
be established with new rules and guidelines under which Angola
administrators would be forced to operate.
The first lawsuit I won, around 1974 or 1975, was against the Department of
Corrections rule that didn’t allow prisoners to wear any items of clothing
with brand names or logos. At that time, you couldn’t find sweatpants
without logos. It put an unnecessary burden on prisoners. I filed a petition of
grievance stating we should be able to wear sweatpants with logos, which the
warden denied. I asked the court to review that decision and won. In the
ruling, the judge told officials how stupid the rule was; not in those words.
She said it didn’t make any sense because it was almost impossible to buy
any item of clothing that didn’t have some logo or brand name on it.
Between filing grievances, going to court, and our constant protests on
the tier to be treated humanely, we gradually gained privileges that had not
been allowed in CCR before. Over time we were granted permission to have
individual fans, radios, and books in our cells. We could subscribe to
newspapers and magazines. In the midseventies, we got screens on the
windows that kept the mosquitos out. Sometime in the late seventies,
Herman, King, and I were actually allowed to share a record player. We
could only pass it between tiers when a decent captain was on duty; he would
have to give the OK for a guard to carry it between our tiers. Each of us
would use it for a few days, then pass it down to prisoners on our tier who
wanted to use it. To move it from cell to cell on the tier we left it outside our

---

door at the end of our hour and a freeman or orderly would move it to the
next prisoner’s cell door. Eventually we were allowed to have cassette
players in our cells. Any or all of these privileges could be taken away at any
time, and they were. Then we’d protest again.

---