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

Star Trek
to describe our bond:
“Separated but never apart, never touching but always connected.” That line
became ours. Thirty years later I would still sign my letters to him “Never
Apart.” They could put us wherever they wanted, and they did, but they could
never come between us. By the end of his trial we’d grown so much together
in such a short time, as Panthers, as comrades, and as men. I sent Herman a
note, asking him if he needed anything. He wrote back no, he was fine.
Years later we found out that less than a month after Herman’s January

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conviction, on February 15, 1974, Warden C. Murray Henderson started
writing letters to secure an immediate release for Hezekiah Brown.

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Chapter 22
King Is Set Up
Between my trial and Herman’s trial Robert King was wrongly convicted for
the murder of a prisoner on his tier. He was set up for the same reason
Herman and I were set up: to punish him for being militant, aggressive,
outspoken, and resistant—and to give authorities a reason to keep us locked
up. King was a leader, a Panther, an agitator. To prison authorities that meant
he was a “troublemaker.” He was the prisoner on his tier who talked back to
freemen when they spoke to prisoners disrespectfully. He was the one who
refused to go into his cell if he was protesting conditions. He didn’t stop
talking when ordered to “shut up.” He didn’t lower his voice when he was
told he was being “too loud.” He fought back when he was attacked by
security. He spoke to the other prisoners about fighting back against
inhumane conditions. His courage, determination, and strength influenced
other prisoners.
The murder took place on the tier, when they were still allowing prisoners
out on our hour at the same time. Two prisoners on King’s tier, August Kelly
and Grady Brewer, got into a fight. Both prisoners were armed. During the
fight Brewer stabbed Kelly and killed him. There was no doubt that Brewer,
alone, stabbed Kelly and that he did it in self-defense. A dozen witnesses saw
what happened. There was a guard at the end of the tier who immediately
came and saw Brewer with the weapon. Brewer was covered in blood.
Brewer told authorities he stabbed Kelly in self-defense. In spite of that they
charged every prisoner on the tier with murder. They did it to coerce
someone to talk, and it worked; they found a prisoner who would testify
against King. King and Brewer were charged with the murder of August
Kelly and would be tried together. The prisoner who testified against King
(and who would later recant, saying he was in the shower when Kelly was
killed) was moved out of CCR and given trustee status.

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Before King and Brewer’s trial in the summer of 1973, their state-
appointed lawyer met with them only once. Grady Brewer was worried one
meeting wasn’t sufficient for the lawyer to prepare an adequate defense for
him and King. He expressed his fears to the judge, in open court, repeatedly.
The judge told him to stop talking. Brewer kept talking, asking the judge for
a new lawyer. The judge finally told him if he talked one more time he would
be gagged. Brewer spoke out again and he was bound and gagged. So was
King, who hadn’t said a word. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs.
Duct tape was put across their mouths. They were forced to sit like this
throughout their trial. Due to the lying inmate’s testimony that had been
coerced by authorities, King was found guilty along with Brewer. They were
sentenced to life in prison. King and Brewer were sent back to CCR and, for
a while, King was put on my tier.
In 1974, under the direction of Elayn Hunt, the first female director of the
Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections—and based on the
bill written by Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor—Angola finally banned the use of
inmate guards and integrated the prison. The inmate guards were moved to an
isolated camp away from the rest of the prison for their own protection and
stayed there until they were released or died. When they integrated CCR they
took the white inmates from their tier and put them on different formerly all-
black tiers. They selected two white men to live on D tier, where I was. One
of them, a white supremacist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, refused to be
put on a tier with black prisoners, saying he’d rather go to the dungeon, and
that’s where they put him. They replaced him with another white prisoner.
One of the white prisoners, named Pelts, was put next to me.
There was no problem whatsoever integrating D tier. I talked to both of
the men about how we ran the tier collectively, as a group. I told them about
the rules of conduct we established. I said it doesn’t matter if you’re white or
black, we just want everyone to follow the rules and be respectful to one
another. Pelts and I became friends. He didn’t have any family who visited
and had no money. I always remembered him when I ordered from the
commissary and if he needed something I got it for him. He loved ice cream.
One day I received a new radio from my brother-in-law and I gave Pelts my
old radio. He told me nobody had ever done anything so kind for him before.
The next day we were standing at the bars talking and he thanked me
again. I said, “No problem, man, I’m glad you can enjoy it.” We both turned

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back into our cells and the next thing I heard was the prisoner on the other
side of Pelts, a man we called Shelby, hollering down the tier, “Get the
freeman, get the freeman.” I grabbed my mirror and went to the bars. I could
hear a gasping, strangled breathing and angled my mirror so I could see into
Pelts’s cell. He was on his hands and knees between the toilet and the bunk,
struggling to breathe. His face was bright red. There was a huge vein as wide
as a finger popping out from his neck. He appeared to be frozen but kept
trying to raise his head. He raised his eyes and met mine in the mirror. “Hold
on, man,” I told him. “Help is coming, Pelts, they’re coming. Hold on.” In his
eyes, I felt he was saying, 
If I can just raise my head, I’ll be OK. 
I never saw
a human being struggle so hard to do something and not be able to do it. He
collapsed onto the floor and died from a massive heart attack. It’s the first
time somebody I had a friendship with died. It shook me up. I put the pain of
it in the back of my mind to a place where it didn’t affect me. It was all I
could do.
At some point between 1974 and 1975 a warden was summoned by a protest
on King’s tier and on his way out he looked around and said to the sergeant,
“Where the hell are the televisions? Get some goddam televisions in here!”
Television was the one thing we never fought for. They installed the TVs on
the walls across from the cells on every tier in CCR; one for every five cells
at first. (Later there was a TV for every three cells.) On weekdays, the TVs
went on at six a.m. and went off at midnight; on weekends or holidays they
stayed on all night.
After we got the TVs, they stopped letting us all out of our cells on the
same hour. For a while they allowed three prisoners out on the same hour, but
three prisoners could still be too powerful when they refused to return to their
cells or resisted other orders, so they changed the rule and only one of us was
allowed out at a time. From then on, we were each let out of our cells on a
different hour, staggered throughout the day. The TVs caused a lot of
disunity on the tier; prisoners started liking different programs and then
fought over which programs to watch.
In 1974 the Louisiana Supreme Court reversed King’s conviction on the
grounds that his trial judge had “abused his discretion” by allowing King and
Brewer to be bound and gagged during the trial. King was retried in 1975. At
his second trial he wasn’t gagged, but he was bound at the defense table and
forced to wear a prison jumpsuit. At the trial, Grady Brewer testified that he

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alone killed August Kelly, in self-defense, and the state’s previous “witness”
against King refused to testify against him at all. In spite of that, King was
convicted a second time. He was sentenced to natural life and returned to
CCR.

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