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

Little Red
Book
with me wherever I went. “Do not steal,” I told the men, reading, “not
even a needle or a piece of thread from the people.” Some of the guys who
knew me from before watched me, thinking I was still in the game, trying to
figure out what my game was. Other prisoners felt threatened and avoided
me. I spoke to the men about what the Panthers taught me. “In prison,” I said,
“first they reduce your value as a human being, then they break your will.” I
told them they had to reeducate themselves, that we had to come together and
work together. I told them they had to stop raping and stabbing each other.
“They want you to fight among yourselves so you don’t resist,” I said. “You
deserve better than what you’re getting.”
It took me a while to catch my stride and learn how to talk to the
prisoners. Through trial and error, I learned that the best way to reach each
man on the yard was at his own level of consciousness. I started to talk a lot
about the food and how bad it was. I learned that asking questions was more
effective than lecturing, so I asked a lot of questions. “How do you feel not
having rain clothes when you have to work out in the field?” I asked. “How
do you feel eating baloney over and over when we see trucks bringing in
chicken and beef meant for us?” “How do you feel about being paid two
cents an hour?”
At the same time, I was still integrating my newly learned code of
conduct into my day-to-day life. I had the idealistic passion of a revolutionary
but at age 24, after five years in and out of four different prisons, I had the
emotional maturity of someone much younger. If a dude did something to me
or threatened me I retaliated. But I was determined to keep going. I kept
coming back to the principles of the party. Over time I realized that my own
personal conduct—the way I behaved—was almost more important than
anything I said. The Panthers taught me you don’t fight fire with fire, you
fight fire with water. I came to understand that meant if a prisoner challenged
or threatened me, I had to find the opposite within myself to deal with that
individual and use the teachings and values of the Black Panther Party rather
than resort to violence.
I worked in the dining hall, a huge building that held the kitchen, pantries,
and freezers where food was stored; a bakery; a butcher shop where inmates

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got vocational training; an empty room in the back for workers to hang out
between shifts; and, at the very back, the scullery. There was always one
huge tub of water boiling in the scullery. We wore rubber boots that went to
our knees, rubber aprons that fell from our necks to the tops of the boots, and
insulated rubber gloves to work around the scalding water. We lowered the
pots and pans to soak in the boiling water first, using broken-off broomstick
handles, then lifted them out the same way, tossing them into a corner where
we rinsed them with a power hose. After they were hosed down we set them
on drying racks. Usually there were three of us working and we took turns at
the tub of boiling water; sometimes there were only two of us. We had to
work fast but I was careful; I never got burned.
In most of the prison, blacks and whites did not work together. But jobs
in the dining hall were mixed. The white prisoners had the “better” jobs,
cooking and working as clerks in the pantry; the blacks did the cleaning and
serving at the steam table. (White prisoners had their own steam table and
were served by white prisoners.) Most of us worked 16-hour days, every
other day, and between meals we were allowed to sign out and go back to our
dorms or to the yard, or we could stay in the back room. It was different for
the black dining hall workers in the front, who served the food, wiped up the
floor and tables while prisoners ate, and poured Kool-Aid and other drinks.
They were forced to work 16-hour days six or seven days a week, and
between meals they weren’t allowed to leave. After a couple of weeks
working in the scullery I started to stay in the dining hall between my shifts
to talk to the workers there. “What you’re doing is slave labor,” I told them.
“There shouldn’t be different rules for you than the rest of us.” I suggested
they put together a petition and send it to the warden.
In the back room of the kitchen I spoke to white prisoners as well. “You
have a better job for being white and that benefits you individually, but as a
group you still suffer,” I said. “We are all victims of the same corruption, the
same brutality, the same beatings, the same sexual slavery that is allowed by
the administration. We all experience the same degrading inhumane
conditions in the dungeon. The same lack of medical care. All of us,” I told
them, “white and black prisoners, suffer for the same reasons.” They listened
to what I had to say. I felt I was making progress.
In August, I got into a beef with a freeman. I don’t remember what it was
about but I was put in the Red Hat for a few days. Outside the temperature
was in the 90s. Inside the three-by-six-foot cell in the Red Hat, it felt double

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that. I sat on the concrete bunk. I stood and sweat ran off me from thinking.
Sometimes I felt cheated, knowing that being born black pretty much
determined where I’d wind up. I thought it was sad that I had to come to
prison to find out there were great African Americans in this country and in
this world, and to find role models that I should have had available to me in
school. What helped me was that I knew I wasn’t a criminal anymore. I
considered myself to be a political prisoner. Not in the sense that I was
incarcerated for a political crime, but because of a political system that had
failed me terribly as an individual and a citizen in this country. This
crystallized within me in the Red Hat.
I remember the day I was released, August 21, 1971, because it was the
day George Jackson, field marshal for the Black Panther Party, was shot and
killed by guards at Soledad prison in California. After being locked in the
stinking coffin of the Red Hat for three days I didn’t think my resolve to
uphold the principles of the Black Panther Party could get any stronger.
When I learned of George’s murder, my commitment only grew.
A few weeks later I was listening to the radio when I heard that prisoners at
Attica penitentiary in upstate New York had taken 42 prison employees as
hostages. Conditions at Attica had been notoriously bad for years. I heard
rumors about it when I was in the Tombs. Prisoners were given a bucket of
water and a filthy towel once a week instead of a shower; they didn’t have
soap, medical care, or adequate food; and there was severe overcrowding. I
tried to find news about the riot on the radio but deep in Louisiana there
wasn’t any. Days later we found out that New York governor Nelson
Rockefeller ordered prison guards and various police departments to take
back Attica. We learned later that prisoners at Attica were lied to by prison
officials, who said that a negotiation would take place to end the riot and
hostage situation. As helicopters hovered over the prison yard on the morning
of September 13, prisoners were expecting members of the Department of
Correction and the governor’s office to land in the yard to talk to them.
Instead, prisoners were ordered to put their hands on their heads and lie down
on the ground. Military-grade tear gas was released by the helicopters onto
the yard. Without any warning, more than 500 armed uniformed state
troopers, along with hundreds of national guardsmen, sheriffs, and police
from several upstate New York counties, stormed the yard and fired
indiscriminately, hitting unarmed prisoners and hostages alike. Prisoners who

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had formed a protective circle around the hostages were gunned down. Ten
hostages and 29 inmates were killed.
None of the hostages were killed by prisoners, but on the day of the
massacre officials reported prisoners had slit the throats of four hostages and
castrated another one. One official told reporters outside the prison that he
“saw” the castrated hostage “with my own eyes.” The following day the local
medical examiner, Dr. John Edland, came forward with the truth: The ten
dead hostages were killed by police bullets. No hostages had their throats slit.
No hostage was castrated. The governor ordered two other autopsies, which
corroborated Edland’s findings. In exchange for his integrity and bravery,
Edland and his family received death threats. He was called a traitor and a
“nigger lover.”
We wouldn’t know any of this until much later but based on my
experience as a prisoner I knew that what happened at Attica did not go down
the way it was being reported on the radio at the time. After the slaughter in
the prison yard, the barbaric treatment of the prisoners who were left alive
began. I was frustrated and angry and felt so much pain for the men
slaughtered and brutalized at Attica. But even as I was horrified that these
men, these human beings, were suffering such brutality at the hands of New
York State authorities, I kept coming back to one thought: the prisoners at
Attica had come together. The lines that usually divided prisoners—racial,
religious, economic—seemed to have disappeared for 1,280 men in that
prison yard. It validated what I learned from the Black Panther Party. The
need to be treated with human dignity touches everyone. And the key to
resistance is unity.

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