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

Chapter 17
CCR
The next day freemen came to the shower and put shackles on my ankles. My
wrists were handcuffed to my waist by a leather strap. These restraints would
become standard for me for decades to come. They walked me to a car and I
got in. A captain next to me started elbowing me in my chest, face, and ribs.
They drove me to a building just inside the front gate that housed the
Reception Center and Death Row. Inside was a cellblock called Closed Cell
Restricted, or CCR: another name for solitary confinement. In the stairwell
they beat me viciously. I couldn’t fight back or defend myself because of the
restraints. I tried not to fall so they couldn’t kick me, but they tripped me.
One of them kicked me in the eye. They grabbed me and dragged me up the
stairs, still punching and kicking me. They took me to one of the tiers in
CCR. I later found out this was B tier. They opened the security gate leading
onto the tier and took me to cell 15. They put me inside and continued to
punch and kick me. When they left, they closed the door and told me to come
to the bars. I stepped to the bars and held my handcuffed hands up so they
could uncuff them. They removed all the restraints through the bars.
Inside the cell there was a bare bunk attached to a wall on the left, a
ceramic toilet and sink attached to the back wall, and a small metal table and
bench attached to the wall on the right side of the cell. There was no mattress
or blanket. I started to check myself to see what injuries I had. My body was
badly bruised from being beaten but I was still able to move around the cell
on my own. I walked to shake off the pain. The cell was nine feet long and
six feet wide. I could take four or five steps up and back the length of the cell.
When I heard the security door open at the end of the tier I stood at the bars
and listened, trying to recognize voices.
I called down the tier to ask the prisoners their names when security left
the tier. They called back. I didn’t know them. In the late afternoon, the

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guards brought Herman in and put him in the cell next to me. He had been
beaten badly in the dungeon and in the stairwell of CCR. I couldn’t see him
but we stood at our bars next to each other and talked. Herman used to live in
the Pine 1 dorm and knew Brent Miller. That morning he had left Pine 3,
where he lived now, went to breakfast, and was at his job in the tag plant
when they were all pulled out to be questioned. He said multiple people must
have seen him at breakfast and at the tag plant that morning. We talked about
how we could let our families and party members know what happened to us.
We both thought that the Black Panther Party would save us and there would
be a movement to free us. I thought there would be mass protests in the street.
“The people will rise up and not let us be railroaded,” Herman said. That’s
how naive we were. (We didn’t know it, but by that time the FBI’s
COINTELPRO, working with other federal agencies, local police,
prosecutors, and the judicial system, had pretty much gutted the party. There
was still a Black Panther newspaper and die-hard members around the
country, including in New Orleans, but the infrastructure and unity of the