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

party in the parish prison and participated in prisoner actions there. “We
destroyed every commode, sink, and face bowl we could,” he said.
“Mattresses were stacked at the front of the tiers and set afire to prevent
prison authorities from physically attacking us.” After two days of a siege,
the sheriff said he would negotiate with the prisoners without reprisal and
gave the prisoners the opportunity to voice their grievances to CBS news
cameramen he allowed into the prison. The sheriff told the reporters the
problem was overcrowding and lack of funding, pointing out that there were
four and five men in cells built for two. This sheriff kept his promise and
didn’t take vengeance on the prisoners who protested.
(Unbeknownst to me until later, Herman was also in the parish prison
when my tier took a hostage in order to speak to Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor;
his tier also nonviolently took a hostage. Both hostages were released
unharmed after prisoners talked to Representative Taylor.) Joining the Black
Panther Party was the defining moment in Herman’s life. Forty-one years

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later Herman was as devoted to the principles of the party as he was in the
beginning. He proudly wore the iconic image of the black panther, created by
artist and former Panther Emory Douglas, hand-drawn on his hat and
clothing, even though he would often get a write-up for it.
Robert King grew up in New Orleans and Gonzales, Louisiana. His backyard
in Algiers, the second-oldest neighborhood in New Orleans, and the only one
on the western bank of the Mississippi River, actually bordered Malik
Rahim’s backyard for a while when they were children. King’s grandmother
raised him in a close-knit but impoverished family. She died when he was 15.
Shortly afterward, King and two friends were walking down the street when
they were stopped by police because they “fit the description” of men who
had robbed a gas station. King was sent to the State Industrial School for
Colored Youth, a state reformatory in Scotlandville, 13 miles north of Baton
Rouge. After that he had several minimum-paying jobs but lost many of them
due to being picked up on “vagrancy laws.”
Police used vagrancy laws and “loitering” charges to meet their weekly
quota of arrests, picking up black men and charging them with having “no
visible means of support,” whether or not those men had jobs or even owned
their own businesses. A lot of black men in the sixties had small jobs that
supported them but weren’t official “businesses.”; they’d walk the
neighborhoods, sharpening knives or selling vegetables, for example.
Ragmen came through with old shirts or pants. On the corner they’d yell,
“Raaag maan,” and people would come out and pay a dollar for this, two
dollars for that. A lot of people made new clothes with these used clothes.
The man selling the clothing and rags had no proof of employment.
Every black man and boy knew what it was like to be picked up by police
for no reason. You could be hanging out on the corner with your friends
when police on patrol would stop, get out of the car, and tell everybody to get
up against the wall. They’d pat everybody down, ask what everyone was
doing, and tell everybody to show proof of work. Then they’d get on their
walkie-talkies and call the paddy wagon, charge anyone without a paycheck
stub or other “proof” with loitering or vagrancy, and put them in jail. Police
could legally hold the men for three days on vagrancy charges. After being in
jail for three days men lost whatever jobs or means of support they had and
had to start over.
Like most black men in those days King was forced to choose between

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providing for himself and his family or watching them starve to death. This
was not a difficult choice to make. At 18 he was sent to Angola for the first
time on a robbery charge and then he came back again when he was 23,
which was when I first met him. Back on the street he picked up boxing and
became a semiprofessional fighter; this is the time when he was known as
Speedy King. At 28, King was arrested and charged with an armed robbery
he did not commit. At his trial, his codefendant testified that he only picked
King out of a mug shot lineup because he’d been tortured by police into
making a false statement. In spite of that testimony King was convicted and
sentenced to 35 years. He met members of the Black Panther Party and joined
the party in Orleans Parish Prison. Later he’d say it was in prison that “things
began to open themselves up to me regarding injustices. I felt it was a hard
pill to swallow. I felt under slavery.”
I trusted Herman and King implicitly. With other men in prison, there
were only degrees of trust, depending on the person’s character, or lack of
character. It was something I had to evaluate as I interacted with each person.
When I was with Herman or King it was different. My defenses were down. I
trusted them not to do anything that would hurt me physically or emotionally.
I trusted them to have my back, no matter what. I never had to worry if King
was going to be there, if Hooks was going to be there. No matter what I did
they would be there for me. They trusted me in the same way.
This kind of trust is very rare behind bars. In prison, you have to question
everything around you. Prison teaches you that most acts of kindness have
strings attached; something in return will be expected at some point and what
is expected might be conduct you find appalling, a violation of your moral
code and system of values. To preserve your dignity and honor, you learn to
reject what people offer. Because Herman, King, and I trusted one another,
there was kindness in our lives.
Nelson Mandela wrote that the challenge for every prisoner is “how to
survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to
conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs.”
 
He wrote about how being kept
with his comrades on Robben Island helped him survive. “For together our
determination was reinforced,” he wrote. “We supported each other and
gained strength from each other.” So it was for me, Herman, and King. We
supported each other and gained strength from one another. Whenever I
thought I could not take another step for myself, I found the strength to take
that step for Herman and King. We had to be strong so we could keep our

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minds and spirits free while being locked up 23 hours a day. We had to be
strong so we could show other prisoners that in the fight against oppression,
there is no letting up, no backing down. We wanted the other prisoners to see
that our struggle for dignity was more important than our own safety and our
own freedom and our own lives. We had to be strong so the prison
administration could not break us.
I loved and cherished their friendship. I didn’t know how so much loyalty
and devotion could exist between three men. We had been through so much
brutality, so much pain and suffering that we had every right to be hard,
bitter, and hateful toward almost everyone and everything in life. But instead,
we did not allow prison to shape us. We defined ourselves.
We didn’t agree on everything. We could argue like cats and dogs. It was
never personal though. We were three strong men who had different positions
on some political issues and we’d get into it sometimes. But even in anger
and frustration we held each other in the highest possible regard. I never
doubted they were honest in their ideas and feelings and analysis. We listened
to one another. We each saw great character in the others. Herman and King
would rather lose their lives than betray me and I felt the same way about
both of them. We never lost the faith.
Herman wrote a poem that, for me, expresses who we had to be to
survive. We were men of steel.