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

10-Point Program of the Black Panther Party
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our
Black Community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and
oppressed communities.

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4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this
decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our
true history and our role in the present-day society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER
of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and
city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a
jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as
defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.

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Chapter 12
NYC Prison Riot
The Panthers were moved off my tier after a few months. As the steaming-
hot summer progressed in New York City, life in the overcrowded Tombs
remained horrible. The food was unsanitary. The tiers were filthy. We
couldn’t get towels or other supplies; prisoners had to hire lawyers to receive
medical care. Tensions were rising. There were 14,000 prisoners incarcerated
in New York City in 1970. More than half had not even been found guilty of
a crime—they were waiting for trials or to see a judge. The Tombs was built
for 900 prisoners; at least 1,500 of us were being held there. The cells were
so crowded that during mealtimes, prisoners had to take turns sitting at the
table in their cell or alternate sitting on the floor or standing while eating. We
were all aware that the prison was on the brink. The word through the
grapevine that summer was that a protest was coming.
The protest broke in August. It started above us, on the ninth floor. We
heard loud banging, then all of sudden the gigantic glass block windows from
above us exploded like bombs on the ground. The men upstairs hollered
down to us through the pipe chase, telling us how to push the windows out on
our floor: rip off the tabletops in the day room, and use the table legs as
battering rams to knock out the window blocks. Prisoners stood in the opened
windows, calling down to spectators. Some made signs on sheets and hung
them outside the prison. On my tier, prisoners took strips of sheets and
knotted them around the bars of the locked gates at the front of the cellblock
so security officers couldn’t open the gates with their keys. We piled up
mattresses against the gates. It would take only seconds for those officers to
break through when they wanted to, but it seemed like a good idea at the
time. Desperation will make men do irrational things. Prison officials
eventually agreed to meet with prisoner representatives from each floor in the
library. I went with two or three other men from the eighth floor.

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The prisoners from the ninth floor took the lead and read a list of
grievances they’d written. “We the inmates on the ninth floor of Tombs city
prison, Manhattan, New York, submit this petition of grievances and we
solicit your attention in this matter,” one prisoner read. He went on, noting
prisoners had to wait on average eight months to a year for a trial. Bails were
excessively high. Prisoners weren’t given preliminary—or any—hearings.
They were pressured by the Legal Aid Society, the state-funded agency
representing most prisoners, to make guilty pleas. Prisoners were not given
access to law books from the library. Blankets were dirty, mattresses were
infested with bedbugs, cells built for one were sleeping three. The kitchen
served moldy bread, rotten potatoes, and half-cooked powdered eggs. The
prison was “ridden with body lice, roaches, rats, and mice.” Prisoners had to
wear the clothes they had on when they entered prison for months.
Our most urgent demand, the letter stated, was to end the excessive
violence against prisoners, largely directed against black and Puerto Rican
prisoners, by officers wielding “blackjacks, nightsticks, fist, and feet,” who
beat prisoners to unconsciousness, after which, prison doctors colluded with
officials to write up fake accident reports.
“It is a common practice for an inmate to be singled out,” the prisoner
read, “. . . because he did not hear the officer call his name or because the
officer did not like the way this or that inmate looked or because of the
manner in which the inmate walked or because the officer brings the turmoil
of his own personal problems to work with him, and together with other
officers, beat the defenseless inmate into unconsciousness, often injuring him
for life physically and mentally or both.
“These acts,” he continued, “would not and could not happen without the
knowledge and consent of the Commissioner of Correction, the Assistant
Commissioner of Correction, the Warden of Tombs Prison, the Deputy
Wardens of Tombs Prison, and the Captains of Tombs Prison.” He added,
“We reject all official denials [to the effect] that such things do not happen
here, as we have experienced these sadistic attacks.” It was common
knowledge by every official in that room, and every prisoner, that nothing
goes on in prison without the prison staff being aware of it. As the saying
goes, the prisoner read, “Not one leaf of a tree could turn yellow without the
silent knowledge and consent of the tree itself.”
The prisoners ended their statement asking that there would be no
repercussions of any kind against the inmates who participated in the protest,

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and that the list of prisoner grievances would be released to the press. Not all
prisoners who participated in the protest were beaten after we returned to our
tiers, but the goon squad, a group of five or six corrections officers in vests
and helmets brandishing sticks and bats, went to the ninth floor first. Many
prisoners were sent to other prisons, including me. The document of prisoner
grievances and demands that the prisoners on the ninth floor wrote and read
aloud to prison authorities was not released to the press by the authorities.
I was taken to the Queens House of Detention, which we called New
Queens. Since no actions were taken by officials to improve conditions for
prisoners in August it wasn’t a surprise to any of us when the Tombs erupted
again, two months later. Facilities in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, and in Queens
where I was staying joined in solidarity. This time the protests lasted for
more than a week. Local papers reported that during the uprising 1,400
prisoners had control of 23 hostages. My tier didn’t take hostages but we
barricaded the end of our tier with mattresses and lockers. Our demands
included: no more than two men to a cell, the right to exercise religious
freedom and follow related dietary guidelines, more sanitary conditions,
edible food, adequate medical care, and affordable bail. One of the prisoner
demands was for bail hearings to be held in public, to show people that black
and Puerto Rican prisoners consistently received excessively higher bail for
petty crimes than did white defendants. After eight days riot police stormed
the prisons across the city.
Guards and police retook the city’s jail with brutal force. At New Queens,
there was no way to hold them off. It wasn’t even close. We had a wall of
mattresses and boxes. They had gas guns, shields, bats, and axes. They
sprayed canisters of CS gas onto the tier and chopped through our barricade
and sprayed more tear gas on us. The CS gas, meant to be used outside to
control riots, was blinding inside, burning our eyes, mouths, nostrils, and
lungs and making it almost impossible to breathe. While we were choking
and disoriented they forced us back into the cells on the tier, beating us with
riot sticks and baseball bats.
We were ordered to strip naked in the cells. As we undressed, guards with
ax handles, billy clubs, blackjacks, and bats lined up on either side of the
hallway outside our cells. One by one we were called out by our cell number
and ordered to the day room. As each prisoner was forced into the hall he was
beaten and poked in the genitals with nightsticks; bats and clubs rained down
on him. The men in the first four cells had the shortest distance to go. The

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farther back your cell, the more you got beaten. I was in number 15, the last
cell on the tier. When they got to my cell I cupped my genitals with one hand
and put my other arm over my head and came out running. A couple of
prisoners ahead of me had fallen and the guards were stomping them. I could
see unconscious prisoners being dragged to the day room. I ran over a floor
slippery with blood from busted heads, mouths, and faces. With each running
step my only thought was, “Don’t fall, don’t fall,” over and over. I felt the
blows all over.
I made it to the day room without falling but had been badly beaten. I felt
excruciating pain in my left arm. Blood was pouring from a gaping wound on
the top of my head. In the day room they herded us like animals and forced us
to lie on top of each other while guards made cruel and racist remarks like,
“Put that dick in him, nigger.” Prisoners who refused to lie on the other men
were beaten mercilessly. I didn’t want to be on the bottom of this pile so I ran
and jumped up on top of the stacked bodies. Other prisoners were moaning:
“Lord help me. Don’t let me die. I can’t breathe.” Some of them were
screaming.
The cries of the other prisoners hurt me the most. I was in physical pain
but the greater pain was seeing men break. I understood their agony and
suffering, but in my mind no matter what happens, you don’t cross a certain
line. Crying, begging, calling some of the guards “boss,” saying, “Please
don’t hit me,” “Please, man, have mercy on me,” or “I’m going to be good.”
The things they were saying were so degrading. It was humiliating to me to
see men reduced to that. I was in a lot of pain, but I was determined not to
beg these animals. I was not going to plead. I was not going to ask for
anything. Even while being screamed at, poked with nightsticks, with blood
rushing out of my head, I didn’t say a thing.
While we were being forced to lie in a pile in the day room guards went
into our cells and threw away our property—eyeglasses, photographs, letters.
When they finished trashing our cells we were ordered back onto the
cellblock, where they put five or six men in each cell. There was no room for
all of us to sit and everyone was badly injured. That night was agony. The
next day they took me to Lenox Hill Hospital, where a doctor put a cast on
my fractured arm and stitched up my head. Back at the prison they packed
five of us into single cells again. We stayed like that for about a week.
After four or five days, they came around with peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches. I don’t know how long it was until we had a hot meal. It took a

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long time to heal. To this day I have problems with my hip from being hit
there with a bat. My scalp has a scar where my head was busted. But I never
regretted taking part in the protest.
I was moved back to the Tombs and was sitting in the day room waiting for a
court appearance when a guard told me my lawyer was there to visit me. I
didn’t have a lawyer. When I walked into the room the attorney said,
“Charles?” The lawyer offered me a deal meant for a real Charles Harris who
was locked up somewhere in New York. He told me if I pleaded guilty to a
burglary charge he could get me two to three years on Rikers Island, but I had
to make the plea deal that day. I’d heard prisoners talk about the work crews
at Rikers, and how the crews were brought to work on the streets every day.
If I could get a job in one of these work crews I thought I might be able to
escape. I pleaded guilty. Later that day they took me to Rikers. After I was
processed, they told me my job would be working on a street-cleaning crew
in Brooklyn. I felt hopeful for the first time in months.
That night there was a blizzard. When I woke up the next morning the
windows were white with snow. We weren’t allowed to go outside to our
work details. The next day, more snow. They kept us inside for a week. I was
in the day room when I heard a corrections officer call, “Where is Charles
Harris, aka Albert Woodfox?” My prints had finally come back. They moved
me off the tier and put me in a one-man cell in an empty wing.
At first being segregated from everyone else didn’t bother me. I was too
busy worrying about the possibility of being killed by police when I got back
to New Orleans. I thought they would kill me for escaping. The idea of going
back to Angola also weighed on me. But by this time my level of
consciousness had been raised by the Black Panther Party and I had become
politicized. Things would be different. I didn’t know how, but that’s how I
felt. Now that they knew who I was I could finally write to my mom. I told
her I got caught, that I was in jail. She got somebody to write back to me
once. Before they could ship me back to Angola I had to be tried on the
bogus aggravated robbery charge brought by the bookie. I was sent back to
the Tombs.
In mid-May 1971, I heard on the radio that all 13 of the Panthers of the
Panther 21 who had been on trial, including the Panthers I had met on the
eighth floor, had been exonerated on all counts. It took the jury foreman,
James I. Fox, 20 minutes to read the verdict, “Not guilty,” 156 times. The

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Panthers had told me to agitate. To educate. I started thinking about how to
talk to prisoners about the conditions we were living in.
I was quickly found not guilty at my trial for aggravated robbery because
while I was in jail the Harlem bookie and butcher who set me up had been
arrested for strong-arming and setting up other people the way they did me,
which came out during my trial. I fought extradition back to New Orleans
and lost. In June 1971, I was put on a plane back to New Orleans. On the
outside, nothing had changed from the day I had escaped the courthouse 20
months earlier. I was a black man with a long prison sentence ahead of me.
Inside, however, everything had changed. I had morals, principles, and values
I never had before. Looking out the window of the plane, I saw into the
window of my soul. In the past, I had done wrong. Now I would do right. I
would never be a criminal again.

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