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

Chapter 37
The Crusaders
My trial was scheduled to take place at the end of November 1998. A couple
of months before it was to start, two things happened that would alter the
course of my life. First, a 25-year-old law student named Scott Fleming, who
was volunteering for Critical Resistance—an Oakland-based organization
seeking to abolish the prison-industrial complex—was reading a stack of
letters from prisoners when he got to a letter Herman wrote to the
organization, seeking support for my upcoming trial. Herman told our story,
including how we’d been in solitary confinement for 26 years. He put my
address at Amite in the letter as well as his own. Scott wrote back to both of
us and asked us to call him. He wanted to help.
Second, Malik Rahim, the former Panther who had mentored and
befriended both me and Herman at Orleans Parish Prison, was attending a
Workers World Party event—also, coincidentally, in Oakland—when our
former comrade from CCR, Colonel Nyati Bolt, approached him and told him
my trial was coming up. Until that time Malik thought Herman and I were
free. Malik tracked down my brother and called my lawyer.
Scott assumed we’d have a base of support somewhere in New Orleans,
so while waiting to hear back from us, he called around looking for it. At a
small anarchist bookstore called Crescent Wrench he found a group of
activists who not only didn’t know anything about us but didn’t know anyone
who knew anything about us. But they wanted to know more. Shana Griffin,
Anita Yesho, Brice White, Icky, Brackin Kemp (Firecracker), and others
created flyers about my upcoming trial and posted them around the city. They
started to make arrangements to share transportation so they could attend my
trial.
Malik flew to Louisiana with funds raised by Workers World Party
activist Richard Becker and community organizer Marina Drummer to meet

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with my lawyer Bert Garraway. Garraway told Malik there was no reason for
him, or anyone, to come to my trial—all he had to do was “get ready for a
victory party.” Malik left Garraway’s office, flew back to Oakland, and with
Becker in the Workers World office made 10,000 copies of a flyer about my
case, all of which were distributed at events in the Bay Area the following
week. He spread the word about my trial to activists and former Panthers
throughout the country. (Through Malik’s connections at Pastors for Peace
our story even reached Cuba.) At a Workers World conference in New York
City Malik printed hundreds of postcards featuring a statement from former
attorney general and founder of International Action Center Ramsey Clark
expressing concern about the fairness of my trial, stating that it would be
monitored. While my jury was being selected hundreds of these cards were
mailed to the offices of Judge Bruce Bennett and the district attorney.
When I got Scott’s letter I called him collect that same day. He asked me
about my lawyers and we talked about my upcoming trial. At the end of our
conversation he asked me to call him every night during my trial to tell him
what happened because he wanted to email the news to his network of
friends, lawyers, and activists. I told him I would.
Malik talked about us to former Black Panther Party member Elmer Pratt
(Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt)—a wrongfully convicted decorated Vietnam veteran
who had been a victim of COINTELPRO and was recently released from
prison. Ji-Jaga survived 27 years in the California prison system, several of
them in solitary confinement, convicted for a murder that the FBI and other
officials knew he was innocent of the entire time. (FBI surveillance records
showed Ji-Jaga was in Oakland at the time of the killing, which took place in
Los Angeles.) Ji-Jaga’s conviction was finally vacated and he was released in
1997 on a judge’s order based on evidence that the main witness against him
was a police and FBI informant who had lied under oath. Upon his release
from prison Ji-Jaga said, “I want to be the first one to call for a new
revolution,” describing himself as a “soldier . . . dedicated to the liberation of
my people and all oppressed people.” Originally from New Orleans, Ji-Jaga
spread the word about me and Herman to his vast network of supporters,
telling people who doubted us, because nobody had heard of us before, that
we were Panthers and political prisoners, regardless of the original charges
against us.
In November 1998, about a week before my trial was to start, I was reading

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in my cell in Amite when a young inmate came to my door and said,
“Woodfox, some guy is getting ready to rape a white boy downstairs.” He
walked off. I put on my tennis shoes and went downstairs. I walked to the one
cell on the tier that the guard couldn’t see into with a camera, cell 15. There
were three guys in there.
“What’s going on here?” I said.
“What you got to do with it?” one of them asked me.
“You’re trying to rape this kid, that’s what,” I said.
“It’s not your fucking business.” he said.
I told him I was making it my business. I punched the guy in his face, he
pushed me, and we started exchanging blows. The other prisoner ran out. The
white kid left. At some point during the fight I hit my face on the top bar of
the bed, which blackened both my eyes. On my next attorney visit Garraway
told me he wanted to push back the date of my trial. “I can’t bring you in
front of a jury looking like that,” he said. He went to court and had a bench
session with the judge. I don’t know what he told the judge but he got us a
two-week delay. My new trial date was December 7, 1998.
The night before my trial my brother and his then wife Pam had people stay
at their house who came to my trial from outside Louisiana. Malik had people
staying over in his mother’s house and garage. New Orleans activist Opal
Joyner had supporters staying in her house. Opal and Pam fed everybody.
Malik was able to rent a car and a hotel room in Hammond, 19 miles outside
Amite City, with funds raised from supporters including Luis Talamantez, a
member of the San Quentin Six and longtime prisoner organizer and activist.
I knew the trial would be rough. “It is the position of the state,”
prosecutor Julie Cullen wrote in a pretrial memorandum, “that Brent Miller
was the victim in this case, not because of who he was personally or because
of anything he personally did, but rather because he was a white correctional
officer.”
In spite of that I was hopeful. We had proof that former warden C.
Murray Henderson paid Hezekiah Brown for his testimony against us. We
had former captain and warden Hilton Butler saying you “could put words in
[Brown’s] mouth.” We had new supporters. The feeling of hope came with
strong emotions of gratitude. Herman, King, and I had been on our own for
so long.
I didn’t yet know that my attorneys received money from the state to hire

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experts and track down all my alibi witnesses but did neither. I didn’t know
yet that a first-year law student would have known better what to do than
they did.

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