Paul Scott Race Indigeneity & Immigration Series

The Angola 3:

In the early 1970s, three men were imprisoned in solitary confinement in Angola penitentiary in Louisiana, all of them members of the Black Panther Party. Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace, and Robert King called themselves the Angola 3.

Albert and Herman were placed in solitary after being convicted of murdering prison guard Brent Miller in 1972; Robert was separately convicted of the murder of another Angola prisoner the following year.

All three men always maintained their innocence of these crimes. All evidence appears to corroborate their claims, and suggest that the Louisiana authorities served the sentences and condemned the men to decades of solitary under racially and politically motivated circumstances.

Albert and Herman were convicted by an all-white jury. The state’s evidence consisted only of the testimonies of three inmate witnesses, all of whom received favourable treatment in return for their statements, and whose trial testimonies were different from statements given just after the murder. There was no physical evidence linking the men to the murder; in fact, the only physical evidence presented at the trial – a crime scene fingerprint – exculpated Albert and Herman.

Robert King walked out of Angola a free man in 2001 after successfully challenging his conviction. He’d spent 29 years unjustly in solitary confinement.

Herman Wallace was freed in October 2013 after his 1974 conviction for the murder of prison officer Brent Miller. He died just two days later.

Albert Woodfox was the last of the Angola 3 to be released in February 2016. He spent 43 years in solitary confinement.

(Images of Angola 3 after Rashid mod)

Souvenir of Selma AL.
From Selma, Still a City of Slaves.. by Chris Arnade in the Guardian, 4 Feb 2016.

… The Edmund Pettus Bridge is recognizable from newsreels of Bloody Sunday, when marchers were beaten by the police, or when President Obama came to mark the 50th anniversary of that day. The central street beyond the bridge is three short blocks filled with shops catering to
tourists.Yet if you walk beyond those blocks you see the ugliness of poverty that is modern Selma: dilapidated and boarded-up homes tagged with gang symbols, empty lots littered with vodka bottles and fast-food wrappers, and sterile low-income projects. You see men clustered on corners selling drugs, and on the better-kept homes you see sign after sign urging, “Stop the violence”. You don’t see working factories, only empty ones being torn down for scrap. You see a population disenfranchised, economically and politically. It makes Selma, a symbol of past civil rights victories, a symbol of current civil rights failures.

On salvaging bricks from an old cotton warehouse…“This is slave work, that’s what it is, but the only work around. Kind of funny when you think about it, because them bricks were probably made by slaves. That is Selma for you, though: still a city of slaves.”

“…..special things DID happen here. Just wish they would happen again.”
(Escrow, Selma resident)

“Souvenir of Selma celebrates the 2018 anniversary walk in Selma Alabama….. The annual event commemorates ‘Bloody Sunday’, March 7 1965, when John Lewis & Hosea Williams led 525 peaceful civil rights protestors across the bridge in Selma. En-route to Montgomery, they were stopped by State Troopers+Sheriff’s Deputies, who brutally set upon them, indiscriminately gassing + beating men, women, & children. Media coverage of the event shocked the world…”

—Paul Scott