[Peace] Fwd: [CEDP] Howard Zinn on the US Prisoners' Movement of the 1970s

Fri Nov 6 14:22:05 CST 2009

More from Zinn. BD

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Julien Ball <julienball at hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:54 AM
Subject: [CEDP] Howard Zinn on the US Prisoners' Movement of the 1970s
To: CEDP National <cedp_national_office at yahoogroups.com>, Campaign Citywide
<chicago_cedp at yahoogroups.com>

Friends,

The CEDP's national convention in Chicago starts tomorrow morning! To get
people in the spirit, I am posting an excerpt from *People's History of the
United States* by Howard Zinn about the US prisoners' movement of the 1970s.
Howard is the keynote speaker of our convention and will be speaking on "The
Power of the People".

It's not too late to register! Just visit http://www.nodeathpenalty.org

http://libcom.org/history/1970-1978-the-us-prisoners-movement
1970-1978: The US prisoners' movement
Submitted by Steven. <http://libcom.org/user/stefan> on Sep 13 2006 14:59
tags:

   - North America <http://libcom.org/regions/north-america>
   - military and law enforcement <http://libcom.org/tags/military>
   - USA <http://libcom.org/tags/united-states>
   - 1970s <http://libcom.org/tags/1970s>
   - prison <http://libcom.org/tags/prison>
   - race <http://libcom.org/tags/race>
   - social movements <http://libcom.org/tags/social-movements>
   - Howard Zinn <http://libcom.org/tags/howard-zinn>

[image: george-jackson-san-quentin.jpg]<http://libcom.org/files/george-jackson-san-quentin.jpg>

Howard Zinn's history of the movement of US prisoners and supporters on the
outside against poor conditions and ill-treatment.
*The movement refelected the general upsurge in revolutionary activity in
the US at the time*

For people in prisons in the US, communication with the outside world was
difficult. Guards would tear up letters. Others would be intercepted and
read. Jerry Sousa, a prisoner at Walpole in 1970, sent two letters—one to a
judge, the other to the parole board—to tell about a beating by guards. They
went unanswered. Fight years later, at a court hearing, he discovered the
prison authorities had intercepted them, never sent them out.

The families suffered with the prisoner: “During the last lock-up my
four-year-old son sneaked off into the yard and picked me a flower. A guard
in the tower called the warden's office and a deputy came in with the State
Police at his side. He announced that if any child went into the yard and
picked another flower, all visits would be terminated.”

The prison rebellions of the late sixties and early seventies had a
distinctly different character than the earlier ones. The prisoners in the
Queens House of Detention referred to themselves as “revolutionaries.” All
over the country, prisoners were obviously affected by the turmoil in the
country, the black revolt, the youth upsurge, the anti-war movement.

The events of those years underlined what prisoners already sensed—that
whatever crimes they had committed, the greatest crimes were being committed
by the authorities who maintained the prisons, by the government of the
United States. The law was being broken daily by the President, sending
bombers to kill, sending men to be killed, outside the Constitution, outside
the “highest law of the land.” State and local officials were violating the
civil rights of black people, which was against the law, and were not being
prosecuted for it.

Literature about the black movement, books on the war, began to seep into
the prisons. The example set in the streets by blacks, by anti-war
demonstrators, was exhilarating—against a lawless system, defiance was the
only answer.

It was a system which sentenced Martin Sostre, a fifty-two-year-old black
man and anarchist, running an Afro-Asian bookstore in Buffalo, New York, to
twenty-five to thirty years in prison for allegedly selling $15 worth of
heroin to an informer who later recanted his testimony. The recantation did
not free Sostre—he could find no court, including the Supreme Court of the
United States, to revoke the judgment. He spent eight years in prison, was
beaten ten times by guards, spent three years in solitary confinement,
battling and defying the authorities all the way until his release. Such
injustice deserved only rebellion.

There had always been political prisoners—people sent to jail for belonging
to radical movements, for opposing war. But now a new kind of political
prisoner appeared—the man, or woman, convicted of an ordinary crime, who, in
prison, became awakened politically. Some prisoners began making connections
between their personal ordeal and the social system. They then turned not to
individual rebellion but to collective action. They became concerned—amid an
environment whose brutality demanded concentration on one’s own safety, an
atmosphere of cruel rivalry—for the rights, the safety of others.

George Jackson (pictured, above) was one of these new political prisoners.
In Soledad prison, California, on an indeterminate sentence for a $70
robbery, having already served ten years of it, Jackson became a
revolutionary. He spoke with a fury that matched his condition:

This monster—the monster they’ve engendered in me will return to torment its
maker, from the grave, the pit, the profoundest pit. Hurl me into the next
existence, the descent into hell won’t turn me… I'm going to charge them
reparations in blood. I’m going to charge them like a mad-dened, wounded,
rogue male elephant, ears flared, trunk raised, trumpet blaring… War without
terms.

A prisoner like this would not last. And when his book Soledad Brother
became one of the most widely read books of black militancy in the United
States—by prisoners, by black people, by white people—perhaps this ensured
he would not last.

All my life I’ve done exactly what I wanted to do just when I wanted, no
more, perhaps less sometimes, but never any more, which explains why I had
to be jailed… I never adjusted. I haven’t adjusted even yet, with half of my
life already in prison.

He knew what might happen:

Born to a premature death, a menial, subsistence-wage worker, odd-job man,
the cleaner, the caught, the man under hatches, without bail—that’s me, the
colonial victim. Anyone who can pass the civil service examination today can
kill me tomorrow... with complete immunity.

In August 1971 he was shot in the back by guards at San Quentin prison while
he was allegedly trying to escape. The state’s story (analysed by Eric Mann
in Comrade George) was full of holes. Prisoners in jails and state prisons
all over the country knew, even before the final autopsy was in, even before
later disclosures suggested a government plot to kill Jackson, that he had
been murdered for daring to be a revolutionary in prison. Shortly after
Jackson’s death, there was a chain of rebellions around the country, in San
Jose Civic Centre jail, in Dallas county jail, in Suffolk county jail in
Boston, in Cumberland county jail in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in Bexar county
jail in San Antonio, Texas.

The most direct effect of the George Jackson murder was the rebellion at
Attica prison <http://libcom.org/history/articles/attica> in September
1971—a rebellion that came from long, deep grievances, but that was raised
to boiling point by the news about George Jackson.

The Attica uprising saw prisoners – black and white together - seize control
of the jail, taking several guards hostage with a series of demands about
conditions. The prison authorities refused to meet the demands, and instead
launched an armed raid on the prison using over 1,000 National Guardsmen,
prison guards, and police, killing 40 people. Nine of the dead were guards
who authorities claimed were murdered by prisoners, but official autopsies
soon showed that the guards had been shot alongside the prisoners by the
raiders.
 Read more about the history of the Attica prison
uprising<http://libcom.org/history/articles/attica>

The effects of Attica are hard to measure. Two months after the revolt at
Attica, men at Norfolk prison in Massachusetts began to organise. On
November 8, 1971, armed guards and state troopers, in a surprise raid, moved
into the cells at Norfolk, pulled out sixteen men, and shipped them out. A
prisoner described the scene:

Between one and two last night I was awakened (I’ve been a light sleeper
since Vietnam <http://libcom.org/history/articles/vietnam-gi-resistance>)
and I looked out my windows. There were troopers. And screws. Lots. Armed
with sidearms, and big clubs. They were going into dorms and taking people,
all kinds of people…

They took a friend of mine. . . Being pulled outside in our underwear. at
1:30, in bare feet by two troopers and a housescrew. Looking at those
troops, with guns, and masks and clubs, with the moon shining off the
helmets and the hate that you could see in their faces. Thinking that this
is where these guys live, with the guns and the hate, and the helmets and
masks, and you, you’re trying to wake up, flashing on Kent State and Jackson
[two universities where unarmed anti-war demonstrators were shot and killed
by the military], and Chicago. And Attica. Most of all, Attica.

That same week at Concord prison in Massachusetts, another raid. It was as
if everywhere, in the weeks and months after Attica, the authorities were
taking preventive action to break up organising efforts among the prisoners.
Jerry Sousa, a young leader of the prison reform movement at Concord, was
taken away, dumped into Walpole in the middle of the night, and immediately
put into Nine Block, the dreaded segregation unit. He had been there only a
short time when he managed to get a report out to friends. The content of
this report tells much about what was happening before and after Attica to
the thinking of prisoners:

We are writing a sombre report regarding the circumstances and events
leading up to and surrounding the death of prisoner Joseph Chesnulavich
which occurred here an hour ago in Nine Block.

Since Christmas eve, vicious prison guards here in Nine Block have created a
reign of terror directed toward us prisoners. Four of us have been beaten,
one who was prisoner Donald King.

In an attempt to escape constant harassment and inhuman treatment, prisoner
George Hayes ate razor blades and prisoner Fred Ahern swallowed a needle . .
. they both were rushed to Mass General Hospital.

This evening at 6 pm prison guards Baptist, Sainsbury, and Montiega turned a
fire extinguisher containing a chemical foam on Joe then slammed the solid
steel door sealing him in his cell and walked away, voicing threats of,
“We’ll get that punk.”

At 9.25pm. Joe was found dead. Prison authorities as well as news media will
label little Joe’s death a suicide, but the men here in Block Nine who
witnessed this murder know. But are we next?

What was happening was the organisation of prisoners—the caring of prisoners
for one another, the attempt to take the hatred and anger of individual
rebellion and turn it into collective effort for change. On the outside,
something new was also happening, the development of prison support groups
all over the country, the building of a body of literature about prisons.
There were more studies of crime and punishment, a growing movement for the
abolition of prisons on the grounds that they did not prevent crime or cure
it, but expanded it. Alternatives were discussed: community houses in the
short run (except for the incorrigibly violent); guaranteed minimum economic
security, in the long run.

The prisoners were thinking about issues beyond prison, victims other than
themselves and their friends. In Walpole prison a statement asking for
American withdrawal from Vietnam was circulated; it was signed by every
single prisoner—an amazing organising feat by a handful of inmates. One
Thanksgiving day there, most of the prisoners, not only in Walpole but in
three other prisons, refused to eat the special holiday meal, saying they
wanted to bring attention to the hungry all over the United States.

Prisoners worked laboriously on lawsuits, and some victories were won in the
courts. The publicity around Attica, the community of support, had its
effect. Although the Attica rebels were indicted on heavy charges and faced
double and triple life terms, the charges were finally dropped. But in
general, the courts declared their unwillingness to enter the closed,
controlled world of the prison, and so the prisoners remained as they had
been so long, on their own.

Even where an occasional “victory” came in the courts it turned out, on
close reading, to leave things not much different. In 1973 Procunier v.
Martinez) the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional certain mail
censorship regulations of the California Department of Corrections. But when
one looked closely, the decision, with all its proud language about “First
Amendment liberties,” said: “we hold that censorship of prison mail is
justified if the following criteria are met…" When the censorship could be
said to “further an important or substantial government interest” or where
it was in the “substantial governmental interests of security, order, and
rehabilitation,” censorship would be allowed.

In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that the news media do not have guaranteed
rights of access to jails and prisons. It ruled also that prison authorities
could forbid inmates to speak to one another, assemble, or spread literature
about the formation of a prisoners’ union. It became clear - and prisoners
seemed to know this from the start - that their condition would not be
changed by law, but by protest, organisation, resistance, the creation of
their own culture, their own literature, the building of links with people
on the outside. There were more outsiders now who knew about prisons. Tens
of thousands of Americans had spent time behind bars in the civil rights and
anti-war movements. They had learned about the prison system and could
hardly forget their experiences. There was a basis now for breaking through
the long isolation of the prisoners from the community and finding support
there. In the mid-seventies, this was beginning to happen.

*This article was taken from Howard Zinn’s excellent A People's History of
the United States<http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=libcom-21&camp=1634&creative=6738&path=ASIN%2F0060838655%2Fqid%3D1138827673%2Fsr%3D1-3%2Fref%3Dsr_1_2_3>
. We heartily recomment you buy A People's History of the United
States now<http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=libcom-21&camp=1634&creative=6738&path=ASIN%2F0060838655%2Fqid%3D1138827673%2Fsr%3D1-3%2Fref%3Dsr_1_2_3>.
OCRed by Linda Towlson and lightly edited by libcom - US to UK spelling,
additional details, clarifications and links added*

*___________________________________________________________________*

*
*

*

HOWARD ZINN

IN A CONVERSATION WITH DAVE ZIRIN

  THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE

  Saturday, November 7th, 7pm

  University of Chicago | Mandel Hall

  1131 E. 57th St., Chicago, IL

  *reserve your ticket now, info below*

HOWARD ZINN – historian, author, and activist – will speak on the

power of ordinary people in changing the course of history. In his

lectures, writings and his book, A People's History of the United States,

Zinn highlights the hidden history of those who have been at the forefront

of social change in American history – African Americans, Native

Americans, women, immigrants and workers.

DAVE ZIRIN – author, sports writer and activist – will interview

Howard Zinn. Zirin is a contributor to The Nation, and author of A

People's History of Sports in the United States, Welcome to the

Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports and What’s My

Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States.

This event is the keynote address for the CAMPAIGN TO END THE DEATH

PENALTY’S NATIONAL CONVENTION, November 7 & 8. The convention, "Makingthe
Death Penalty History," will feature former prisoners, family members of
prisoners and other anti-death penalty activists from across the country.
More info is available at http://www.nodeathpenalty.org or by calling
773-955-4841.

  **Buy Your Ticket Now

This event is expected to sell out and tickets are available online on a

first come, first served basis.

Tickets are $10. Visit http://www.nodeathpenalty.org to purchase your

ticket online.

WILL-CALL TICKETS: You will not receive a physical ticket, rather the name from
your online order will appear on the list at the event. Please be sure to
print and bring your Pay Pal receipt for admittance.

CONVENTION GOERS: Entry to the event is included for those registered for the
CEDP convention.

 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Join Howard Zinn, Martina Correia and many others...

Register now for the CEDP Convention!

Online registration at:

http://nodeathpenalty.org/content/page.php?cat_id=3&content_id=44

 Making the Death Penalty History

Join the Campaign to End the Death Penalty for two days of lively discussion
in plenary and workshop sessions.

 November 7th and  8th, 2009

University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Saturday at Ida Noyes Hall at 1212 E. 59thStreet at Woodlawn.

Sunday at Stuart Hall 101.

Featuring Howard Zinn on The Power of the People

Saturday, Nov. 7th at 7pm

University of Chicago

Registration for the weekend is $50:  special family member, former
prisoner, and student rate is $25.  Limited travel scholarships available
for family members and former prisoners.  To register online go to
www.nodeathpenalty.org.

Featured speakers at the convention will include:

Martina Correia -Sister of Georgia death row prisoner Troy Davis.

Ronald Kitchen -Recently exonerated death row prisoner from Illinois.

Darby Tillis -Exonerated death row prisoner from Illinois.

Sandra Reed -Mother of Texas death row prisoner Rodney Reed.

Jeannine Scott -Wife of newly freed Texas prisoner Michael Scott.

Marvin Reeves -Recently freed from Illinois prison after 21 years.

Lawrence Hayes -Former Black Panther and NYS death row prisoner

Sessions will include:

Making the death Penalty History

Activists have made great strides in this past year, from Troy Davis winning
a Supreme Court ruling in his case to the freeing of several victims of
police torturer Jon Burge. How can we move forward to abolition? How do
activists organize in the Obama era? What are our possibilities for building
in this new period?

 The Troy Davis Campaign

Georgia death row prisoner Troy Davis has won the right to finally be able
to present evidence of his innocence in court. But as his sister and most
vocal advocate says, "This is still an uphill battle." This is a discussion
on what it will take for Troy to win, and what the impact of this case has
had on the death penalty debate more broadly.

Victory and Struggle: Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize

Featuring newly exonerated prisoners and family members.

Workshops will include both practical tool-building sessions and discussions
taking up controversial questions facing our movement:

-- The Press: How to Get the Most From It

-- Coerced Confessions: Why Would Someone Confess to Something They Didn't
Do?

-- Fighting for the Guilty, Too

 For more information, call the CEDP's national office at 773-955-4841.

 ******************************************

The Costella Cannon Scholarship Fund

We have limited scholarship funds available to help cover the costs of
travel for former prisoners and family members attending the convention  To
request a scholarship application or for more information, please call the
office at 773-955-4841.

*

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