The Angola Two
They started out as the “Angola Four.”
The year was 1972. The Spring. The March breeze had given way to April’s swamp like humidity at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as “Angola.”
The sprawling 18,000-acre prison plantation’s two main crops, cotton and sugarcane, did not sit well with the increasing “black militancy” fomenting among the prison’s African-American inmates—most of whom had graduated out of New Orleans “housing projects” to the city’s notorious Parish Prison in the first leg of their journey to Angola. The prison had the well-deserved reputation of being “the bloodiest prison in America.”
A militant political stew had come to a quick boil in the nation’s prison system after the Attica Prison Riot that occurred the previous September—an uprising that left 33 inmates and 10 prison personnel dead in its wake. The riot found its seeds in the death of “black militant” writer/activist George Jackson who was killed during a bloody escape attempt from San Quentin Prison on August 21, 1971.
Attica was emblematic of prisons across the nation that had become cauldrons of violent political unrest as African-American inmates—interchangeably referred to as “black militants” or “Black Panthers”—began to demand better living conditions and more humane personal treatment.
That spring of ’72, I was a 27-year-old inmate housed on Louisiana death row waiting for an almost certain trip to the state’s electric chair. I kept up with the black militancy at a distance: television, books, magazines, and underground information channels. There were 46 of us on death row living in anticipation of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia—a decision that in June 1972 declared the death penalty nationwide to be unconstitutional as it was then being applied. Louisiana death row inmates were eventually resentenced to life imprisonment.
Twelve days after the start of the Attica riot, a U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge decided Sinclair v. Henderson—the first prisoners’ rights legal decision in Louisiana. Under the legal direction of a young civil rights attorney, Richard Hand, the lawsuit got the federal court to declare long term solitary cell confinement, such as death row, cruel and unusual punishment. The federal court decision also afforded procedural due process requirements in the prison’s disciplinary process: right to a rule book, right to a written disciplinary report, right to a disciplinary hearing, and right to appeal any adverse decision.
In 1971 that was landmark litigation. The “Sinclair Decision,” as it became known, would ultimately open the door to other “reforms” at Angola cementing my jailhouse lawyer reputation both in the prison community and the state’s judicial system. The decision also played a role in one of Angola’s most infamous incidents—the April 1972 killing of Angola prison guard Brent Miller.
In the months after the Attica riot, New Orleans Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor, the first African-American elected to the Louisiana Legislature since Reconstruction, had become a “radical” voice in the state’s political system. The outspoken lawmaker set her reform sights on Angola. Her interest in Angola ignited the budding, though spirited “black militancy” at the prison. The prison white redneck security regime reacted by locking up scores of African-American inmates in a brutal maximum security unit known as “CCR” [Close Custody Restriction]. One of the three tiers in the unit was designated the “Panther Tier.”
That tier was located directly above death row. In compliance with the Sinclair Decision, prison officials had constructed an “exercise yard” outside the death row cellblocks. The yard was below the Panther Tier allowing communications between the militants and death row inmates.
Several of the militants wanted a copy of the 52-page legal memorandum Richard Hand had prepared in connection with my lawsuit. That memorandum had been declared “contraband” by prison officials because they believed the legal information in it posed a “threat to prison security.” They would only allow it in my possession because it was “legal mail.” I was warned not to share it with other inmates.
Nonetheless, I got a mimeograph copy made of the memorandum and smuggled it into the Panther Tier. Several of the militants used the memorandum as a guide to craft their own lawsuit challenging the conditions on the Panther Tier.
Fearing a second Sinclair Decision and continued prison involvement by Rep. Taylor, Warden C. Murray Henderson instructed his Deputy Warden Lloyd W. Hoyle to release all the militants off the Panther Tier. This action infuriated the prison’s white security staff.
I was hailed a hero by some of the released militants who sent me a lot of “right on, comrade” messages. Henderson and Hoyle, however, saw me in a different light. I was the “trouble-making motherfucker” who had backed them into a corner by distributing the “contraband” memorandum.
Then it happened.
A young white prison guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death on April 17, 1972 in Pine One, an all-black dormitory on the prison’s Big Yard.
The prison’s redneck regime went crazy. They deputized dozens of local Ku Klux Klan farmers and brought them into the prison. Hundreds of African-American inmates, all designated with the “black militant” label, were locked up in various maximum security cellblocks with as many as five inmates to a cell. There were wholesale beatings and torture inflicted on the “militants” in an effort to find out who killed Miller, and why.
Within weeks four African-American inmates were named the killers: Herman “Hooks” Wallace, Albert Woodfox, Gilbert Montegut, and Charles “Noxzema Black” Jackson.
They quickly became known as “The Angola Four.”
The prison’s security staff believed Miller’s killing happened for several reasons: Hoyle’s release of the militants from the Panther Tier, the Sinclair Decision, and Rep. Taylor’s activism. Several days after Miller’s killing, one of his brothers, who was also employed at the prison, threw Hoyle through an office plate glass window in the prison’s administration building disfiguring him for life. He would later win a large civil judgment against the state for the attack.
The “Angola Four” quickly dwindled.
Noxzema Black became a state witness against the others. Gilbert Montegut, who was mentally challenged, was found guilty of manslaughter and eventually released from Angola. Woodfox and Wallace were convicted and received life sentences. They would ultimately become “The Angola Two.”
In October 2013, a federal judge freed the 71-year-old terminally ill Wallace into hospice care in New Orleans where he died less than a week later. He had spent the previous 41 years in solitary confinement. Woodfox was released nearly three years later in February 2016 after having his conviction reversed and ordered released by a federal court. He had spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement.
In 2001, after the publication of my prison memoir, “A Life in the Balance,” I was contacted by a New York supporter of The Angola Two. After reading the memoir, the supporter had a “gut feeling,” as he described it to me, that I had information about the Brent Miller killing. I told him that I did have some information about the case (namely, the name of an African American inmate who told me in 1973 that he stabbed Miller to death and chronicled to me all the events leading up to the killing) but I did not know how valuable it would be to the Angola Two case.
The supporter arranged a meeting between me and Scott Fleming, an Oakland-based attorney representing The Angola Two. I described to Fleming the 1973 conversation I had with the close friend who gave me a detailed account of how and why the Brent Miller killing took place. The information exonerated Wallace and Woodfox. I had no way of verifying the veracity of the account. It was simply prison information I stored away in the recesses of my brain for 30 years.
Certain aspects of the information intrigued Fleming because it either corroborated or fit into a chronology of other information he had developed about the case. I provided him with a sworn affidavit to use as he saw fit in his effort to free “The Angola Two.”
There are times when each of us, including those in prison, must make choices that are not in our best interests. Our moral compass demands that we make those choices. I had no allegiance with The Angola Two. I had several conversations with Wallace in 1974 but nothing that made us “comrades.”
In 2001, with Scott Fleming at my doorstep, I was embroiled in an all out war with the Louisiana prison system—the impact of my memoir was sending backlash ripples throughout the system. The memoir war came on the heels of my exposure to an investigative, Peabody awarding winning journalist/friend about the relationship between the chief judge of a federal appeals court, a serial pedophile priest, and the corrections secretary of the Louisiana prison system. Those revelations had spawned two criminal investigations, a state legislative investigation, and a judicial ethics investigation—not to mention the national and international media attention it generated in other venues.
The last thing I needed at that juncture was to become involved in the political war the state’s prison system was waging against The Angola Two. Fleming recognized the inherent danger of my position and assured me he would provide me with as much protection as he could. But he wanted the information I had. I gave it to him.
That’s the thing about choices. Make them and be prepared to accept their consequences. In that context, the two black lives of The Angola Two mattered more than my own self-interests.
Two months later I was denied parole for the fifth time. The politics of my case, the official hostility generated by my memoir, and the fallout from the judge/priest pedophilia disclosure all factored into the denial. Then a few weeks later an assistant warden whispered to me, “you should have stayed out of The Angola Two case.”
You don’t always get a chance to pick your battles in prison. Sometimes they get right up in your face and slap the fuck out of you, forcing you to respond back twice as hard.
But the battles leave indelible scars on the spirit, deep within the basin of the soul. There’s no denying it.
Two years before my 2006 release from the Louisiana prison system, my wife saw and knew what battle scar tissue had done to my soul.
“It’s time for you to get on the back of the wagon and let me drive it the rest of the way home,’ she said to me one day as she held my hand during a visit.
And she did – like a warrior giant.