Prison Advocacy in a Time of Capital Disaccumulation

Black Leadership

As noted earlier, African Americans comprise half the prison population in Ohio. Nationwide, according to Justice Department statistics, in 1999 blacks accounted for 46 percent of all prisoners serving a year or more.

This unusual situation presents great challenges and great opportunities. White prisoners tend to be drawn from segments of the general population in which racial prejudice is alive and well. On the street, whites may work in integrated shops and offices but when they punch out at day's end they generally return to segregated residential neighborhoods. In prison, whites are in the company of approximately equal numbers of blacks "twenty-four/seven," that is, all the time.

Thus in prison, whites are perforce thrust into a circumstance that very few white persons have an opportunity to experience in the wider society: to be part of an inter-racial movement in which blacks either lead or share equally in the leadership. The authors had this opportunity as persons living on the campus of a "Negro college" in Adanta during the early 1960s. No one could reasonably doubt that blacks began and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). However, whites played important roles, especially in office tasks but also (as in the case of Floward Zinn) as honored advisers or (as in the case of Bob Zellner) as organizers in the field. Briefly, during the summer of 1964, many others became deeply involved. The difficulty of creating and sustaining inter-racial efforts in this society is suggested by the way the inter-racial civil rights movement fell apart after the Freedom Summer ended.

In a previous Monthly Review article (February 2000), Staughton described the creation of inter-racial unity during the eleven-day Lucasville rebellion of April 1993 in southern Ohio. A friend who had been in prison described an analogous experience in a letter he wrote to us after reading the article.

I did 31/2 years in the Federal Prison System in the late 1970s. I did most of my time at Lompoc, California and McNeil Island, Washington.

The reason I got sent to McNeil was that I helped to lead a food and work strike at Lompoc in September 1978. Like Lucasville, it was a multi-ethnic struggle, although involving five ethnic/racial groups instead of two; but unlike Lucasville, no one was killed or hurt. (This lasted only over a two-day period.) Six of us leaders afterwards were locked up in solitary, where we also maintained a total food strike for five/six days. Then we got some "bus therapy" and transferred across the United States.

The other similarity to Lucasville, as I read it, was that almost all of the whites that participated in our struggle were also self-identified racists. Yet because I had been in the middle of some stuff, and could explain exactly how the police were playing the races off against one another--and one of the racist whites who I was on good terms with co-signed me to the other whites as a solid con--these racist white convicts listened to me, and then on their own initiative, put forth the demand that the police (I'm being polite) quit playing the races off against each other! Because of this, the entire group of strikers stayed solid...