Robert King: 'I'll fight until the day I die'
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/robert-king-ill-fight-until-the-day-i-die-1925371.html
Robert King spent decades battling for his release from the
'hell-hole' of America's notorious Angola Prison. Now free, he's
still crusading for its inmates, he tells Simon Usborne
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Working conditions at Angola Prison in Louisiana were so harsh that,
in 1952, three dozen inmates hacked through their own Achilles
tendons with razor blades in protest. They became known as the Heel
String Gang. By the time Robert King first arrived at the former
slave plantation, 10 years later, armed convicts were working as
guards. Incoming prisoners, or "fresh fish", were being sold as sex
slaves. Some were raped so violently they died of their injuries. But
these horrors formed only part of King's nightmare. For every day of
the 29 years he spent in solitary confinement, inside a prison
described as the "bloodiest in America", he knew he was innocent.
"It's hard to get dipped in shit and not come out stinking," says
King, who walked free in 2001. "But I don't have time to be angry."
Two men, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, who were sent down for
murder at the same time, still languish in Angola Prison, properly
known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary, after 37 years in solitary
confinement, the longest period in US history. King, who is now 67,
will not rest until they are released: "Will I fight till the day I
die? Perhaps I will."
For decades, the men known as the Angola Three have protested their
innocence. Their supporters say the case represents one of the
greatest miscarriages of justice of our times one that still shames
America. When they fought for the rights of black inmates at the
height of the civil rights movement, they were framed for murder,
thrown in cells smaller than most bathrooms, and forgotten.
The plight of King and his comrades is the subject of In the Land of
the Free, a documentary narrated by Samuel L Jackson and out in
cinemas on Friday. King hopes the film, which premieres in London
tomorrow, will help his fight for justice. "You throw pebbles in a
pond and you get ripples," he says. "I see this as a huge rock."
King has devoted his life to throwing pebbles. He spends two weeks of
every month travelling the world, meeting activists, world leaders
anyone who will listen. I first meet him in London in 2008 at an
exhibition put on by an artist and supporter. It includes a
whitewashed, wooden replica of King's cell. Standing behind its bars,
he is taken back to a space from which he never expected to emerge.
"I had life and 43 years, and in Angola life is life," he says. "I
had hope, but I had to reserve my feelings because I knew I would
probably die in prison."
King wears a pair of khakis, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Kangol flat
cap turned backwards. A crude, faded tattoo of a spider peers out
from under his right sleeve. It's a souvenir from King's first stint
in prison, while he was still in his teens. His route to Angola
started in Algiers, a poor ward of New Orleans. Raised by his
grandmother (his parents were "off the set"), King's upbringing was
marked by poverty and discrimination. "There were laws in place that
upgraded some citizens and downgraded others," he says. "I happened
to be on the down side as was my father, and his father before him."
Drawn on to an escalator of petty crime, King was soon doing time in
juvenile facilities for robberies he says he wasn't involved in.
"Back then, police said, well, you might not be guilty but you was
probably there, so ... " Between sentences, a young King found work
digging graves and collecting litter to recycle for cash. In 1970,
while serving a sentence for another robbery of which he claims
innocence, King cracked. He escaped from the Orleans Parish Prison in
a bust involving 25 inmates. It did not endear him to the
authorities, who recaptured him after two weeks, and threw him into
solitary. "I decided I couldn't have any more obligations to a system
that had dealt me like that," he says. "I had hoped that the system
would be fair but I lost that hope."
Meanwhile, at Angola, Wallace and Woodfox were serving sentences for
unconnected robberies. The world's largest maximum security prison,
and a working farm to this day, Angola was built in the late 19th
century on the site of a plantation, and named after the African
country from which many of its slaves were shipped. Guards who worked
there in the Seventies have admitted that the trade in sex slaves was
allowed to flourish. Between 1972 and 1975, the practice of arming
inmates as guards resulted in the deaths of 40 prisoners. Partly
reformed today, Angola has 5,000 inmates, more than three-quarters of
whom are black. Eight out of 10 of its convicts die behind bars.
Sickened by racial hatred in and out of Angola, Wallace and Woodfox
formed a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party, the revolutionary
group that rocked America in the Sixties and Seventies. It made them
public enemies. When no inmates spoke up after the 1972 murder of a
23-year-old prison guard called Brent Miller, authorities terrorised
Angola's black population, and singled out Black Panthers. A prisoner
who at first said he had not seen the murder emerged suddenly as a
key witness. He fingered Wallace and Woodfox, who were found guilty
by an all-white jury and sent to solitary, where they remain. Prints
collected at the scene, which belong to neither man, were never
tested. Even Miller's widow, Leontine Verrett, is said to be
convinced of the pair's innocence.
King, who by now had also joined the Panthers, was moved to Angola
soon after Miller's murder. He could expect an earlier release but
later learned he was under investigation for the slaying, despite not
having been there. The authorities found a better reason to keep him
locked up in 1973, when King was charged for the murder of August
Kelly, a prisoner who was stabbed to death. King stood trial
alongside Kelly's assailant, who claimed sole responsibility for the
murder. But witnesses, who would later admit to having given false
testimony, put King at the scene. He was found guilty, only to be
re-tried in 1975 after it emerged his mouth had been taped shut
during the first trial. Despite a mountain of evidence in King's
favour, he was found guilty by an all-white jury drawn from the
prison community. And so began three decades in solitary.
"You can't get used to anything like that but you have to think about
it as part of the territory if you're gonna survive," says King, who
shared Angola's Closed Cell Restricted area with Woodfox and Wallace.
Talking was forbidden and rule-breakers were thrown in "the dungeon".
"They didn't even have a mattress in there or no blankets," King
recalls. "Food you got was sometimes just two slices of bread, and
you wouldn't get a shower for days. You could get 10 days in there,
sometimes 20, sometimes 30, but we were willing to sacrifice a bit
just to talk."
Like his comrades, King became schooled in the law and found "escape
in sleep", but a sweeter diversion came from an unlikely source. By
stacking empty drinks cans to create a stove fired by burning
tissues, King used butter packs and sugar sachets, as well as
smuggled pecans, to make pralines. Risking stints in the dungeon, he
sold his candy to other inmates and made donations to the men on
death row. He says: "It was something I could do, and something
different I could give people who might never see daylight again
myself included."
King says it required a "change in psychology" to stay sane: "I began
to see America as one big prison that I was in maximum security and
that the people outside were in minimum custody." As years turned
into decades, the Angola Three risked being forgotten in the hellhole
that was the prison. But as word of their plight spread, the scales
of justice started to creak. After a complex process of plea
bargaining, during which King says the state went to great lengths to
avoid a costly and embarrassing lawsuit, he reluctantly accepted a
charge of conspiracy to commit murder. On 8 February 2001 he walked
free. "I was elated never scared," he recalls, "but it felt so
strange and surreal."
King returned to New Orleans, where he continued to make his pralines
(he rebranded them "King's Freelines" and still sells them to raise
money for the campaign). Driven out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he
moved to Austin, Texas, where he still lives with his dog, Kenya.
All possible legal strings within reach have been pulled to ensure
that Woodfox and Wallace remain no closer to freedom. When King isn't
campaigning or "you know, coolin' out, dilly-dallyin' around", he
reflects on what the case of the Angola Three says about race
relations in modern America.
At our first meeting, Obama's inauguration was still six months away
and King doubted even a black president could bring change. "The
politics are too entrenched," he said. "Kennedy tried to change them
and was assassinated. Malcolm X was assassinated. If Obama gets
elected and isn't assassinated, he might give people the idea America
has changed but it won't be true."
And now? King thinks for a moment. "I believe Obama has become a
catalyst for change," he says. "The election showed the ideology and
mindset of the young people in this country has made a big leap. We
saw it in Katrina and we're beginning to see it elsewhere. They're
saying, you're not gonna do this in our name no more. We gonna go on
our own. Whether or not that will impact Herman and Albert
immediately, I don't know. Until it does, the struggle goes on. I may
be free of Angola. But Angola will never be free of me."
Angola3.org ; Inthelandofthefreefilm.com
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