[3 items]
Lifer Lessons
http://citypaper.com/news/lifer-lessons-1.1137776
Marshall "Eddie" Conway talks about prison life
By Van Smith
Published: April 27, 2011
Now 65 years old, Marshall "Eddie" Conway started serving a life
sentence for murdering Baltimore police officer Donald Sager when he
was 24. Back then, Conway was a postal worker and U.S. Army veteran.
He was also a civil rights activist who, as a member of the NAACP and
the Congress of Racial Equality, had helped organize efforts to
better working conditions for African-Americans at a number of major
employers in the Baltimore area. His most renowned role, though, was
as Minister of Defense in the Maryland chapter of the Black Panther
Party苔 position that put him on the front lines of a successful
government effort to undermine the party.
Now, Conway is a published author with two books to his credit. In
2009, iAWME Publications issued Conway's The Greatest Threat: The
Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO, in part as a fundraiser for
Conway's legal defense. And earlier this month, AK Press published
Conway's memoir, Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore
Black Panther, a release party for which takes place April 29 at 2640
Space featuring readings from the book by Bashi Rose and WombWorks
Productions, Pam Africa talking about the Mumia Abu-Jamal case, and a
performance by Lafayette Gilchrist. (Visit redemmas.org/2640 for more details.)
The new memoir provides an ideal opportunity to consider the man and
his life from different perspectives. Edward Ericson Jr. takes a
serious look at Conway's claims to be a political prisoner in his
essay about The Greatest Threat. Michael Corbin, who taught at the
Metropolitan Transition Center, the former Maryland Penitentiary in
Baltimore, places Marshall Law in the American tradition of prison
literature. And since decades in prison have tempered Conway's
revolutionary zeal, in a recent phone interview from the Jessup
Correctional Institution, he spoke of what hurts and helps the
corrective function of prisons, the challenges of fatherhood on the
inside, the folly of drug dealing, his own unrealized aspirations in
life, and what he would do as a free man.
City Paper: Maryland has a life-means-life policy, essentially
denying the possibility for parole for those serving life sentences.
It was put in place in 1995 by then governor Parris Glendening, who
recently admitted his regrets.
Marshall "Eddie" Conway: Yes, I'm aware of his regrets, 16 years
later and after about 50 of my associates are dead. During the course
of waiting for this policy to be changed, they passed away.
CP: In your mind, what is wrong with this policy?
MEC: The real problem is that young people coming into the prison
system see people that have been participating in the programs, doing
all they can to turn their lives around and become usual citizens in
the community, and they see how they've spent 10, 20, 30, 40 years
doing that, with no kind of possibility of release. Well, right away,
young guys end up saying, "Well, what's the point?" It increases the
potential for violence, because there is frustration, and it
increases hopelessness, which means that people tend to act out. It
doesn't give an incentive for people to rehabilitate themselves, and
instead creates negative activity and energy. If you take away hope
in a system like this, then you're going to receive a lot of people
returning back to the community very frustrated and hopeless趴hich is
not good, considering the unemployment situation. Also, when a person
reaches a certain age, just the fact that a person is, like, 45, 50,
or over, means that he becomes a safer risk for release in the
community. And most of the time, when you get people that have done
an extensive amount of time in prison, they got an associate degree
or a bachelor's degree, so they are more capable of taking care of themselves.
CP: Since the policy has been in place, have you seen an increase in
violence, hopelessness, and nihilistic approaches to serving time?
MEC: There was a real spike in violence immediately after that policy
was announced. In this institution, for maybe a 10-year period after
1995, pretty much every week there was something fatal or near-fatal
occurring. I'm not saying that's a direct result of Glendening's
policy, but it got so bad that the guards actually refused to come to
work. And that violence spread from this institution to others.
CP: If the policy is overturned, would prisons become more suited for
rehabilitation?
MEC: Well, of course it would. There are a lot of older prisoners,
like myself, working to decrease the level of violence and conflict,
and that's really having a good impact. But in terms of people
turning their lives around and having hope and having a desire to
motivate change虹f you can't show them something at the end, there's
no incentive for that, and I'm kind of like swimming against the
tide. But if they see a way to get out of this predicament虹f they
work, if they develop, if they grow and change their paradigm負hat's
going to probably change the climate within the prison population.
CP: Do you suspect you would have been paroled if this policy hadn't
been in place?
MEC: I don't know if I would have been paroled, but I have to assume
that I would have. I was a model prisoner, quote unquote, meaning
that I was苔nd I am趴orking to improve the conditions among the prisoners.
CP: Let's pretend you hadn't been convicted. What would have been your career?
MEC: I want to believe that, if the community hadn't been drugged and
the jobs hadn't been shipped overseas, we could have turned this
around, and I would have probably ended up teaching somewhere. I had
two interests. One was history and education, and the other was the
medical profession. I had an aspiration to go into school at Johns
Hopkins University, trying to engage in further training for the
medical profession. I don't know that that would have happened, but
the teaching probably would have. Either way, I would have been
constantly engaging in the community, trying to better the conditions.
CP: What do your sons do?
MEC: I have two sons. One of my sons is an instructor at Bowling
Green University in Ohio, teaching computer science. The other is a
manager of a water-purification plant in Maryland.
CP: How did you manage as a father in prison?
MEC: Right at the beginning, I have to admit that I succeeded in the
case of one and I failed in the case of the other. In the case of my
second son, I was estranged from him all the way until he was 18. It
was my fault that that was the case, and I certainly never was a
father to him. We tried to recover and establish some sort of
relationship, and it just didn't seem to work out. My oldest son, who
I knew from the time he was born, I kept in touch with his mother,
but I kind of lost track of him through my early years in the prison
system simply because, of my initial seven years, I spent six of them
in solitary confinement. Somewhere along the line, his mother came to
me and just pretty much said, "Look, you need to talk to your son."
So at that time I had organized a 10-week counseling program for
young people, and I actually had my son brought to the program. I
would sit down and talk to him, one on one, and we would counsel in
larger groups. We developed and we started bonding. Like all young
black men at the time, he was like, "I'm going to the NBA, going to
be a baller." He was really good, but only so many people get
selected to go into the NBA, and he needed to be considering a
profession. So he decided to go to college and do the
computer-science thing. I've supported him as much as I could, and I
tried to get him to get his doctorate, but he had had enough of that.
I think it was a good experience for both of us.
CP: How do you see it going with other inmates, and their issues with
fatherhood?
MEC: It's one of the things that we deal with a lot. I've been
working with young guys for the whole entire 40 years, but at some
point I had to stop for a while. They were just so angry, and the
morals and values had changed to such a degree that I couldn't be a
neutral observer when somebody is talking about beating up their
grandmother or disrespecting their mother. But after I started back
working with them, I noticed this great hostility to fathers, this
great anger at being abandoned.
But the other side of that is that they really want to be very
connected and attached to their children, even though they're locked
up. They're trying to break that cycle, even though the cycle
continues due to the simple fact that they are here. They're trying
to be the father that they didn't have. So that's good, and it's more
young people like that than not, and a lot of them actually do end up
going back out, and they realize that they almost blew that
opportunity to be that father. So they tend to get jobs and do what
they need to do to stay there because of that.
But, I'm in here now with three generations of people. I'm looking
across the generations of absent fathers. And I don't know how that
cycle gets broken if there's no jobs. One of the great negatives is
that maybe 80 percent of people in the prisons around the country are
there for drug-related activity, not necessarily violent. Just
selling drugs, buying drugs, using drugs, or fighting over drugs,
based on the fact that there's no jobs out there.
CP: It strikes me that these low-level drug dealing jobs are just bad
jobs. Low pay, long hours, harsh management.
MEC: You think? And there's not very good health care!
CP: People tend to think drug dealers get into it because it's an easy buck.
MEC: It's not an easy buck. It's day-to-day survival苔nd it's
detrimental to your survival. If you manage to make any money, the
state comes and scoops up any you might have around, and what you may
have stashed away is used for the lawyers. So you end up with nothing.
CP: I wonder, are there any drug dealers out there for whom it
doesn't end badly? The odds are probably better that you'd make it to the NBA.
MEC: This is the bottom line: The nature of drug trafficking itself
means that you are going to be highly publicized, that people are
going to know who you are, that there's always going to be a chain of
evidence back to you, and that there's always going to be someone
who's going to want to avoid being incarcerated by saying, "Go look
at him or her." It's definitely a loser's proposition.
CP: What do you know about gangs in Maryland prisons?
MEC: The real problem is that anybody in prison that associates with
street organizations is pretty much tagged or targeted, be it the
Black Guerilla Family, Crips, Bloods, Dead Man Incorporated, or any
of them. It has made it impossible to interact in any kind of a
positive way with members of those organizations without being
tagged. I was educating people, and on the days that I made myself
available, I would be in the yard and anybody could approach me to
talk about things like how to make parole, how to deal with domestic
situations. The result was the prison authorities tagged me. When I
talked to the lieutenant about it, I said, "These are the same guys
that are going back into our communities, and if they go back in with
negative attitudes they are going to be destructive, they're going to
hurt people軌our family, my family, everybody else's families苔nd I'm
not going to ignore that, so I'm going to work with them."
But you can't get too close without being labeled, without it being
reported that you're associating with them. So I don't even go into
the yard anymore, but I still work with organizations that provide
information, education, insight, and skills to manage conflicts. You
get penalized if you try to work with these groups any closer than
that. It's almost as if the prison authorities want them to
proliferate, so they can have "X" amount of members or associates
documented and get funds for, quote unquote, anti-gang activities. I
don't know what the end is, other than everybody at some point will
end up in Big Brother's files.
CP: What would you do if you were released tomorrow?
MEC: With the rest of my life, I would try to get a house with a nice
garden and grow some food and smell the roses. I would still be
involved in developing good, positive communities, but I'm a big
supporter now of organic food, growing your own food, developing your
way to sustain yourself into the future. So I would want to do that
and encourage other people to do it.
--------
No Excuse
http://citypaper.com/news/no-excuse-1.1137778
Cop killer's treatise doesn't add up
By Edward Ericson Jr
Published: April 27, 2011
Marshall "Eddie" Conway has been a cause c幨鋐re among Baltimore
leftists for four decades, ever since his incarceration for the
murder of Baltimore Police officer Donald Sager began in 1970.
This celebrity has brought Conway occasional newspaper coverage;
peace-loving people of good will gather regularly to agitate for his
release. And he has a publisher苔ffording him a megaphone through
which to address the public. So Conway is different from other
convicted cop-killers. Supporters say this is because Conway is
unjustly imprisoned, his trial unfair要ot the same as being innocent,
but close enough. Conway is a victim of a government conspiracy, he
and they say. And it is a fact that this government conspiracy
(despite official denials) keeps dissidents under legally
questionable surveillance to this day. In the 1960s and '70s it was
called COINTELPRO貞hort for "counter-intelligence program." Once
secret, COINTELPRO is now, thanks to Sen. Frank Church's hearings
conducted in 1975-6, among the best-known police operations in U.S. history.
Read as a fast and loose (and derivative) primer on COINTELPRO, The
Greatest Threat is no worse苔nd no better負han the dozens of other
pamphlets cluttering the wire racks of places like Red Emma's. For
insight into what Conway did or didn't do, the book is worthless; he
neither proclaims his innocence nor confesses his crime. It is a
polemic, pure and simple, which sets out to prove that 1) the FBI's
illegal tactics were the cause of the Black Panther Party's demise苔s
well as the demise of many individual members; and 2) because of No.
1, those surviving members still incarcerated are "political
prisoners" entitled to special status, if not immediate release.
The book proves no such things. But it illuminates its author's
philosophy in ways that could, if his supporters read it carefully,
change some minds.
The Greatest Threat is a confused brief for the right of violent
revolution, and for kind and respectful treatment of failed
revolutionaries. As previous revolutionaries shouted "give me liberty
or give me death," or "we must all hang together or assuredly we will
all hang separately," Conway's position can be summed up as "give me
liberty because cops took us seriously."
He does not have the right to be set free though, because even if
shooting a cop is a political act苔nd it certainly can be虹t's also a
crime. Conway does not appear to understand that one does not get to
be a political prisoner for shooting a cop, even if it was for the
purest of political motives.
What is clear is that, even by this partisan's reckoning, the Black
Panther Party, established through a fusion of street criminals and
student Marxists in 1966, retained a thuggish mind-set in at least
equal measure with its political philosophy. And that mind-set衫ore
than any dirty tricks the feds played虹s what killed many Black Panthers.
Conway lays bare the gangster mentality that suffused Panther
ideology on pages 56 and 57, complaining that, "A series of poison
pen letters to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, Algeria from FBI agents
masquerading as BPP members caused a split between Newton and
Cleaver. That split resulted in the deaths of New York Panther
Captain Robert Webb and National Distribution Manager for the Panther
newspaper, Samuel Napier, and an unknown number of others. Both Webb,
a Cleaver supporter, and Napier, a Newton supporter, were
assassinated and the assassins remain unknown."
Reading this, an impressionable freshman might conclude that
government hit men did the dastardly deeds. But Conway is either
ignorant or disingenuous. It is widely understood that both men were
killed by fellow Panthers in the usual gangland style. One was gunned
down on the streets of New York. The other, in retaliation, was
tortured and murdered. Conway continues:
While the New York operations were affecting a national split, the
COINTELPRO operations in California, Chicago and elsewhere were
having a deadly effect. Agent provocateurs and FBI agents were
labeling key BPP members informers.
Conway calls the case of Fred Bennet an "excellent example" of law
enforcement's violence against the Party. But as Conway reveals in
his own text, Bennet was killed by Jimmy Carr苔 fellow Panther趴ho
burned the body.
In Conway's view, the FBI, writing letters and making false
allegations about snitches, committed an unpardonable crime that
"resulted in the deaths" of party members. The BPP members'
response苔ctually killing those alleged informants虹s pardonable,
even justifiable. That this is a Mafiosi's mentality seems not to
have occurred to Conway.
But the Panthers, remember, were not mobsters. They were
"revolutionaries," albeit of a peculiar kind: One of Fred Hampton's
"revolutionary" acts was robbing an ice cream truck on behalf of
neighborhood children. And that raises another contradiction in
Conway's argument. No war was declared against BPP, as it was against
Germany during WWII, Conway complains. "Nonetheless, citizens died
because of COINTELPRO's use."
In other words, when the BPP was organizing an armed insurrection to
overthrow the U.S. government (as it repeatedly claimed it was doing
in its own literature), members were a revolutionary vanguard unbound
by racist law or oppressive convention. But when police infiltrated
and the feds wrote poison pen letters苔nd members killed each
other負hen BPP members were "citizens" whose civil rights were violated.
In attempting to shape COINTELPRO's history into a brief for his
status as a "political prisoner" or "prisoner of war," Conway seeks
special consideration not available to mere criminals. The legal
strength of this case is not much debated: It is weak. No Black
Panther觔r anyone else虐as ever been granted political prisoner
status by a United States court.
The faithful take this as damning evidence that these revolutionaries
are political prisoners. Conway takes it on faith as well, asserting
that "at least 100" Panthers are political prisoners without defining
the term. Instead he draws comparisons to other insurrections and the
atrocities of Third World dictators, depicting Panthers as victims of
a "dirty war" and comparing U.S. actions against his comrades to the
war crimes of Argentina's 1970s junta, which dropped victims from
helicopters and "disappeared" more than 30,000 people.
For anyone familiar with recent Latin American history, the
equivalence might not be obvious. In Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, El
Salvador, and other nations, mere union members were tortured and
killed in the thousands. Neo-fascist paramilitary death squads shot
priests and raped nuns who were simply talking about getting people
fair wages or the right to vote.
Conway's political delusions, no doubt, are partly the product of his
incarceration. What is mystifying is his continued viability among
leftists, particularly those whose lifelong non-violent agitation on
behalf of peace repudiates Conway's sophism.
Two passages, mere pages apart, illustrate the confusion at the
center of Conway's argument. He writes, "Since almost every form of
agitation and protest is treated as criminal behavior, it is hard to
determine how many prisoners may be confined for agitation." And then
three pages later: "The overwhelming majority of BPP prisoners are
serving sentences [for incidents] that involved the shooting of
police or robbing banks."
Come the revolution, one supposes, shooting police and robbing banks
will not be crimes but solemn duties required of every citizen. Until
then, as Richard Pryor said, "Thank God we got penitentiaries."
-------
Panther Division
http://citypaper.com/news/panther-division-1.1144674
Published: May 11, 2011
I wish I were as convinced of Marshall "Eddie" Conway's guilt as
Edward Ericson Jr. is in his review of The Greatest Threat: The Black
Panther Party and COINTELPRO ("No Excuse," Feature, April 27). If I
were, it'd be easier to write Conway off and never have to think
about him again. And I had hoped for a better review of Conway's
work. It's one thing to qualify the author in a book review, but Ed
makes a huge leap in fact and logic that has skewed his sense of
history as well as his ability to fairly judge this work. The attempt
to turn Conway's words around on him as proof that the Panthers got
what they deserved is surprising, and I was also shocked at the
dismissive tone that runs throughout the review.
To be clear, I've heard Conway profess his innocence, and I've read
about his case, and I don't think it's as open and shut as this
review makes it seem.
Labeling someone a "cop killer" sure makes for great headlines. But
for the record, Conway and his supporters say he is innocent, has
been unjustly imprisoned, and had an unjust trial. The tone that runs
throughout this review makes me wonder why Ed would look past what
Conway and his supporters are actually saying and hear only "unjustly
imprisoned" and "his trial [was] unfair," then snottily pronounce
"not the same as being innocent, but close enough." So, OK. Ed thinks
the man is guilty.
But what about history? Here he picks parts of the book and adds his
preconceived opinion to write off things like COINTELPRO and the
Black Panther Party (BPP) as trivial events in U.S. history. I
wouldn't think to sum up the Panthers with phrases like "thuggish
mind-set" or "gangster mentality" without putting things into some
context. There must be more to it than this.
Instead Ed makes these sweeping generalizations about the BPP, while
ignoring the community-support programs the organization blended with
its survival programs. Things like the Ten Point Program (pp.
217-221), Breakfast for Children, and free medical clinics (discussed
pp. 32-34). Also ignored苔nd what the hell, while we're pointing
fingers虹s the fact that prior to the 1970s police acted pretty
thuggish toward African-Americans苟specially toward members of the
BPP. These generalizations overlook the context in which Black
Nationalism developed. Ask Emmett Till, lynched in 1955. Ask Charles
Mack Parker, lynched in 1959. Both lynchings happened during Conway's
lifetime, and both were murders that involved complicit law
enforcement officials. Bring it closer to present day and ask Rodney
King about Officer Friendly. Here in Baltimore, police higher-ups
still cook their books. Pretty gangster if you ask me.
What Ed calls a derivative primer, I call a welcomed addition to
understanding the history of the BPP苔nd the racism still rampant in
our country趴ritten by someone who lived it.
Joe Tropea
Baltimore
The writer is a former City Paper editorial staffer.
Thanks to City Paper for getting some good information out about
former Baltimore Black Panther leader Marshall "Eddie" Conway. But
Edward Ericson Jr.'s review of Conway's The Greatest Threat showed
many instances of prejudicial rancor for the subject of Conway's book
and places that sell such books. Limited space for this letter can
only cover a few examples.
First, Ericson erroneously described Conway's perfect-bound paperback
book as a "pamphlet," which he stated is "no worse苔nd no better負han
the dozens of" others "cluttering the wire racks of places like Red Emma's."
Ericson then presented Conway's conviction for "shooting a cop" as
fact, despite evidence that police framed Conway for exposing that a
National Security Agency undercover agent and several of his NSA
cohorts started his Baltimore Black Panther chapter. Pulitzer
Prize-winning writer Seymour Hersh wrote that the CIA and other
agencies worked with the FBI's Counterintelligence Program against leftists.
After police arrested Conway, a judge ordered Conway's release
because they didn't have a reason to hold him. When prosecutors took
Conway to court, the top evidence was testimony from a jail cellmate
who said Conway confessed to the crime. Years later, when
incarcerated for the crime, Conway's defense group hired an
investigator. It was discovered that the cellmate, Charles Reynolds,
was a career criminal and police informant commonly testifying to
"confessions" by other cellmates.
Ericson further mocked leftist leader Chicago Panther Fred Hampton.
He neglected to mention that Hampton had organized top anti-war
white, black, and Hispanic activist leaders in the first "rainbow
coalition." World-renowned linguist and leftist professor Noam
Chomsky traveled from Boston to attend the 21-year-old Panther's
funeral after police killed him in his bed.
Red Emma's displays some of Chomsky's "pamphlets," at least one of
which was a New York Times bestseller. The store also carries a
memoir, FBI Secrets, in which former FBI COINTELPRO Agent M. Wesley
Swearingen reported the Chicago FBI COINTELPRO chief admitting having
orchestrated the police execution of Hampton.
It's this sort of racist, murderous police behavior, often under the
direction of U.S. intelligence, which the Panthers struggled against.
What Ericson maliciously describes as the Panthers' "thuggish
mind-set" came out of the kind of self-preservation represented in
their founding name, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
Ericson also suggested Conway's comparison of U.S. intelligence's
behavior toward the Panthers and the Latin American "dirty war" was
unfounded. Not only were there many murderous parallels in both
sagas, but The New York Times exposed that the CIA's "Operation
Condor" aided the war on Latin American leftists.
And finally, Watergate muckraker Carl Bernstein published one of the
most important and little-known findings of Sen. Frank Church's
hearings, which Ericson mentioned. Bernstein said they found that
"more than 400 journalists had lived double lives maintaining covert
relationships with the CIA." That Bernstein listed most of the top
media owners as collaborating with the CIA might explain the kind of
antagonism toward leftists found in many articles such as Ericson's.
John Potash
Baltimore
Edward Ericson Jr. responds: Carl Bernstein's excellent work
notwithstanding, my status as a CIA agent can be neither confirmed nor denied.
.
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