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| (PHOTO: Angela A. Allen-Bell joins Amnesty International in support of the Angola 3 outside of the Louisiana State Capitol on April 17, 2012.) |
Terrorism,
COINTELPRO, and the Black Panther Party
--An interview
with law professor Angela A. Allen-Bell
By Angola 3 News
This
past July, students from Northwestern University’s Medill Justice Project visited
the infamous Louisiana State Prison known as Angola. While there, students
landed an impromptu interview with Warden Burl Cain, where they asked him about
an inmate at Angola named Kenny ‘Zulu’ Whitmore, who has now been in solitary confinement
for 28 consecutive years. This important interview was cited afterwards by Time Magazine in an article examining the impact of solitary confinement on
prisoners’ health.
Zulu
Whitmore is a member of the Angola Prison chapter of the Black Panther Party
(BPP) that was first started in the early 1970s by Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox
of the Angola 3. In reply to the students’ question about Whitmore, Cain cited
his affiliation with the Angola BPP and expressed concern that Whitmore could
spread his beliefs in the prison, sparking violence among inmates. “The Black
Panther Party advocates violence and racism—I’m not going to let anybody walk
around advocating violence and racism,” Cain said. At the time of publication, Whitmore remains in solitary confinement.
Burl Cain’s characterization of the BPP as “advocating violence and racism” is reminiscent of a deposition he gave on October 22, 2008, following Albert Woodfox’s second overturned conviction, where Cain cited Woodfox’s affiliation with the BPP as a primary reason for not removing him from solitary confinement. Asked what gave him “such concern” about Woodfox, Cain stated: “He wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant.” Cain then stated that even if Woodfox were innocent of the murder, he would want to keep him in solitary, because “I still know he has a propensity for violence…he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates.”
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| (PHOTO: Albert Woodfox, left, with Kenny 'Zulu' Whitmore, right, in 2009.) |
The
remarks by Burl Cain in 2008 and 2014 are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when it
comes to misrepresenting the Black Panther Party. “Until history is accurately
told, this type of misinformation will live on and we will all suffer as a
result of it,” argues Southern University Law professor Angela A. Allen-Bell in
the interview featured below. Her new article, published by the Journal of Law and Social Deviance,
entitled “Activism Unshackled & Justice Unchained: A Call to Make a Human
Right Out of One of the Most Calamitous Human Wrongs to Have Taken Place on
American Soil,” turns the tables on the anti-BPP rhetoric by asking if what the
BPP sustained at the hands of government officials is itself akin to domestic
terrorism.