"Angola is Still a Plantation": Fighting Back Against Legacies of Slavery

At the heart of Louisiana's prison system sits the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, a former slave plantation where little has changed in the last several hundred years. Angola has been made notorious from books and films such as Dead Man Walking and The Farm: Life at Angola, as well as its legendary bi-annual prison rodeo and The Angolite, a prisoner-written magazine published within its walls. Visitors are often overwhelmed by its size -- 18,000 acres that include a golf course (for use by prison staff and some guests), a radio station, and a massive farming operation that ranges from staples like soybeans and wheat to traditional Southern plantation crops like cotton.

Recent congressional attention has again brought Angola into the media limelight. The focus this time is on the prison's practice of keeping some inmates in solitary confinement for decades, especially two of Angola's most well-known residents -- Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Woodfox and Wallace are the remaining members of the Angola Three, political activists widely seen as having been interned in solitary confinement as punishment for their political activism.

Modern plantation

Norris Henderson, co-director of Safe Streets/Strong Communities, a grassroots criminal justice organization in New Orleans, spent twenty years at Angola -- a relatively short time in a prison where 85 percent of its 5,100 prisoners are expected to die behind its walls. "Six hundred folks been there over 25 years," he explains. "Lots of these guys been there over 35 years. Think about that: a population that's been there since the 1970s. Once you're in this place, it's almost like you ain't going nowhere, that barring some miracle, you're going to die there."

Prisoners at Angola still do the same work that enslaved Africans did there when it was a slave plantation. "Angola is a plantation," Henderson explains. "Eighteen-thousand acres of choice farmland. Even to this day, you could have machinery that can do all that work, but you still have prisoners doing it instead." Not only do prisoners at Angola toil at the same work as enslaved Africans hundreds of years ago, but many of the white guards come from families that have lived on the grounds since the plantation days.

Nathaniel Anderson, a current inmate at Angola who has served nearly thirty years of a lifetime sentence, agrees. "People on the outside should know that Angola is still a plantation with every type and kind of slave conceivable," he says.

Prison organizing

In 1971, the Black Panther Party was seen as a threat to this country's power structure -- not only in the inner cities, but even in the prisons. At Orleans Parish Prison, the New Orleans city jail, the entire jail population refused to cooperate for one day in solidarity with New Orleans Panthers who were on trial. "I was in the jail at the time of their trial," Henderson tells me. "The power that came from those guys in the jail, the camaraderie … Word went out through the jail, because no one thought the Panthers were going to get a fair trial. We decided to do something. We said, 'The least we can do is to say the day they are going to court, no one is going to court.'"

The action was successful, and inspired prisoners to do more. "People saw what happened and said, 'We shut down the whole system that day,'" he remembers. "That taught the guys that if we stick together we can accomplish a whole lot of things."

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were members of the Black Panther Party, and as prison activists, they were seen as threats to the established order of the prison. From their first day, they were organizing among the other prisoners, conducting political education, and mobilizing for civil disobedience to improve conditions.