Jordan
Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine,
and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring
the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and audiences
around the world have seen the television reports he’s produced
for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now.
Flaherty’s
most recent articles have tackled a variety of important
stories. His article, Jena
Sheriff Seeks Revenge for Civil Rights Protests, follows
up on the Jena Six story and exposes a wave of post-Jena
6 arrests directed at activists and the Black community
in general. New
Complaints of Police Violence in New Orleans, reports
that “New Orleans' Black and transgender community members
and advocates complain of rampant and systemic harassment
and discrimination from the city's police force, including
sexual violence and arrest without cause,” and then the
article provides a voice to the activists who are fighting
back. Did
a White Sheriff and District Attorney Orchestrate a Race-Based
Coup in a Northern Louisiana Town? focuses on a town
called Waterproof, where “the African American mayor and
police chief assert that they have been forced from office
and arrested as part of an illegal coup carried out by an
alliance of white politicians and their followers.”
This
summer, Haymarket Books will release his new book, Floodlines:
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six ,
and this fall he will be touring with the Community
and Resistance Tour. Contact him at
[email protected].
Angola
3 News: Can you please tell us about your upcoming
book?
Jordan
Flaherty: Floodlines is a firsthand account
of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans in
the years before and after Katrina. The book weaves the
interconnected stories of prisoners at Angola, Mardi Gras
Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents,
gay rappers, spoken word poets, victims of police brutality,
out of town volunteers, and grassroots activists.
From
post-Katrina evacuee camps to organizing with the family
members of the Jena Six, Floodlines is the real story behind
the headlines. The protagonists of this book are the people
who have led the fight to save New Orleans.
A3N:
What will it show readers about New Orleans and LA
that they won’t get from the corporate media?
JF:
If this city is going to recover, the first step is getting
out the truth that New Orleans is not okay. Most of the
country believes either that New Orleans has been rebuilt,
or that, if not, it’s because people here are lazy and/or
corrupt and wasted the nation’s generous assistance. But
New Orleans is still a city in crisis. The oft-promised
aid, whether from FEMA or various federal and private agencies,
has not arrived. We don’t need charity, but we do need the
federal and corporate entities responsible for the devastation
of New Orleans to be held accountable for supporting its
rebuilding. I want the world to know that it’s not too late
to make a difference.
The
other crucial element of this book is a tribute to grassroots
resistance and culture in New Orleans. People like Sunni
Patterson, Norris Henderson, Rosana Cruz, Sess 4-5, and
the many other organizers and culture workers who have cultivated
this steadfast resistance.
A3N:
What is one of your favorite stories from the book?
JF:
A central story I focus on is the case of the Jena Six,
and the people’s victory it represents. Our movements should
be proud of what happened in Jena. We should claim it as
a success. Fifty thousand people marched in Jena, in a mass
movement led by the family members of these six kids who
were facing life in prison for a school fight. These Jena
families didn’t have the corporate media behind them, they
didn’t have money or mainstream civil rights organizations
supporting them. All of that came eventually. But for months,
these families were on their own, and they kept struggling
and fighting for justice against incredible odds.
The
massive national support these courageous families brought
together helped the students. All of them remained in school
rather than going to prison – and they are all now either
in college or on their way. Without the world watching,
the DA and judge could have done whatever they wanted.
Jena
was more than a historical moment. I think that the young
people from around the US – and especially the south – who
traveled to Jena for the mass protests, and who also organized
in solidarity in their own community, will continue to lead
exciting struggles. I think we will see a Jena Generation.
A3N:
You have written several articles focusing on the
Angola 3. How do you think the story of the Angola 3 fits
into the broader picture of injustice in Louisiana?
JF:
Every year, thousands of New Orleanians are shipped upstate
(or upriver) to prisons like Angola and Elayn Hunt. In telling
the story of New Orleans, it’s important to tell the story
of these institutions.
The
United States has the largest incarcerated population of
any nation on earth—the people imprisoned here represent
25 percent of all prisoners around the world. Nationwide,
more than seven million people are in U.S. jails, on probation,
or on parole, and African Americans are incarcerated at
nearly ten times the rate of whites. Our criminal justice
system has become an insatiable machine—even when crime
rates go down, the prison population keeps rising.
The
state of Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration
in the United States—816 sentenced prisoners per 100,000
state residents. By comparison, Texas places a distant second
with 694 per 100,000. African Americans make up 32 percent
of Louisiana’s population but they constitute 72 percent
of the state’s prison population.
Prison
makes us all less free—by breaking up families and communities,
by dehumanizing the imprisoned both during and after, by
perpetuating a cycle of poverty, and by making all citizens
complicit in the incarceration of their fellow human beings.
Since so many New Orleanians live in prisons around the
state, the stories from these prisons are also the stories
of New Orleans itself. Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola,
Orleans Parish Prison, and all the other prisons of this
state are central to the narrative of New Orleans’s poor
and dispossessed.
Angola
or another “lifers’ prison” is frequently the final stop
on an unjust journey that begins with children born into
substandard health care and housing; then shuttled into
a school system that treats them like criminals from a young
age; then left with few job options in a tourism-based economy
in which corporations such as those that own the city’s
hotels profit while the residents are left out; and finally
entangled in a criminal justice system that treats them
as guilty until proven innocent. This is the “cradle-to-prison
pipeline,” and nowhere is it more entrenched than here in
New Orleans.
Perhaps
the most dramatic example of the injustice perpetrated by
this system is the case the Angola Three, locked in solitary
confinement because of their political beliefs.
Statements
by Angola warden Burl Cain have made clear that Woodfox
and Wallace are being punished for their political views.
At a 2009 deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain,
“Let’s just for the sake of argument assume, if you can,
that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller.” Cain
responded, “Okay. I would still keep him in [solitary]…I
still know that 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. I would
have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and
I would have the Blacks chasing after them....He has to
stay in a cell while he's at Angola.”
Louisiana
attorney general James “Buddy” Caldwell has said the case
against the Angola Three is “personal” to him. These statements
by Caldwell and Cain indicate that this kind of vigilante
attitude not only pervades the DOC, but that the mindset,
in fact, comes from the very top.
The
problem is not limited to Louisiana State Penitentiary at
Angola—similar stories can be found in prisons across the
country. American Friends Service Committee reported that
on any given day in the United States, up to two hundred
thousand men and women are held in solitary confinement.
The director of the ACLU’s National Prisoner Project, Elizabeth
Alexander, told reporters, “If you look at the iconic pictures
from Abu Ghraib, you can match up these photos with the
same abuses at American prisons, each one of them.”
A
2008 legal petition filed by Herman Wallace echoed Alexander’s
words. “If Guantanamo Bay has been a national embarrassment
and symbol of the US government’s relation to charges, trials
and torture, then what is being done to the Angola Three…
is what we are to expect if we fail to act quickly….The
government tries out its torture techniques on prisoners
in the US—just far enough to see how society will react.
It doesn’t take long before they unleash their techniques
on society as a whole.” If we don’t stand up against this
abuse now, it will only spread, he argued. The vigilante
violence enacted on the streets of New Orleans after Katrina—condoned
and carried out in part by the police—is one example of
the truth of Wallace’s predictions.
The
case of the Angola Three is truly an international issue,
and Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King are an
important part of the city’s civil rights history. Among
those who know this history, the Angola Three are an urgent
and ongoing concern.
A3N:
Any closing thoughts?
JF:
Those who have not experienced New Orleans have missed an
incredible, glorious, vital city—a place with an energy
unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority–African American
city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated
and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture
of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and hip-hop to secondlines,
Mardi Gras Indians, and jazz funerals, New Orleans is a
place of art and music and food and liberation.
New
Orleans is a city of slave revolts and uprisings. In 1811,
the largest slave uprising in U.S. history was launched
just upriver, as more than five hundred armed formerly enslaved
fighters marched toward New Orleans, partially inspired
by the Haitian revolution. As one historian described, “The
leaders [of the revolt] were intent on creating an [enslaved
persons] army, capturing the city of New Orleans, and seizing
state power throughout the area.” Although the revolt was
defeated, it inspired more over the following years.
In
1892, Homer Plessy and the Citizens Committee planned the
direct action that brought the first (unsuccessful) legal
challenge to the doctrine of "separate but equal"—the
challenge that became the Supreme Court case of Plessy v.
Ferguson. Plessy, part of a community of Creole Black intellectuals
and community leaders, boarded an all-white railcar after
notifying the railroad company and law enforcement in advance.
While the action was ultimately unsuccessful, it was an
important turning point in this long history of locally
led resistance to racist laws.
You
could say the spirit of the Panthers was born in Louisiana.
The Deacons for Defense, an armed self-defense group formed
in rural central Louisiana in 1964, inspired the Panthers
and other radical groups. The Deacons went on to form twenty-one
chapters in rural Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, continuing
a legacy of defiance that inspired future generations. Several
civil rights workers and future revolutionaries were born
in this state, including Black Panther leader Geronimo Ji-Jaga,
born in Morgan City, and founder Huey P. Newton, born in
Monroe. Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, also known as H. Rap Brown,
former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and later the justice minister of the Black Panther
Party, was from Baton Rouge. Chicago Black Panther Fred
Hampton’s parents were also from Louisiana.
So
there is an intense and terrible history of racism and white
supremacy in New Orleans, but also an incredible history
of resistance, and that is what I am trying to pay tribute
to in Floodlines.
--Angola
3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to
Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com
where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We
are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight
the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism,
repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement
as torture, and more. |
Jun
3, 2010 - Issue 378
is
published every Thursday
