Albert Woodfox, Activist Wrongfully Imprisoned for 43 Years, Dies at 75

Albert Woodfox, a wrongfully imprisoned Black Panther activist who spent his 43 years in solitary confinement uplifting himself and others before finally being freed in 2019, died Thursday of complications from Covid-19 at age 75.

“With heavy hearts, we write to share that our partner, brother, father, grandfather, comrade, and friend, Albert Woodfox, passed away this morning,” Woodfox’s family said in a statement. “Whether you know him as Fox, Shaka, Cinque, or Albert—he knew you as family. Please know that your care, compassion, friendship, love, and support have sustained Albert, and comforted him.”

The family added that Woodfox was a “liberator” who inspired Americans to “think more deeply about mass incarceration, prison abuse, and racial injustice.”

Civil rights attorney and former NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill called Woodfox “one of the most extraordinary human beings I’ve ever met.”

“He deserved more time to experience his freedom, but what he did with [the] time he had was transformative,” she tweeted. “May he rest in eternal peace and power.”

In 1971, Woodfox was serving a 50-year sentence for armed robbery at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a former slave plantation then known as one of America’s toughest prisons. That year, he and fellow inmates Herman Wallace and Robert King formed a chapter of the Black Panthers to combat the rampant rape and sex trafficking, violence, and horrific living conditions at the prison.

They organized strikes and sit-downs, earning the respect of many of the prison’s Black inmates and raising the ire of racist prison officials.

“Our cells were meant to be death chambers but we turned them into schools, into debate halls,” Woodfox told The Guardian after his release in 2019. “We used the time to develop the tools that we needed to survive, to be part of society and humanity, rather than becoming bitter and angry and consumed by a thirst for revenge.”

On April 17, 1972, Angola guard Brent Miller was stabbed to death at the prison. Woodfox, Herman Wallace, and Robert King—the Angola Three—faced charges of the killing and ended up in solitary confinement.

The courts tried and convicted Woodfox for Miller’s murder but later overturned both convictions. A judge ruled in 2008 that Woodfox was denied due process, citing ineffective legal counsel and questionable evidence in his trials. Woodfox’s lawyers also successfully argued that the state bought Woodfox’s conviction, whose case relied heavily upon the testimony of jailhouse informants rewarded for their cooperation.

Woodfox always maintained his innocence, claiming that the state wrongfully punished him for Miller’s murder because of his political activism.

Originally published at Commondreams.org.