From the "Life and Death of the SLA" Les Payne and Tim Findley

CHAPTER 1:ESCAPE

Prison is the test of the people's fidelity. When the doors of the prison are opened, The real dragon will fly out. Ho Chi Minh

PRISON

DonaId David DeFreeze had spent much of his life as escapee.

• At fourteen, he ran away from home. During his teens, be drifted from home to home of friends and relatives in Buffalo, ever mindful of the possibility of being identified by authorities and returned to his family in Cleveland. He married an older woman with three children, and for the next half dozen years, DeFreeze struggled to free himself of his wife’s dominance. His had been a life of retreat from forces seeking to hem him in. His encounters with the law, ~before the final prison sentence, were marked by bold ~ escapes or by bargaining his way to release.

 As a youth, the slender DeFreeze was sensitive, moody, often alone. He had a solemn, narrow face (with quiet brooding eyes, and he passed scarcely noticed on the black mean streets of Cleveland. Primary school teachers and fellow students remember him hardly at all. Those who do especially recall his hollow voice with a certain alien quality about it. Though husky and capable of passion, it seemed somehow affected, like the ecclesiastical voice painstakingly cultivated by black ghetto boys preparing for a career of whooping in the Baptist pulpit.

DeFreeze’s father, Louis, was an iron-willed laborer from San. Antonio who, at forty-three, had married the gentle Mary, twenty years younger and up from Mississippi. During the postwar years Louis moved in and out of employment's as a welder, machinist, and odd-jobs man. He struggled to steer his family on a course of upward mobility.

Between pregnancies, his wife worked as a rest home nurse. "Sometimes I had two or three jobs going at the same time," she recalled. "I really worked my fingers to the bone."

The family moved into a three-bedroom brick house in suburban Glenville in 1954. No one was more excited about the move out to the predominantly white community than ten-year-old Donald. For he had become more and more alienated in the tough, predominantly black inner-city housing project the family was leaving behind. Gleefully, he would describe to his new neighbors each home Improvement his parents made: .the new drapes, the cabinets, even the bathroom fixtures. It was the family’s first major achievement.

But in their striving, the DeFreeze family was pulled apart. The father turned to the bottle with increasing frequency. He grew more impatient with his children. Always given to disciplining them by force, Louis became more single-minded than ever about resorting to violence as a means of solving family problems. Neighbors were more and more frequently exposed to his rowdy rages. Louis was one of the many black men who, finding themselves powerless in the larger society, vent their rage on their families; rabbits in the outside world, but lions at home.

Donald, the eldest of eight children, was most often the target of his father’s rampages. Three times, the son recalled, Louis attempted to kill him. The leathery, strong-bodied old man regularly beat his thin twelve-year-old with bare fists, and sometimes with a hammer and baseball bat. The sensitive DeFreeze would frequently stay away from school rather than expose the numerous bruises and cuts he bore a result of those sessions. Before Donald had even entered high school, his father had broken one of the boy’s arms on three separate occasions.

In the face of this brutality, Mrs. DeFreeze tried against all odds to save her household from becoming perpetual Donnybrook. Her steadying influence endured to spare most of her children the permanent

physical and psychological damage so common from such battering. But the scars, the assaults, and the rejection by his father would combine to influence Donald’s later behavior, to shape and mold the structure of his life.

Donald was a bright but indifferent student. By the time he entered the ninth grade he had been apprehended several times by Cleveland police for loitering and for stealing cars. Once he was arrested for stealing a gun, a pistol with which he said he intended to kill his father.

By the time he escaped his father’s wrath and his troubled life in Cleveland, DeFreeze was an embittered confused young teen-ager. In Buffalo he lived for a while with a cousin and later, for two years, boarded with a Baptist minister. Enterprising and full of energy, DeFreeze collected and sold rags, paper, and scrap metal. He became immersed in fundamentalism, especially the fire-and-brimstone interpretation of the Old Testament. He lent his voice to hymns at the minister’s church, and to a bit of the whooping and heaving so common to aspiring black Baptist preachers. He even toyed briefly with the idea of becoming a minister. Throughout his life, especially when times got hard, DeFreeze was to return to the comfort he had found in the Psalms and Proverbs of the Old Testament, and to that moan and rumble of black spirituals.

Still DeFreeze did not stay out of trouble. He was arrested for breaking into parking meters and in 1960, was Sent to Elmira State School for auto theft. After serving two years of a three-year sentence, he was paroled to New Jersey.

DeFreeze took up the craft of house-painting.

Employers in Newark remember him as skilled, energetic, and very reliable. his peers on those pickup jobs were idlers and drifters who would work a day or so and move on. "DeFreeze always came to work on time," one employer said. "He was very industrious, never complained about having to work overtime."

In June of 1963, DeFreeze married Gloria Thomas twenty-three, the mother of three small children. Relatives and friends advised the nineteen-year-old not to marry the older woman and assume the responsibility of supporting her family. Even the Newark minister who married them counseled DeFreeze against it.

"She was far more mature than he was," the minister recalled. "He was young, reserved, and immature. He listened to me quietly for hours, and decided to go ahead and get married. I knew that there would be trouble later on."

DeFreeze had known trouble all his life. He saw Gloria as a woman who would accept him as he was. For the first time there was the possibility of finding a family, fitting in.

"She was nice and lovely," DeFreeze said of his

bride in a letter years later. "I fell in love with her. I believe I was just glad and happy that anyone would have me the way I was. Life really became real for me."

The DeFreezes were an ideal couple at the outset. Gloria was strict with the children, though they were seldom spanked. "She would always tell them to walk; quietly down the stairs," one neighbor said. "You usually couldn’t tell that they were up there. The children were always well dressed, with ribbons in -their hair.

She usually changed their clothes two times a day. They polished and waxed their place, she kept everything neat. She even waxed the stairs outside of the apartment. Gloria put so much money into that apartment."

The couple lived in a predominantly white section of East Orange, New Jersey. Their rent was $115- a month, $20 higher than that paid by white residents in the building. The DeFreezes’ immaculate apartment was outfitted with modem furniture, custom drapes, and sparkling chandeliers. DeFreeze installed an intercom system in the children’s bedroom so that they could be listened to or easily summoned.

For the first time in his life DeFreeze had a family untroubled by conflict and brutality. But even as grew fond of his wife’s three children, he yearned for a son of his own. Gloria, too, was a striver. She continually pressed her husband for better furniture, expensive clothes, more income. DeFreeze worked a house painter, furniture repairman, and interior decorator. And even though he set up his own firm, the House of DeFreeze, he never managed to achieve what she expected of him financially. She minimized his contribution to the family’s welfare, ridiculing him before her children and neighbors. She began to treat in condescendingly, as if he were one of the children. It was the start of serious trouble in the marriage.

Barely a year after their marriage, DeFreeze was arrested for deserting his family.

After they were reconciled, the impending arrival of the couples first child of their own seemed to draw them together for a while. The sensitive prospective grew anxious as the months wore on. "When

Gloria went to the hospital to have his first child Donald almost died," a neighbor recalled. "He couldn’t do enough for her. He didn't want her to raise a finger. She had to tell him, ‘Donald, I can walk. For goodness sake, people have babies every day."

He was disappointed that his first child was a girl. After that, with the increase in expenses and Gloria’s escalating demands, DeFreeze began to withdraw from his marital situation. He spent days and nights at a time in New York. City. And he turned to what would become his life’s passion—guns and firearms.

On March 9, 1965, that passion drew serious attention from the police. Neighbors at 189 Elwood Avenue in East Orange heard a loud explosion coming from the basement. It was near noon.

"I didn’t know what it was," one neighbor said,

"There was an awfully loud noise and smoke was everywhere."

In response to a white neighbor’s call, firemen arrived, then the police. DeFreeze told them that had had simply set off a firecracker in the basement. The firemen withdrew. The police, however, wanted evidence. So DeFreeze led them to his basement, where:

they found his rifle in a cabinet. He was arrested.

the stationhouse, police discovered a homemade-bomb in his pocket. The rifle was a 7.62-caliber Russian Moisin bolt action assembled from parts of several other guns. The "extremely hazardous" bomb was shrapnel enclosed in a bamboo shoot. A search of DeFreeze’s apartment turned up one rifle, twenty-two rounds of ammunition, one round of blank ammunition, -one rifle magazine loaded with thirty pounds-of .30-caliber carbine ammunition, a box containing twenty-eight rounds of .30-caliber carbine ammunition, one .32-caliber bullet, six .22-caliber bullets, nine .22 blanks, and seventeen empty cartridges.

DéFreeze told police he had that day purchased the rifle from a Forty-Second Street gun store for $l6.95~ and had bought additional ammunition from anther gun shop. He had consulted his catalogue of gun books at home, cleaned the rifle, sawed eight inches off the eighteen-inch barrel, loaded it, and fired three b1ank into a closed barrel. He then fired a live shell, which started the trouble. The bomb, he said, had been made the day before in his shop, and he had planned to set it off in the country with a couple of dry-cell batteries.

Gloria was furious.

- DeFreeze was indicted before a grand jury for discharging firearms within the city limits. At the tune of his arrest, an FBI check had been run on him to find out if he had any Black Muslim connections. The confidential report was filed as negative. (By the time this case was due for hearing, DeFreeze was awaiting trial in Los Angeles on a multitude of charges, including possession of a bomb and the sale of firearms.)

It was a nervous time for whites around, Newark, -indeed in all communities around New York City. The Nation of Islam was being harassed by police and the FBI. On February 21, Malcolm. X had been assassinated in a New York City ballroom and his followers were said to be in open warfare with those of Elijah Muhammad, from whose sect Malcolm had defected. No one had yet been indicted for the assassination.

As is usually the case in times of open racial conflicts, whites cut their eyes suspiciously at blacks. DeFreeze, the head of one of the building’s. two black families had a strange, irregular pattern of coming and going.

After the explosion, white tenants in the apartment quickly moved to safer terrain. "They all got in a big hurry," DeFreeze’s elderly black neighbor. "The rent jumped up, too."

When DéFreeze was freed on $500 bail he had to face Gloria. "She said, ‘I told you not to do that.’ She didn't screech and scream. She talked to him the same way she would talk to the kids if they had done something wrong."

Soon after, the DeFreezes were forced to leave the apartment. He would remain bitter about the incident, telling some Vacaville inmates years later that was something of a turning point on his road to gunrunning and crime.

Re had business cards printed up and got jobs from various real estate agencies, but The House of DeFreeze interior-decorating firm was floundering. He was now branded a Black Muslim in the community, despite the FBI's findings. He felt that people were refusing to do business with him because of the rumors.

DeFreeze became discouraged. "It was [his] last venture in black capitalism," said a close friend. "The refused to do business with him. He was disappointed in people, period. He hadn’t been able to successfully make it as a good American. So he told me

that he became a very big burglar and armed robber." Near the end of March 1965, DeFreeze traveled

alone to Los Angeles. Shortly after his arrival, on March 31, police found him hitchhiking on the San. Bernardino Freeway without identification and armed with a teargas pencil bomb, a sharpened butter knife and a sawed-off shotgun in his suitcase. He was convicted; his sentence was the two-and-a-half months he had served in jail awaiting trial.

In June, DeFreeze was arrested in Newark for possession of a bomb. Shortly after that, he took his family to Los Angeles. But his frequent trips, his gunrunning and encounters with police continued.

In 1967, DeFreeze was given a three-year probation for carrying a concealed weapon. After stopping him for running a red light on his bicycle, Los Angeles police had. found two homemade bombs and a .22-caliber revolver in the bicycle’s basket. On December 2 of that year, still on probation, he was again arrested for carrying a pistol, which he had stolen from a military supply house in Los Angeles. DeFreeze agreed to lead police to the entire cache of stolen weapons. However, on reaching the apartment, the agile prisoner suddenly, leaped to freedom out of the second-story window. Four days later he was recaptured, and this time he led police to the apartment of his crime partner, where they found "approximately two hundred weapons" stolen from the military supply house on November 11, 1967.

No doubt owing to his co-operation in this case and others, DeFreeze was again placed on probation, this time for five years, and, on December 13, 1968, he was sent to Chino prison for psychological evaluation. In spite of the Chino recommendation that he be "committed to the California Department of Corrections," he remained on probation.

Life in Southern California was not going well for the DeFreeze family. DeFreeze would unexpectedly go off on trips, hustling firearms or riding out some other wandering binge, in between working at whatever jobs he could get. The family was allocated $370 a month by county welfare but DeFreeze spent most the money before Gloria ever saw it. He had become a moderate user of barbiturates and alcohol, although seldom anything stronger. The ill health of his family complicated the situation. One of the six children was a chronic asthmatic, another had a defective heart; one of the boys had had a hernia operation, and Gloria had been hospitalized for a while. DeFreeze took what jobs his education and opportunity would allow—laborer, short-order cook, painter.

Some of his employers simply laid him off, and several of the jobs were dead ends from the start. After completing a six-week course in aircraft assembly, he was turned down for a job at Lockheed because he was on probation.

Gloria saw little chance for a stable life in California, with her husband drinking, drifting in and out of jail, and. always a potential target of arrest warrants. In ‘June of 1969, acquiescing to her pressure, he-took his family back to Cleveland.

-There the indictments crept closer to DeFreeze. On October 11, 1969, he was arrested with burglary tools on the roof of the Cleveland Trust Company, which happened to be only eight blocks from where his mother lived (his father had died in January of that year). To spare her possible embarrassment, he bid behind the alias "Steven Robinson." But the charge, a1ong with another in Cleveland and several in New Jersey, would go unanswered. DeFreeze went back to Los Angeles, alone this time. He would not be reunited with his family again.

~.One of the more curious alleged crimes of which DeFreeze had been accused involved a kidnapping in Newark, which probably never took place at all. He was identified as the May 9, 1969, abductor of a building guard whom he supposedly held for a $5,000 ransom. DeFreeze was acquitted after court records showed that at the time of the crime he was in California. A lawyer for a co-defendant in the case recalled DeFreeze’s animated statement about abduction: "Kidnapping, man, that just ain’t my bag."

Politics had not yet entered DeFreeze’s thinking. It is true that he sold guns to political groups—the Black Panthers, Ron Karena’s United Slaves (US), and others—-but it - was strictly for profit and the fueling of his firearms fascination. That fascination had not been lost on the Chino prison guidance staff, who, in their 1968 report, referred to DeFreeze as "an emotionally confused and conflicting young man with deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy," noted his childhood problems is with his father, and concluded that his "fascination is with firearms and explosives made him dangerous."It was for that reason that they had recommended a prison sentence.

In the few months that he spent at Chino, the troubled DeFreeze began to fix the face that would be familiar to prison officials for the next several years. He was the picture of regeneration, self-healing, and old-time religion. In his letter to the court he wrote: "The man I am now is nowhere near the same man, or rather boy I was when I went to Chino. When I went there I fond [sic] that the people there would really try and help if you had any problems but like all help, you had to be willing to be helped . . . it was up to me just what kind of man came home, the old Donald, or a new and better Donald, I made up my mind for the better one . . . sometimes [it] took many tears to face the truth, but with God’s help I both found myself and changed my outlook on life, my biggest problem was the growing up and boy it was hard to face the facts that I was just not acting [sic] my age, but finally I got the word.

"I’m a lot different man now . . . I tore myself apart up at Chino to see what makes me tick. I was acting like a young fool. . . and now all I can think about is my family out there and what I’ve done to them."

That was DeFreeze the apolitical gunrunner. There is no record of what he later made of this performance. But his expressed concern for his family was genuine; it was a dilemma that he never really solved. His letter of appeal, coupled with his record of cooperation with police and pleading letters from his wife, won him the continuation of probation instead of Chino-recommended prison sentence.

But the string of maneuvers ended a year later, in December 1969, when his probation was revoked and he was sentenced to the California prison system for armed robbery and assault. The bill of particulars for his conviction describes him as relieving a Los Angeles woman of her $1,000 cashier’s check at gunpoint and attempting to cash it. After arousing the suspicions of the bank manager, DeFreeze wandered at of the building and, in due course, was pursued y the police. In the early stages of the chase, DeFreeze, according to court records, "began, a gun battle with the officers which ended only when the defendant’s weapon was empty and he had- been minded in the hand and foot. No other persons were injured."

For DeFreeze this conviction marked the end of the apolitical-gunrunner phase of his life, a phase that had really begun the first time he was picked up with a gun as a juvenile in Cleveland. The ninth-grade dropout whose first serious appetite - for reading had moved mm to study the gun specifications and nomenclature n- weapons manuals - and rifle magazines was now a twenty-seven-year-old man whose lifelong penchant or guns and bombs could be traced through his arrest record—possession of weapons and bombs, burglary ~f gun shops, sale of unauthorized weapons, discharging firearms within city limits, burglary....

DeFreeze entered prison as he had entered Buffalo ears earlier: - with an overwhelming sense of defeat and rejection. His bargaining power with police and judges had been spent. -He had been unable to feed Is family. His wife had lost -hope in him. "I just couldn’t take it anymore," he wrote to a friend. "I was slowly becoming a nothing."

His first days in Vacaville prison did nothing to change his feeling of hopelessness. Hard eyes, confidence, and time served at the big maximum-security houses—like Folsom, Quentin, and Soledad—were prerequisites for respect on the Vacaville tiers. DeFreeze was small time, troubled, and suspicious. He was, in prison terminology, a "fish"—an inmate with small and uncertain baggage among convicts who had survived a hundred knife and pistol fights, who bad mastered every note and scale of prison life.

But in these strange waters, DeFreeze would prove an enduring, if odd, fish.

There is a sense of foreboding about Vacaville prison, as there is about prisons generally these days. During DeFreeze’s stay there—until January 1973—- most of the inmates were struggling simply to stay afloat on the sea of regulation "programs" and policy changes that washed incessantly over them. Vacavile is a state "medical facility" designed to handle inmates whose problems require treatment less brutal than that offered at the maximum-security houses. The behavior modification programs in which inmates are placed are carefully designed and closely monitored by psychiatrists. Inmates usually adjust to their programs with the single purpose of earning an early parole.

In the group-therapy program DeFreeze became one of the most respected members of the collection of inmates that met twice a week for about three hours and discussed their crimes, their lives, their aspirations. The thoughts DeFreeze expressed centered almost exclusively on his disagreements with his wife, remorse over his crime life, and mild recommendations for prison reform. As a result of his group performance he was characterized as a model prisoner—for staff officials took these sessions seriously, far more seriously than the inmate participants.

"Group therapy consists of sitting around and talking," one of DeFreeze’s group mates said. "I don’t know what the scientific objective is behind it, but the mechanics of it is that you sit around and shoot the shit; and like, brothers in the joint have got a lot of, shit to shoot. We would shoot some tall guns."

• In a prison of whatever classification, a man facing long sentence usually withdraws into himself, his ethnic group, or the small knot of inmates he finds himself trusting. DeFreeze quickly found himself trusting a small group of black inmates "off the block," who, like inmates everywhere, spent a great deal of me plotting the shortest route to parole. In between time they talked and grappled with the ideas they discovered in the books that made their way within the wall.

Books became important to DeFreeze very soon after he entered Vacaville. At first he sought the escape offered by paperback pornographic novels and men’s magazines, both of which he acquired through prison contacts. But with an increasing awareness of the ~hlack influence on radical politics, DeFreeze, like many other inmates, began to seek out the writings of those seminal thinkers who could help explain the black man’s place in the world. It was the first step in what he later saw as his political conversion.

~.His need to find a self-identity that would explain Find justify his past, and perhaps offer some ambers of hope for the future, led him also to the writings of the mind scientists. Perhaps they might unravel the puzzle of why his marriage had failed, as had his life generally, and suggest ways to, as he put it, "gain better insight into how to handle day-to-day problems.

"DeFreeze spent the majority of his time in the joint reading," said Ron Eagles, who served time with him in Vacaville. "Every time I’d catch him, I’d catch him with a book; either that or working. He was always doing something, applying himself. He wasn’t an idle dude. He was always concerned about black people’s position in struggle, black people’s position m the American society, on his particular position as a black man in relation to society, especially a black convict"

For politics, DeFreeze read heavily in the works of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah and a multitude of other black thinkers who examined under glass the nature of the oppression of Third World people at the hands of Europeans. But it was George Jackson who would strike the most responsive chord, not only in explaining the past but in laying out a future course of action for the energetic and sensitive DeFreeze. Following Jackson’s bibliography, DeFreeze began in 1971 to devour Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, but his more parochial outlook made him despair of the dense scientific discourses on dialectical materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He found more to his liking the swift concrete guerrilla strokes of the Tupamaros of Uruguay, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. DeFreeze had always been a man of action, not much given to theory and abstractions and. lengthy discourse. Later, in the formation of the Symbionese Liberation Army, he forbade his followers— who were steeped in Marxist theory—even to use the vocabulary of the Left borrowed from alien Marxists: "Let’s use words that the people understand," be commanded.

By 1972, jailed blacks and Chicanos had come to symbolize the revolutionary vanguard for a growing number of guilt-ridden white radicals. These convicts

in their chains were the new political prisoners to be rescued.

Prison officials resisted this analysis, seeing themselves as the dedicated keepers of felons and worse; as the last pinch-valve between safe streets and boulevards overrun with cutpurses, rapists, and second story men. With its cavalry of friendly politicians, the California prison institution fought off each assault mounted on behalf of "political prisoners."

They were a "strange phenomenon to us," said Raymond K. Procunier, director of the Adult Authority, the nine-member board that determines sentencing and parole in the state. "Every person we have in prison has been convicted in court for a felony, hut the concept of political prisoner is that the system is wrong, and if it were not for the political makeup of this government, they would not be in prison."

The most compelling voice heard anywhere on behalf of the convict as political prisoner was that of George Jackson, the passionate revolutionary writer who had been an inmate a Soledad and some of California’s other maximum-security houses. Jackson was slain in August 1971, in a San Quentin shootout that also claimed the lives of two other convicts and three guards.

In his two polemical books—Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye—Jackson brought the image of the political prisoner into focus by recounting his long ordeal as a convict in California prisons. And his blueprint for urban revolution, nourished by the thinking of Marx, Frantz, Fanon, Castro, Che, and Regis Debray, put Goosebumps on the prison movement and high resolve in locked-down inmates bloated with despair and a sense of their own failure.

Most observers of prison existence accept Camus’ observation that prolonged, confinement produces weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both. "If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission," Camus argues, "it will generally be one of domination. Every ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power."

Such was the stuff of George Jackson’s passionate call to revolution when, after serving eleven years in California prisons, he saw absolutely no possibility .~ ever getting out alive.

"I related to Mao," Jackson wrote, "and couldn’t kowtow."

And to that wide, swift stream that was Jackson came the troubled, apolitical DeFreeze, with a bucket.

Like many of the black prisoners who were influenced by Jackson, DeFreeze attempted to reason his way from a criminal life to one strictly political. Jackon laid out the transition in Soledad Brother:

These prisons have always borne a certain resemblance to Dachau and Buchenwald, places for the bad niggers, Mexicans, and poor whites. But the last ten years have brought an increase in the’ percentage of blacks in for crimes that can "clearly" be traced to political-economic causes. There are still some blacks here who consider themselves criminals—but not many. Believe me, my friend, with the time and the incentive that these brothers have to read, study and think, you will find no class or category more aware, more embittered, desperate, or dedicated to the ultimate remedy—revolution. The most dedicated, the best of our kind you’ll find them in the Folsoms, San Quentins, and Soledads. They live like there was no tomorrow.

DeFreeze read this passage, and the rest of Jackson, many times. He discussed him with buddies, underlined him, quoted him in letters, and recommended him to friends.

Jackson’s initial appeal for DeFreeze was in his passionate depiction of the convict as political prisoner and his legendary prison reputation as a ‘get-down brother" who could be counted on to fight to the death when the gauntlet was dropped. Most other inmates were less than "for real," having made peace with talking loud when stickless, following up large orders with small deliveries. But Jackson, always as, courageous as his word, inspired DeFreeze, who was fighting desperately to close the gap between what he. would say publicly and what he would do in the end.

By the middle of 1972, DeFreeze had acquired an, impulse for revolution that was influenced more by Jackson’s joy in anger than by his rich intellect. Clearly be was not stirred by Jackson’s discourse on tl1e prerequisite of "ideology" before undertaking "revolution Within a modern industrial capitalist society," which called for the "overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly ‘or indirectly support existing property relations."

DeFreeze was more attentive to Jackson when he stopped soaring and walked the earth with that prison nourished joy in anger, describing, for instance, "the many thousands of ways to correct individuals. The best way is to send one armed expert. I don’t mean to outshoot him with logic, I mean to correct him. Slay him, assassinate him with thuggee, by silenced pistol, shotgun, with a high-powered rifle, shooting from four hundred yards away and behind a rock. Suffocation, strangulation, crucifixion, burning with flame-thrower, dispatch by bomb. Auto accidents happen all day. People drown, get poleaxed, breathe noxious gases, get stabbed, get poisoned with bad water, ratsbane, germicides, cyanide, hydrocyanic acid, vitriol. A snake could bite him, nicotine oil is deadly, an overdose of dope; there’s deadly nightshade, belladonna, datura, wolfbane, foxglove, aconite, ptomaine, botulism, and the death of a thousand cuts. But a curse won’t work.

"We’re going to have to fight to win. The logic of procrastination has been destroyed."

DeFreeze fed such passages into the equation to determine the course of the remainder of his life. And for his tatterdemalion state behind bars he saw hope through Jackson’s eyes.

Jackson was uncompromising. "If a man gets a parole from these prisons," Jackson wrote, "it means f-that he crawled into that room. No black will leave this place if he has any violence in his past, until they see that thing in his eyes. And you can’t fake it, resignation—defeat, it must be - stamped clearly across the face." But it war a stamp that Jackson would go to his grave refusing to wear. "They’ll never count me among the broken men."

DeFreeze’s encounter with prison was somewhat of an inversion of Jackson’s. He had already been broken when he entered Vacaville. His prison experience was -devoted to putting together the shattered pieces of his life. And DeFreeze’s life and his intellect were such that he would hardly perceive his oppressor except in narrow, personal terms.

"And he felt that she was demanding too much. In L.A., at one point, he had a couple of jobs at one time. And he still wasn’t able to earn enough to meet her demands. And this is what got him into the gunrunning thing. He was trying to make this money...to make her happy. He was trying to hold his family I together."

And his wife had from the very beginning established her rule over him. She was from a more stable family, better educated and on a higher economic level. And she never let him forgot it.

"She seemed to be quite dominating and he was a very congenial person," his friend said. "He must have tolerated her to the point of breaking; he tolerated all that a person of his makeup could tolerate. He felt that she was ‘bourgie.’ He felt extremely close to the kids, but I don’t think that he had any desire to see her again. I can remember hini saying how at times he felt like just killing her."

In retrospect, DeFreeze, with his newfound politics, would rage over Gloria’s earlier refusal to allow him to keep his guns in the house. He always had to keep them in the basement or stash them elsewhere.

DeFreeze had learned to hawk and barter in the California prison market where a packet of heroin goes for five cartons of cigarettes. A stick of marijuana costs $3.50, and $10 can get a tab of LSD. He developed that knack for reading convicts’ eyes, for deciphering the codes of the jailers’ hardwood clubs. However, one of DeFreeze’s most difficult adjustments in prison was making peace with group association. Basically, he was and had always been a lone wolf. In his youthful prison days at Elmira, DeFreeze had avoided the gangs that, through fighting and snitching, assisted the guardians in ruling the divided youth. Life in Elmira was "nothing but fear and hate, day. in, and day out," he wrote years later. "I would not be a part of any of the gangs, black or white. I didn’t hate anyone, black or white, and they hated me for it."

But by 1972 he had, thanks mainly to George Jackson, a new outlook, and he began to test it out on close friends. Later, he looked for an organization that would allow him to act on the new creed that, for the first time in his life, carried him beyond the boundaries of his private needs and those of his immediate family. He was separated from the one thing in his life that had been constant and familiar—his family—and he desperately sought a replacement.

CHAPTER 3 BCA

 For the first time in his life, DeFreeze became enchanted with the possibility of exercising power and leadership. He had reviewed his life of failure, from his days as an outcast from home to his tatterdemalion state as rejected husband and convicted thief. He had already experienced nothingness. Now he was overcoming despair, approaching conversion.

But power in prison was based on one’s ability to generate fear and to influence a tight band of loyal, cold-blooded followers.

 Prison gangs were the parties that elected convict leaders. The gang division at Vacaville was in general drawn along ethnic or racial lines. The whites, the Chicanos, the blacks. These gangs, or "tips," were organized for crime, protection, or as a nonpolitieal pastime. Prison officials tolerated the alignments and sometimes encouraged them. One of the most powerful tips in the California prison system during DeFreeze’s incarceration was the Mexican Mafia, or EME.

Since the late 1950s this Chicano gang has controlled most of the underground narcotics traffic and prostitution in state prisons. Well connected in the crime world outside prison walls, the Mexican Mafia makes up in ruthlessness what it lacks in organization. "Made" members, who take a blood oath of lifetime loyalty to the brotherhood, are tattooed with an "M" on the arm or wrist and are held together by their criminal enterprise. They are fanatical about administering bloody vengeance against offenders.

The Mexican Mafia, according to some observers, is kept off balance by the predominantly white prison authorities, who use its extreme nationalism as a buffer between white and black convicts. But there are other pressures that force the Chicanos to fight among themselves, for the core of the brotherhood comprises Mexican-Americans from urban barrios, many already skilled in the drug trade and The cold-steel discipline of the barrio underworld. The blunt recruiting methods of the EME—which begins with intimidation and often ends with murder—has its effect on the Chicanos themselves, especially those from the rural towns, and in 1967 they organized their own tip in self-defense, La Nuestra Familia. Bad blood between the EME and "Our Family" has accounted for numerous stabbings and murders over the years.

Unable to prevent prison tips from forming, prison officials have usually tried to dilute their full potential power by keeping them warring among themselves. Thus the prison .system has tended to drive white inmate joiners into reactionary, race-oriented groups. Just as the Mexicans have tended to organize around crime as a means of survival in their barrios, so the white state inmates have generally banded together around the platform of white supremacy. The major white tip, whose members are mainly from working class families, is the Aryan Brotherhood, the ABs The group consists mainly of motorcycle gang members who carried into prison an affinity for their machines, beer, racism, and swastikas. More recently, the Polar Bear Party has emerged in the California prisons, born out of the more moderate white expatriates of the deceased hippie movement.

Among black state inmates, the most feared tip was the Wolf Pack, a gang initially organized for self defense by George Jackson, James Carr, and a few other black convicts with notorious reputations for bloody retaliation.

The idea of blacks organizing has always been viewed as threatening by the white-dominated prison staffs. In the early 1960s, it was the Nation of Islam, which seemed to demand little more from the prison officials than the right to worship freely. At every huddle of "suspicious" blacks on the exercise yard, roaming "bulls" would break up the gathering conspirators. In top appellate courts all across the nation, prison boards challenged the Muslims’ right to field ministers behind the walls. But just as the specter of Malcolm X made "extremist" Dr. Martin Luther King more palatable to white Americans in the early 1960s, the Black Panther Party emerged later in that decade to make the Muslims more acceptable to prison staffs. The conservative Islamic decorum, the bow ties, and the abstinence from pork made Muslims far more desirable inmates than the "revolutionary" Panthers, who preached guns and death to the ruling class, including prison guards.

While the Muslims taught that all white people were devils, they let it go at that and rendered respect to the authorities. The Panthers, on the other hand, sought out chances to agitate openly, to thumb their noses at the turnkeys, to rattle their chains. Even so, the black tips were the most difficult for guards to penetrate. Eventually, prison officials claim, the Black Militant Family existed throughout the system, inspired by the legendary George Jackson. After his death, in 1971, the BMF was thought to have evolved into the Black Guerrilla Family.

There were sharp contrasts to the violence-oriented tips. The Church of the New Song, begun in Atlanta, required, among other things, that members consume a meal of Chateaubriand and an expensive wine once a month. And there were other, somewhat more serious groups.

By the mid-’60s, corresponding to the increasing mood of ethnicism among activist minorities outside prison walls, many inmate groups were pressing for their own cultural community organizations. In 1967 San Quentin officials approved the formation of EMPLEO, a Chicano organization to provide communication between inmates pending parole and community organizations on the streets.

The blacks drifted toward those groups whose charters, at least, showed a desire to gain some semblance of cult or political understanding, which had eluded ~ them during their days on the streets. At San Quentin they formed the Self-Advancement Through Education Association. Penal authorities, cornered by their own official dedication to rehabilitation, were persuaded that SATE would engender community involvement in inmate regeneration. Similar groups, aided by the California "busing" practice—shifting inmates from one institution to another—eventually sprung up in all twelve state prisons.

Not surprisingly, prison officials considered such nonviolent cultural pursuits as favorable alternatives to tips, reasoning, no doubt, that their jobs would be easier if inmates were strung out on discovering their past instead of getting high on violence and revolution.

At Vacaville it was under the auspices of one such black-culture-oriented organization that Donald David DeFreeze had his first chance to experience the hint of power that comes from directing a group toward personal goals. Formed by inmates in 1968, the Black Culture Association was officially recognized the following year and, in 1970, was granted a state charter. Throughout its existence, the BCA has been dedicated largely to inmate social concerns. The pomp and Ceremony that characterizes members’ behavior was borrowed from such outside cultural nationalist groups as Ron Karenga’s United Slaves:, the five-stage hand-~ shake, the black-power salute, and the hoisting of the tri-color Black Liberation flag.

Like other culture groups, the BCA had to appeal to the prison bureaucracy for whatever stencils, papers, and projectors it required, which, of course, afforded the prison authority another control they could exert over inmates. The largely white prison staff tolerated the culture group and looked on amusedly at the ceremony granting members "reborn" African names, some of which the recipients could neither spell nor pronounce.

The BCA sought inmate rehabilitation, with the idea of returning a more responsible black to his community. This was to be done by heightening black awareness, establishing communication between inmates and the black communities outside, - and by accelerating educational advancement through a twice weekly tutorial program.

The BCA was the largest black group among the fourteen official inmate associations. Its leader held considerable bargaining power with the prison authorities and was highly revered by black inmates.

Urged by his small band of associates, DeFreeze decided to run for the chairmanship of the BCA in June 1972.

The campaign would be a test between DeFreeze, Robert "Bojack" Jackson, the incumbent, and Cecil Moody, who had recently been transferred from San Quentin.

Like almost every other group member, Jackson had adopted a reborn African name, Oba, to replace the slave name handed down through his family. But most often he was called by his Los Angeles street name, Bojack. Marking his political conversion, DcFreeze, too, rechristened himself: Cinque M’tume, a rather unusual combination of a number given a captive Mendi chief by Portuguese slave traders in the 1830s and the Swahili word for prophet. (Cinque was also’ the name taken in San Quentin by Ruchell Magee who initially stood trial with Angela Davis for involvement in the 1970 San Raphael courtroom shootout engineered by George Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathon, who was killed in the incident, along with two inmates. A judge was taken captive.) Of DeFreeze’s two reborn names, Cinque stuck more tightly, but he was most often called simply "Cin," sometimes erroneously written "Sin."

Cinque was ambitious and worked with all the zeal of new convert. But he was—as he would remain, behind bars—a small fish. What counted for convict leadership was time served in one of the hard houses, a heavy conviction rap—murder, armed robbery—-among blacks, physical stature and a gift for pyrotechnical oratory. Cinque dismally lacked both of the latter attributes. He appeared shorter than his real five-feet-nine, and his voice, with its seemingly affected ,West Indian lilt, seldom got untracted in time, with enough fireworks’ to satisfy inmates lusting more for fire than light. Moody stretched beyond six had a well-documented mean streak, and could with enough flint and politics to set his listeners’ spirits soaring.

Cinque finished a disappointing third, far outdistanced by the winner, Moody, but close behind the incumbent, Jackson.. He was distraught at his poor showing. Some say he went to prison officials and threatened to somehow destroy - the group unless he was given some position of power. However, it appears more likely that he settled for working out a deal with authorities and with Moody whereby he could set up his own class under the auspices of ~e BCA.

On July 30, 1972, Cinque submitted a memorandum Vacaville officials requesting that his new class be approved and funded. Called Unisight, it was desingned to redirect black inmates in their relationship themselves, their communities, and their families. The program outline charted a chain of command which started with Governor Ronald Reagan, worked