Talk about a dead man walking. Robert King somehow sprung himself out of what would have been effectively a life sentence in the American penitentiary system, and has lived to tell the tale. Others are not so fortunate.
The United States likes to set itself up as the home of the free, the bedrock of democracy, but its underbelly is full of evil and injustice.
Robert King entered the American prison system like many young black men — poor, angry, historically disadvantaged and disempowered. It could be a template for the condition of the majority of young South Africans, with the difference that in the US blacks are a minority.
In South Africa we still imagine that there might be hope. In the US, people like Robert King simply hope for the best, and keep on struggling.
King might have remained a nonentity, another in a long line of statistics that goes back as far as the eye can see, had it not been for his conversion while in prison to the ranks of the Black Panther Party.
The what?
Yes, that’s right, the Black Panther Party.
As far as most of us know, the Black Panther Party died in a wave of flames and spectacular shootouts and arrests back in the 1960s and 1970s. Its remnants went into exile in Cuba and Algeria and other places, in some cases filtering through into various parts of nascent post-colonial Africa, especially high-profile countries like Ghana and Tanzania, where the spirit of Black Nationalism was riding high. I hung out with a lot of ex-Panthers in my adolescent years. You couldn’t really avoid them. Plus, they were cool.
But the Black Panther Party often seemed to be more style than content — at least from a distance. It was a lost cause buried deep inside the belly of an intemperate beast. But, with its spectacular public acts, its black leather jackets and black leather fists punched in the air, it did a lot to encourage black people in the US and across the world to hold their heads up high. It was an essential part of Black Consciousness.
The Black Panther Party was such bad news that J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, declared it to be the greatest internal threat to American democracy. Now that was something. That meant that the Black Panther Party was potentially as significant to the potential downfall of the American Way of Life as Soviet Russia, Red China, North Korea and the rest of them.
So considering the Black Panther Party was made up of just a few thousand black brothers and sisters and their friends, they must have been pretty significant. Which is why Hoover and his boys and girls made sure that they were wiped out in pretty short order.
Now, why would Robert King consider himself to be inducted into the Panthers in prison in the latter part of the 1970s, long after the party had ceased to exist?
Well, think about it: how many people were recruited into the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party long after they were banned? How many foot soldiers for the movement were created in apartheid jails?
King makes no bones about his past as a criminal in the segregated world of the Deep South, where no black person stood a chance anyway. But it’s like the man said: once you’ve got a record, the cops are sure to come by your house and pick you up for a crime you didn’t commit, just on suspicion of the fact that if you didn’t actually commit it, you were probably thinking about committing it anyway.
So he was busted for an armed hold-up he wasn’t involved in. The prosecutor offered him a plea bargain: plead guilty, and we’ll make sure you’re sentenced to only 15 years.
King said, ”Hell, no, I didn’t commit that crime anyway!” So the judge threw the book at him and sentenced him to the full 35 years.
It seemed like a lifetime. And a lifetime in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana is like a long time in hell.
Feeling that he was being treated no better than a slave in the old slavery days, King decided to take the bad-nigger option and break out. He organised 24 fellow inmates and got out. Of course they were eventually caught, and slung back in the jug. But between incarceration and self-liberation, they had been politicised. The Black Panther Party, figment or reality, was the rallying point for their cause.
Robert King spent the next 31 years in Angola Penitentiary, 29 of them in solitary confinement. The authorities said he had to be confined in solitary because he was a decidedly Bad Nigger.
Systems that declare innocent people bad niggers inevitably create badder niggers. ”The Black Panther Party emerged in the 1960s,” says King, ”because everything else had failed.” From the time Africans were first transported into the Americas against their will, there had been slave revolts. There was Marcus Garvey and his ”back to Africa” movement. There was Toussaint L’Ouverture and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. There was passion and bloody failure.
And so, having been miraculously released a couple of years before his term expired, owing to the system grudgingly admitting that there might have been some errors in the procedures that led to his sentencing (this is 31 years down the line, let me remind you) Robert King, like Nelson Mandela, does not look back on the bitter years that are behind him, but stares down the long passage of time that might see his fellow prisoners, who are many, released into the clear light of freedom.
He was in South Africa this week on part of this continuing campaign. No one paid him much notice.
He shrugs this off philosophically. His essence has been distilled into the person he became while locked into the system.
And so he remains a Black Panther, whether there is a party or not.