II

Albert Bradford had assumed that when he entered a guilty plea he was confessing only to the robbery charge, for which he expected to get a 20 year sentence. The public defender had assured him that with good conduct he would be out in three. However, when Bradford appeared in court for sentencing, he was slapped with three concurrent life sentences: one for the robbery, one for the rape of a white woman that had happened during the robbery, and one for a rape that had occurred almost half a year before.

Missouri was doing some book-cleaning of its own.

Although it is generally considered part of the Midwest. Missouri is actually a southern state. Admitted as a slave state, it was the home of Dred Scott--whether Dred wanted it to be or not. Although it did not officially secede from the Union during the Civil War, more than 30,000 Missourians fought for the Confederacy, as did organized bands of rural guerillas; its governor established a pro-Confederate government in exile; and martial law had to be imposed to keep the state under Union control. As recently as ten years ago, many of the smaller towns and parts of the larger ones had sundown ordinances prohibiting blacks from being present after dusk. In many places where there was no law, the practise was enforced. Many black men have been savagely beaten and not a few have been killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in Missouri.

Albert Bradford's crime and punishment were no different. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time doing something wrong: however, he had not done THE wrong, had not been the one who had committed the southern crime of crimes. Some black boy had, and atonement must be made. Albert Bradford happened to be available. "Twelve years later, the judge wrote my mother from Florida and said that he felt bad that I wasn't out and that he felt that one of the reasons was they needed an example and I was the pound of flesh that was chosen."

Unlike most juvenile offenders--even lifers--Bradford was not sent to the state's Young Men's Reformatory. His partner in the robbery was, but Bradford went to the penitentiary. However, he did not go into the joint totally alone: "I went into prison with an intense hate for white people because it was a white judge, a white lawyer, and a white prosecutor, and it was white police--you know, everyone who put me in prison was white."

III

Albert Bradford did not come out of the joint alive. He died in there sometime during the first five years that his body was being held in Jeff City. He died when his hate died.

Malik Hakim was born in the joint.

The delivery was slow and not without complications. It began in 1955 when Hakim along with two other cons organized an art class. "That was the transitional point. That was the point of moving from that rancid cancerous feeling about white folks to the point of starting to see myself, you know, beginning to understand myself, and if you remember, it was about this time that Malcolm began to speak in public. Brothers in the joint began to hear a black man articulating the thing that they couldn't articulate. We began to take a certain pride in being black."

This emerging pride in being black was reflected in changes in the life-style of Hakim and other cons at Jeff City. "They feed a lot of starch and pork in prison. Now anybody that knows anything about diet knows what that does to your body. So we began to educate the brothers about diet so that the brothers was walking past the pork chops. The man couldn't relate to that because it used to be a time brothers used to steal pork chops. But now they was walking past the pork chops and stealing the hamburgers, you know. The man knew that something was happening that wasn't too kosher."

For Hakim and many of the other black inmates, this new pride in blackness was related to their involvement in Islam and their subsequent discovery of aspects of black history that had not been a part of the education they had received in the public schools. This discovery awakened in Hakim and his brother cons a desire to obtain other knowledge and skills they had missed. Prevented from obtaining this knowledge in the prison schools because of the tracking system. "We began to conduct our own classes. We had brothers there from Lincoln University and so forth. So the cats began to teach math classes and science classes. We began to teach these things on the yard. One of the things the prison system does not want is a thinking convict, they want a reacting convict, and we were beginning to teach cats to think. Cats would go to the hole less and less. Homosexuality was on the decline in A hall, which was an all-black hall. I he old black convicts that had had a free run at making punks were beginning to run into problems because there was young brothers jamming them up. There was a coming together."

This coming together of the younger black cons at Jeff City did not fail to meet with substantial opposition from prison authorities. "Antagonisms began to develop: because it was hard for them Southerners to concede that the black man does not necessarily want to integrate with him, see. And the fact that we had begun to educate religiously along the lines of Islam meant that he couldn't join us either, they started rumors. You know, there's going to be a race riot. Well, you see, we wasn't talking about race riots. We was talking about history and facts. But they had to find some way to shut us up; so they locked us up. They locked up seven of us, but they didn't lock nobody white up. It's just like they do out here. You know, the cat that becomes the most articulate is the cat that gets ripped off. It got to the point that in the early '60's that it was hard for me to get to go to church because the man wanted to keep me in my cell. If I went to the yard with my shirt tail out, he found that an excuse to send me back to the cell so that I couldn't The man counldn't accept this. So get to the yard."

Then again, it isn't every black man in prison who has had the same experience Malik Hakim had when he received a visit from Malcolm X in 1957. "To meet Malcolm for the first time in the life of a black man, to have been deaf, dumb and blind, is like walking into a totally pitch black room and someone turns on a million-watt light bulb. It was probably the most beautiful, the most painful experience I've ever had. Look at it like this. Christians pray to Jesus and if Jesus walked into their rooms they would be speechless. When I walked into the visiting room and saw Malcolm. I was speechless. But in a matter of minutes, it was almost as if his soul merged with mine. He taught me that we must seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. Knowledge is the greatest weapon in the 20th century that the black man can have."

IV