10/12/2019 GSMCB: Robert King -- Ending Solitary Confinement

THE GILLESPIE-SENTER MEMORIAL COMMUNITY BREAKFAST

October 2019 Keynote Presentation:

Ending Solitary Confinement

Robert Hillary King

Member of the Angola Three

SATURDAY OCTOBER 12, 2019

11:00am to 12:00pm

First Unitarian Universalist Church

5212 South Claiborne Av., New Orleans

(Enter via the Soniat Street entrance; inside large classroom)

Coffee will be served beginning at 10:30am

 Attender brief introductions 10:50am to 10:58am
Keynote Presentation and Discussion: 11:00am to 12:00pm

Progressive Social Justice Community announcements follow

The Gillespie-Senter Memorial Community Breakfast has been a project of the

First Unitarian Universalist Church Social Justice Committee since May 1983.

Our website: http://www.thecommunitybreakfast.org/

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A member of the Angola Three, Robert King will discuss his 29 years in solitary confinement and his work since being released in 2001 to end human rights abuses in American prison and to reform the U.S. justice system. Findings of two new reports on solitary confinement in Louisiana prisons, where incarcerated people are held in solitary at FOUR times the national rate, and how to plug into the Louisiana Stop Solitary Coalition will also be discussed.

Robert King lived in solitary confinement in Angola State Prison for 29 years. He was among the co-founders of the Angola chapter of the Black Panther Party. With Albert Woodfox and the late Herman Wallace, also Black Panthers, he is known as one of the Angola 3, men who were held for decades in solitary confinement at Angola.

Since his release, Robert King has worked as a speaker on prison reform and the justice system. He has been featured in numerous print, media and film articles and interviews worldwide including:  CNN, National Public Radio, NBC, BBC and ITN. He appeared in two documentaries about him and his fellow prisoners in long-term solitary--  Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation, and Land of the Free (2010). He also provided continuing support to Wallace and Woodfox in prison.

His autobiography, From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of a Black Panther (2008), was released by PM Press. He won a PASS Award for his book in 2009 from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Following the destruction throughout the poorest areas of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, King pitched in with local activists to organize communities and provide aid. Local activist Malik Rahim, and Scott Crow and Brandon Darby, both from Texas, co-founded the Common Ground Collective to provide assistance and medical care to local residents left destitute after the storm. King has spoken internationally against the use of solitary confinement and on behalf of Wallace and Woodfox while they were still imprisoned. 

He has spoken at college campuses and community centers across the US, and before the Parliaments in the Netherlands, South Africa and Portugal. In December 2010, King was invited as the inaugural speaker at TEDx Alcatraz in San Francisco, delivering a talk entitled "Alone".