Tag: Black Unity Council

It’s shamefully apparent that, with deliberate indifference, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and SCI Dallas, have killed political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz.

Families of U.S.-held Political Prisoners, and all prisoners, suffer their own traumas along with their caged loved ones. The carceral state systematically inflicts the pain of super oppression, often succeeding in fracturing the bonds of the family unit. The father and son Shoatz unit however, through love and commitment, has only become stronger.

The Free Russell Maroon Shoatz website describes him this way: “Russell Maroon Shoatz is a dedicated community activist, founding member of the Black Unity Council, former member of the Black Panther Party and soldier in the Black Liberation Army. He is serving multiple life sentences as a U.S.-held prisoner of war.” Shoatz has been locked in solitary confinement at various state prisons for the past 22 years, 28 of the past 30 years.

An estimated 80,000 men, women and even children are being held in solitary confinement on any given day in U.S. prisons. If the struggle to end inhumane treatment inside prisons is to become anything more than a largely apolitical movement for so-called “civil rights,” it must put two long-ignored points back on the agenda: race and revolution.

His name is almost legendary: Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, an affiliate of the Black Panther Party, activist and Black revolutionary.

In the Louisiana bayou, a descendent of slaves was born into the Pratt clan, whose entire community suffered under racial apartheid. Since Pratt was a strong and thoughtful boy, his community encouraged him to shoulder the task of working to help defend the downtrodden who surrounded him.