For nearly half a century, Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz was a political prisoner of the United States. Prior to his incarceration, Shoatz fought against US capitalism and imperialism as a member of the Black Panther Party, and then as a soldier of the Black Liberation Army. Due to his two successful escapes from prison and organizing behind bars, Shoatz spent two decades in solitary confinement. Despite this brutal repression, Shoatz continued to struggle for liberation, leaving behind a trove of political writings that continue to inspire revolutionaries to this day. Shoatz’s children, Russell Shoatz III and Sharon Shoatz, join Rattling the Bars for a discussion on his newly published memoir, co-written with Kanya D’Almeida, I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner.

Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Mansa Musa:  Welcome to this edition of Rattling The Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.

Back in the ’60s, we had an organization that formed a formidable fighting formation. It was known as the Black Panther Party. The founder of Rattling the Bars, Eddie Conway, was a former member of the Black Panther Party. He was set up, framed, and locked up for almost 40 years before he was released.

During this time, while he was incarcerated, he organized a collective of prisoners that we developed. A collective called the Maryland Pen Intercommunal Survival Collective, [inaudible] as a hybrid form of the Black Panther Party.

Joining me today is the children of Russell Maroon Shoatz, who also found himself in the same situation that Eddie Conway and other members of the Black Panther Party found themselves in. They dared to struggle and they dared to win, and as a result of that, they found themselves captive, enslaved, and fighting for their freedom.

Joining me today is Russell Shoatz and Sharon Shoatz. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.

Sharon Shoatz:  Thank you.

Russell Shoatz III:  Thank you for having me.

Mansa Musa:  All right, so recently — And if not, y’all can correct me as we go along — Y’all have a new book coming out called I Am Maroon, and it’s a memoir of your father, Russell Maroon Shoatz. And it’s slated to come out this month, or is it already out this month?

Sharon Shoatz:  Yeah, the pub date, September the third, the publication date. September…

Mansa Musa:  OK. So let’s unpack. Let’s unpack. First of all, who was Russell Maroon Shoatz? You can start with this one, Russell. Sharon, you can fill in — And it’s not a chauvinist thing, it’s just the way I want to do it at this time.

Russell Shoatz III:  So my father was, basically, a young Black person growing up in a community, a Black community in West Philadelphia. At that time, pre ’60s and pre Civil Rights time, there was a gang culture in Philadelphia. He was a part of that. There was a doo-wop culture in Philadelphia, he was a part of that, singing on the corner, drinking wines, all that stuff.

Went to some juvenile detention centers for his youth involvement in some of that gang and street activity, then became older and got politicized through going see Malcolm in New York. And then was involved in a political action, which was the retaliation shooting of a police officer after Amadou Diallo style, George Floyd style shooting of a youth in Philadelphia. And that’s kind of a nutshell bio of my dad.

Mansa Musa:  And Sharon, in terms of your father’s maturation, because y’all was young when he got locked up, how did you process his maturation in terms of, like your brother said, growing up in Philly, being subjected, like all like Watts, Compton, Southeast DC, you name it, any ghetto that was being colonized by the country and policed by the police. How did you look at your father’s growth and development in terms of his ultimate maturation to become a political figure?

Sharon Shoatz:  For me, I think I lived in two worlds, one in which I knew my father was a part of something larger that I couldn’t actually define as a child. But I know my family was instrumental, his family in particular, my aunts and uncles were definitely there for us growing up and keeping us in that realm of consciousness about what was going on with my father, but not really cluing us in on it as we know it in his autobiography.

And then, on the other hand, we were children growing up, and we weren’t subjected to the type of bullying that we see today. But I know when my father escaped both times, we then encountered questions about who we were. Because the Shoatz name, it’s not a common name, and when you see that plastered all over the newspaper, “Cop Killer”, you then as a child, then get those questions.

But I didn’t feel that our community wasn’t there for us. The community was still very supportive. And again, the Shoatz family, my aunts, my grandmother, they were always there to help us understand some of what was going on, but not really the level that I know it to this day.

Mansa Musa:  Right. And OK, let’s talk about how did this particular project come about? Because do y’all have another book that was written, or was this the first book that’s written?

Sharon Shoatz:  So his first book was the Maroon the Implacable, which was a series of writings that he had did over a number of years that was out there in the ether. A lot of anarchists was publishing it, and people were reading it all over the world, really.

And then, this project in particular came about, I would say, in the ’90s, particularly in 1990 when I moved to New York City. He had asked me to get his dossier to the tribunal. They were having a tribunal at that time for US held political prisoners, the human rights abuses. And I was new to New York, the geography and the landscape, so I didn’t find it. It was on Hunter’s campus, and I didn’t know the campus, and I didn’t know where I was going.

But in the process, I end up meeting members of the Black Panther Party and the BLA. And that was like Safiya Bukhari and [inaudible], the Holder Brothers. And these people actually knew my father. So here I was meeting these 20th century revolutionaries in the Black Panther Party, and it was on the hills of the landscape of Nelson Mandela being free. I had went to LA, I happened to see him at the Coliseum.

So they started telling me stories. So it allowed me to lean in on these stories that I had never heard. I had visited them all through my life. My family was there and supportive, but they had never really shared any stories. And so from that, it allowed me to press my father, like who are you? Who are you? And I know you my father, the seed and the genetic piece, but —

Mansa Musa:  But who are you?

Sharon Shoatz:  Yeah. So that started us writing back and forth until we had this family document. And then, he wanted to then use that document to get out of solitary. And that’s the collaboration where Kanya comes in.

And now we have what you have today, which is the publication of I Am Maroon, which was a family document that was used to try to secure his freedom from solitary. Fred Ho had suggested that he use it. They brought Kanya in, and then that collaboration began. And here you have this final production of I Am Maroon.

Mansa Musa:  And Russell, like Sharon said, she found herself, at one point in time, after being exposed to our comrades, members of the Black Panther Party and other revolutionaries and people fighting our struggle. At one point, she became enlightened that, OK, my father’s my father, but he’s somebody else. Did you have that same experience, being exposed to people that ultimately gave you a different perspective of your father, or you always had this perspective of your father’s being a freedom fighter and a revolutionary?

Russell Shoatz III:  No, no. Yeah, I had this similar experience —

Mansa Musa:  Talk about it.

Russell Shoatz III:  So I had been visiting my dad and doing work around him for a couple years before my sisters joined in that movement to liberate my father. And just like her, and all of us, and people after my sister, Sharon, my other sisters and brothers, as we all came to support him at different times, would ask him, who are you, dude?

Even if I had conversations with my sister and be like, oh, dad said this, or whatever, it’s still that because it’s your biological father or whatever. It’s still that, I guess, interpersonal conversation that you want to have with that person, with your dad and say… My first question, in my naivete, my first question was, who was the shooter? Did you shoot the cop or did one of the other [inaudible].

And that question was for me to be to the next question was, if you did shoot them, then why don’t you let them dudes go? And if you didn’t shoot them, why don’t you try to get out? But that wasn’t their rubric, that wasn’t their understanding. That wasn’t going to happen. They all kind of went to death. They would die before they would tell on each other or try to get out of the situation. But yes, it went very similar. Everybody wanted to know who their father was.

Mansa Musa:  Right. And let’s frame this situation, because we’re talking about Philadelphia and Rizzo and the Gestapo. LA had a Gestapo unit, but Philadelphia had a Gestapo unit of police that even your father spoke about in the early years when he was young, that they just randomly walked down on Black youth and commenced to beating them and then lock them up.

But let’s talk about that period, to your knowledge, in terms of what led to them ultimately being captives. What was that environment, from your knowledge, because he talk about in the book, what was that environment like during that era that gave birth to Maroon?

Russell Shoatz III:  If people don’t know, they should Google Rizzo. Rizzo was the police chief in Philadelphia. He is the forerunner of the police states that we see today. They had a Gestapo unit in LA. They had a couple units around the country at that time.

But even prior to those days, when Rizzo came into office, he was the first police chief to say, let’s send our officers over to Israel and train over there with them. Let’s be tactical with the dogs and stuff like that. Let’s strip the Panthers naked in front of their office. Let’s do all of these radical things, policing-wise, to keep, for lack of better terms, the people on edge. And it really did keep people on edge.

And also, the sentencing and the judicial followed his lead in the context of Philadelphia having the most lifers, the most juvenile lifers, the most people without parole, juvenile lifers without parole, lifers without parole, just the toughest sentencing in the country over a mass group of people. And so that’s just a part of that culture.

But you also see it in the activism ideology of Philly all the way from my dad, through MOVE, through the juvenile lifers. And so it’s a certain type of energy that came out of that tough, tough repression that you’re seeing bloom 30, 40 years after.

Mansa Musa:  Sharon?

Sharon Shoatz:  And I would also just add to that, not much, but the fact of the racism was more entrenched with Rizzo, as well as the brutality and oppression. But even that racist mentality of law and order, and we have to keep these Black or minority people in their place. With housing, with discrimination, it was just rampant in Philadelphia.

So it is not a wonder that there were people taking up arms in Philadelphia to deal with oppressive state and injustice where they saw it, right in their communities where they lived at. They saw it every day.

Mansa Musa:  And also, I remember, before they dropped the bomb on the MOVE, I remember looking at an article in a radical newsletter where they had a picture of the police taking the butt of the gun and bashing one of the MOVE members’ head in. It was almost like the My Lai massacre where they showed that picture of the police shooting the brain out of that kid in Vietnam.

Russell Shoatz III:  Oh yeah.

Mansa Musa:  I like what you say about Google it, but more importantly, you don’t have to Google to find out who Rizzo is, all you gotta do is read I Am Maroon to get an understanding on who the Philadelphia police were, how they operated. That’ll give you context that this is a real live person that’s regurgitating or recounting this event.

Talk about your father in terms of working his way out and ultimately getting to a point where he was positioned to get out, and how the death of 1,000 cuts had took its toll on him in terms of his health and everything.

Sharon Shoatz:  I think Maroon, my dad, never relented from freedom. And it didn’t matter what it took or what toll his body was going to take, because ultimately, those beatings… When you escape from prison, don’t think they just rush you back in nice. I mean, he took a few beat downs.

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, I already know.

Sharon Shoatz:  He took several beat downs to the point where his body ultimately succumbed to some of that, of course. And then the brutality of solitary confinement. To come out and not being able to walk up and down steps because you hadn’t walked up and down steps for 22 years.

And when he came out, we was happy, but we didn’t think about the physical toll that it would take on him. And to know that the prison, the food is unhealthy. And it’s up to the point where the medical is non-existent.

Mansa Musa:  Inadequate. Non-existent. That’s right.

Sharon Shoatz:  [Inaudible]. My sister, I mean, she was really on his medical health, and she held them to a standard. So they was calling her and reporting what his status was. You got to hold them accountable in the prison system, if not your loved one is languishing there with the run around they give you on the phone.

Russell Shoatz III:  I know that, actually, all the way up to the warden, but also all the way up to the Deputy of the Prisons, who controls all the prisons in Philadelphia, they were probably actually glad that my father was released just on the strength of my sister’s constant calling them, constantly being on them. So just one less person, all right, Maroon’s out of here. Won’t got to hear Teresa no more. We won’t hear Teresa Shoatz calling us every day about follow up, what’s going on, blah, blah, blah.

So when you talk about that ongoing struggle for freedom, there were a lot of different people involved over the years, a lot of different moving parts. And definitely towards the end, because we had pretty much threw a lot of things at the wall, but we had not engaged the medical community within the prison, the nurses, the doctors.

The doctors, when he would get sent out to other institutions, all the way up to the deputy of all of the prisons, and engaging them and saying, our father is in this situation, it was COVID, all these things. He got stage IV cancer. You guys don’t have the apparatus or anything to really take care of anybody with these conditions. Allow us to have him. And they fought that, they fought that.

Mansa Musa:  And speaking, I did 48 years in prison prior to getting out, and I did a limited amount of time in solitary confinement. I was in the super max. But more importantly, I can identify with that situation because I remember that when a police officer had got killed in the Maryland pen when they was doing an investigation, and the legislators was coming in to justify pumping more money into building more prisons, and barbed wire, handcuffs.

And they had the speaker of the House on the state level, on the Senate and the delegate side, and had the attorney general for the state of Maryland come in. They came in the South Wing, which was like the lock-up wing where most of us did our time. And when they left out of there, when they left out of that wing, left out, they was only over there for maybe a good, maybe, maybe five minutes — Maybe.

They came outside. They were like this here [panting]. Saying, we just came from the innermost circle of hell. Now imagine your father being in the innermost circle of hell 20-some years, inside and maintaining his faculties.

So the torture, it’s because of Mumia Abu-Jamal that they got medicine for Hepatitis C, that they was able to get the pill that helped to correct a lot of that ailment for people that’s locked up. Going back to your medical, it wasn’t that they got an attitude of like, we take a [hippocratic] oath and that we going to do the best. No, we are hypocrites in taking the oath that we are not going to apply. And it’s because of y’all work that your father was able to at least get out and live a semblance of life before he transitioned.

Talk about where y’all going there with the book at this time. What’s on the agenda, and what do y’all want people to know about the work and the importance of the work as it relates to raising people’s [consciousness] about the struggle and the struggle continue, and the contribution and sacrifice your father made, either one of y’all?

Sharon Shoatz:  Well, we’re on a book tour trying to get it out through the book tours, through programs like yours. So we thank you, definitely —

Mansa Musa:  Most definitely.

Sharon Shoatz:  …For having us on. And we are just trying to promote it throughout as many ways as we can, throughout media and the tours. So we’re in Philadelphia on the 22nd. I’m in Ohio next week at a [inaudible] conference with the book. And then, we’re in Philly on the 22nd. We’re in DC and Baltimore on the 28th. And then, we’re heading to Atlanta, Texas, and then we’re heading to the West Coast.

November the second, we’ll be with Mike Africa from MOVE and his book. He has a new book out, On A Move, and we’ll be with him at the Huey Newton Foundation on Nov. 2.

So we’re taking it on the road and we hope that people, for me, it’s twofold. One, that my father’s an incredible, complicated, beautifully flawed person, but he never relented from the struggle for freedom for oppressed people all across the globe. And secondly, the part for our family, they never really knew who he was.

From this perspective, I have cousins. Oh yeah, we always heard about Uncle Russell. But until he came home for those 52 days, and it was a line of family to see him, and I’m glad they were able to meet him. But again, as I didn’t know who he was, neither did they. They only knew the legend and the myth and oh, Uncle Russell.

But this story lays it out very well. And if you’re from Philadelphia, the geographics is —

Mansa Musa:  Come on, come on. That’s important.

Sharon Shoatz:  …Extraordinary because he lays it out the middle-class stronghold. And now Philly is, what, I think, the poorest city in the country? Clearly, back then there was a middle-class stronghold, and he talks about it in depth.

And so I think from those two perspectives, the part of freedom and this oppressed system and where we see an oppressed system and injustice, we need to be doing something about it in our own little way. I can’t be Maroon. I have the genetics, but he’s something special. And I can’t be him, but I can take from what I know.

And like Maya Angelou said, when you know better, you do better. When you know better, you do better. And we have freedom fighters that are still locked up.

And why? Why? And I don’t know why people aren’t on board with that. Black Lives Matter, they stood on the shoulders of these revolutionaries. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t have been an agenda regarding political prisoners. With regards to that, my brother talks about every other revolution, they free their freedom fighters.

Mansa Musa:  That’s right.

Sharon Shoatz:  I’ll stop there and let my brother —

Mansa Musa:  Come on, Russ.

Russell Shoatz III:  Well, it’s a catch-22 for me. And it’s a little tougher for me to envision what I would like people to see. Because what I would like people to see is probably further down the road and maybe either another publication, because this publication is actually, my dad wrote this long before he got out, long before he even got sick and stuff like that. And so there’s actually a part of his life that’s not there.

And then, there’s a part of his life right when he’s transitioning, and then there’s a part of a life when he gets out and comes home and he’s actually home and not in prison. That’s not in a book. There’s a part of his life where he turns into a whole different person than we know what’s in the book that he probably even knew of himself or what he just turned into a whole nother different person that nobody knew, nobody ever saw before, any of that. And so those things are important to me.

Also, I don’t want people to get mixed up and think that this is some more of his teachings. These aren’t his teachings. This is just him saying, this is my life. This is what I did, blah, blah, blah. You can get knowledge and jewels and teachings out of that, but if you really wanted to know his teachings, the final teachings kind of, sort of, you would want to look towards his comment, or in court, his transcripts from court.

Also him being like, I’m a Muslim now and everybody should take the Shahada. Everybody should blah, blah, blah. Like, really fundamental Islamic stance. And not just Islamic, but a spiritual space, the space that most people are in when they’re about to transition. And so that transition space is a whole different space with more information, knowledge, and jewels that you really only get only if you’re there or around or hear about it or what have you.

But he was on a mission to get people to contemplate their mortality because he was at that space of really, really contemplating his mortality. But most freedom fighters have already contemplated their mortality. If you are thinking about going over that wall, you trying to escape, then you got to think about them killing you.

Or if you in some prison and they put on the Star Wars uniform and knock on the door and come in to beat you up, that’s just part of it. If you are fighting for liberation and you incarcerated, nine times out of 10, there’s going to be some situations where you got to think about, well, are they going to come in here and try to do me?

And so contemplation of mortality added with your life as a tool of liberation, because that whole book is just about him saying, you can use your life actually as a tool for liberation, if that makes any sense. So those two things, you can’t do anything. You’re not going to be real effective, you’re going to be fearful and scared if you don’t contemplate your mortality.

And people in Palestine, people in South America, people all over the world every day wake up, have to contemplate their mortality. Every day in Palestine, when you wake up, you got to be like, what’s cracking today? Is it a bomb? Is it a bullet? Is it a beating? What is it? Because it could be all them things, but I contemplated that. And now from there, I’m moving on to here.

I thought about it. Yeah, it may happen. It’s a possibility. We all came here to leave. But that was something in my dad’s last teaching, that was part of his last teaching. Are you ready? Are you ready? You built for this? You ready?

Mansa Musa:  There you have it, The Real News Rattling the Bars. You have The Prison Letters of George Jackson, you have The Autobiography of Malcolm X, You have Revolutionary Suicide, Seize the Time. You have Martial Law. You have The Greatest Threat by Eddie Conway. And now you have I Am Maroon. But in each one of these books is a story that’s woven all the way out about people fighting for their liberation. The story of us always, since we’ve been brought to these shores, fighting for our liberation.

And it’s important that y’all, our listeners and our viewers, understand this and look to the book, I Am Maroon, and enlighten yourself. And like both Sharon and Russell said, it’s not about the individual, it’s about the collective. It’s about the struggle, the struggle for liberation, and the struggle to free humanity.

Thank y’all for coming on. Really appreciate y’all, and we definitely going to be posting this information, and we’ll see y’all when y’all get on this end at Sankofa, if I don’t come to Philly and check y’all out.

Sharon Shoatz:  See you.

Russell Shoatz III:  Yeah. Come to the brunch, come and eat some of that food. It is a free brunch, you don’t want to miss that.

Mansa Musa:  All right. All right. Thank you. All right. All power to the people.

Sharon Shoatz:  Power to the people.

Russell Shoatz III:  Power to the people.

Sharon Shoatz:  Peace.

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