Among those familiar with his life story, the name Russell “Maroon” Shoatz is synonymous with freedom.
His childhood and early adulthood were spent on the streets of Philadelphia, where he transformed himself from a gang member into a dedicated community organizer at the height of the city’s struggle for Black liberation.
Arrested in connection with an attack on a park guard in Philly’s Fairmount Park in 1970, he spent two years underground with various chapters of the Black Panther Party until he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison.
For four decades he served time in one penitentiary after another across the state of Pennsylvania. He earned the title “Maroon” after escaping from two of these prisons. The title — a revered honorific among Black freedom fighters — draws upon the long history of Black and Indigenous slaves breaking free from plantations to form autonomous, liberated zones across the Americas and the Caribbean.
Following his second and final recapture, Maroon began a period of deep self-study, which rapidly drew in scores of other politically conscious prisoners dedicated to organizing and uplifting themselves in the face of institutional racism and brutality. Incensed by his success at mobilizing his fellow prisoners, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections threw him in solitary confinement. He survived nearly 22 years of no-touch torture before finally winning his release into the general prison population in 2015.
His first book, a collection of essays entitled Maroon the Implacable, charts his political evolution from a mere “foot solider” in the Black Liberation Army to a sharp theoretician on matters of economics, armed conflicts and ecosocialism.
His recently published autobiography — the result of a 10-year collaboration with me (Sri Lankan journalist Kanya D’Almeida) — tells a different story: not the history of the Panthers, or even of the Maroons, but of a young boy’s journey from city streets to the depths of incarceration. This memoir is the story of how a person goes from being a freedom fighter, to an escaped prisoner, to a free man; a story of finding freedom in confinement and isolation; and a blueprint for how to get — and stay — free.
Shoatz died in December 2021, two months after he was granted compassionate release from prison after 41 years behind bars. The following is an excerpt from his posthumously published memoir, I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner (Copyright © 2024), which we brought into being together. It is available from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
By Russell Shoatz
Before he was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem in 1965, Malcolm X warned of a global race war. He did not hesitate to name the cause of the prevailing situation: a long history of white racism, colonialism, and empire, against which the colored minorities of the world were now rising. He described America as a powder keg, and her Black population as the fuse capable of lighting the explosive substance within and pretty much setting the whole damn world on fire. He prophesied a total revolution — not a polite tussle over “civil rights” but a full-blown battle for the basis of emancipation, which is to say, for land.
Long before most Black people got on board with his message, the federal government took Malcolm X’s words to heart. Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI began to systematically search for and catalog the most capable individuals and organizations dedicated to Black liberation in America. Not for a minute did the agency underestimate the threat posed by dedicated and disciplined groups of Black freedom fighters and their white comrades. The bureau’s archives, which have now largely been made public, include everything from training manuals to correspondence to propaganda materials created by these groups.
The Black Panthers accounted for the FBI’s largest file and was the target of the bulk of the agency’s efforts and resources, including informants, detectives, spies, and a range of other undercover agents and operatives. To this day I believe this was due to the party’s clarity of vision. They had a thorough grasp of capitalism and fascism that came from a lived experience of Blackness, and that enabled them to reach and unify masses of people who had previously been lost, apathetic, or afraid.
When I and other BUC [Black Unity Council] members first visited the Panther offices located on Nineteenth and Columbia Avenue in North Philadelphia, we were largely ignorant of the level of government surveillance of their activities. It was only gradually, as our link with the party deepened, that we would come to understand the lengths to which the state was prepared to go to not only eviscerate the Panthers, but bury all trace of them forever. It was only after we had joined forces with the BPP [Black Panther Party] that we came to fully comprehend what it meant to be blacklisted by the United States government, and to feel the deadly weight of its so-called national security apparatus.
Our first point of contact, in the year 1969, was a dude named Mitch Edwards, a defense captain of the party’s chapter in Philly. He must have been close to my age, mid-twenties, and he was responsible for training and leading a platoon of teenaged Panthers stationed at several offices throughout the city. Given the Black Unity Council’s status as a prominent and respected local group, that initial meeting was one of equals. However, it quickly became clear that the Panthers had a whole lot going for them that was beyond our scope or ability.
For a start, they were a national organization. They had a newspaper, a tool the BUC had never even considered, which allowed them to educate a much wider audience on their programs and ideas. Most crucially they had a fully functional free breakfast program for kids, which earned them tremendous goodwill in the neighborhoods and also served as a model for a community-based form of independent government.
As far as we were concerned, the Panthers had one weakness: They had not dedicated sufficient time and resources to developing a comprehensive military strategy, which forced them to suffer humiliating defeats and unnecessary casualties at the hands of the police. In December 1969, Chicago police officers staged a raid on the party’s headquarters, killing Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter........