Joel Buchanan Archive of African American History: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/ohfb
Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Program Director: Dr. Paul Ortiz 241 Pugh Hall PO Box 115215 Gainesville, FL 32611 (352) 392-7168 https://oral.history.ufl.edu
AAHP 387 Malik Rahim African American History Project (AAHP) Interviewed by Justin Hosbey and Brittany King on August 6, 2015 1 hour, 19 minutes | 30 pages
Abstract: Mr. Malik Rahim in this interview discusses his life experiences and family history in New Orleans, Louisiana. He shares the racism his family faced and the resilience they built together. He joined the Navy and traveled to California. There, he became a part of the Black Panther Party and got involved with them back in New Orleans. He discusses the role the Panther Party played in building up the Black community in New Orleans. He shares about the violence from the police and prison system. He concludes the interview delving into the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the community.
Keywords: [New Orleans, Louisiana; Black Panther Party; Hurricane Katrina; African American History]
Standards: SS.8.A.1.7 View historic events through the eyes of those who were there as shown in their art, writings, music, and artifacts, SS.912.A.7.5 Compare nonviolent and violent approaches utilized by groups (African Americans, women, Native Americans, Hispanics) to achieve civil rights, SS.912.A.7.6 Assess key figures and organizations in shaping the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement, SS.912.C.2.2 Evaluate the importance of political participation and civic participation.
For information on terms of use of this interview, please see the SPOHP Creative Commons license at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AfricanAmericanOralHistory.
AAHP 387 Interviewee: Malik Rahim Interviewer: Justin Hosbey and Brittany King Date: August 6, 2015
H: We’re here today at the Wilhelmina Johnson Community Center in Gainesville,
Florida. Today is August 6th?
K: I think it’s the fifth.
H: August 6th.
R: Yes.
H: August 5th, I’m sorry, August the 5th, 2015, and my name is Justin Hosbey, and I
am here from the Samuel Proctor Oral History Project.
K: Brittany King.
R: Malik Rahim.
H: Okay, and today is August 6th, 2015. [Laughter] Okay, so Mr. Rahim we wanted
to say first, thank you for coming out and allowing us the chance to speak with
you. Usually we start the interviews with a question to jog memory. So, where
were you born? And state your date of birth.
R: I was born in New Orleans. I was born on December the 17th, 1947.
H: Okay, all right. And is your family from Louisiana?
R: Yes.
H: Southern Louisiana area?
R: Yes.
H: Okay, okay. So, where did you grow up in New Orleans?
R: I grewed up in a community called Algiers.
H: Algiers. AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 2
R: In a area that was mostly known as Freetown. It was an area of, basically,
maroons. So I grewed up in a maroon area of New Orleans.
H: Right, right. Okay, so had your family always lived in Algiers?
R: My family on my mother’s side was from the West Bank.
H: The West Bank. Okay.
R: On my father’s side, it was from the East Bank. So, except for my father’s
mother, she was from an area, an all-Black area in Morgan City, a little island
called [inaudible 02:00].
H: Okay.
R: So, my family have a rich history of coming from maroon areas.
H: Yes, areas of Black people who kind of had a measure of freedom during those
times.
R: Right.
H: So who’s the oldest relative of yours that you still remember?
R: My grandmother.
H: Your grandmother. What was her name?
R: Bertha Lewis.
H: Bertha Lewis, okay. And she was from New Orleans as well?
R: Oh, yes.
H: All right. What was it like growing up in New Orleans?
R: In the time I grewed up in, in the area, in a period, in an era of Jim Crowism. It
was very racist, but it was one of—well, we was able to endure that racism by our
will to work and live together. So it was, to me, one of the best periods of my life. AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 3
I met many people through my lifetime, and I never met anyone that had a
blessed upbringing in the same manner that I had. Again, it was a maroon area,
and my grandfather was a UNIA member. Our community had the second-largest
UNIA chapter outside of New York. My grandfather was familiar with Queen
Mother Moore, and then when Marcus Garvey was deported out of the country, it
was out of our area. So I can always remember my grandfather and my
grandmother telling the stories about how they lined the levee all the way to
Plaquemines Parish, going through all these maroon areas, waving Garvey
goodbye. And the fact that after they deported him, how they did a caravan
leaving from Algiers going all the way to Canada, to see him in Canada.
H: Wow!
R: So, I was raised with that history.
H: Right, right. So being raised with that sense of history, and growing up in New
Orleans especially, did you feel that that’s how many people in New Orleans
were raised?
R: Oh, no. Oh no, it was a big distinction between our community and the rest of the
African-American community, all the so-called free people of color. We was more
isolated. We was more withdrawn from those areas. I didn’t grow up with a
disdain for free people of color or for that area, but I grew up knowing that they
wasn’t us.
H: Okay, and when you say “free people of color,” who are you speaking of?
R: Basically what we used to call Passe Blancs. So it looked like White, tried to pass
for White, and then those who feel like a slave culture or mentality was the way AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 4
of living. And that wasn’t us. The history of our community—I don’t know if you
ever heard the story of Juan Malo.
H: No I haven’t.
R: Juan Malo, he was the head of the largest maroon camp in the history of
Louisiana. For almost twenty-five years, they controlled St. Bernard Parish,
Plaquemines Parish, on both side of the river. Many look at him as a villain; we
looked at him as a hero. Many of your so-called free People of Color used to use
him as a saying to the kids, “If you don’t be good, you going to sleep and Juan
Malo going come in and get you at night.” And on our side we would say, “Well
go get them!” [Laughter] We used to celebrate that, and so it was a totally
different from the—
H: Right, right, right. I’m sure it did, but can you talk about how, growing up you
became involved with the Panthers. Is that part of what encouraged you to—?
R: Well, in my community, they built the elementary school with all of the amenities
that go along with it. We wasn’t allowed to go into the yard because it was for
White, even though it was one block from where I was raised, that we had to
walk something like about maybe two miles or two and a half miles to our school.
And then, once we were arrested for just sneaking in there and playing on the
swings. So then as a teenager we didn’t ask to—it was a movement not to
integrate, but basically in our community, to—they had just built a White park with
a swimming pool. And we said, “Well hey; we pay taxes, too. We want a pool and
a park for us.” And we did it during an election time, and they say, “Yeah, we’ll
give it to you, and we’ll build it for you.” And they did; big old spacious pool with a AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 5
fine, beautiful park. But they built on top of the city dump. So with that, I could always remember the fact that my father would not allow us to go to that pool, even though we had this big, brand-new, spacious pool. I used to have to sneak to go to it until you could tell, with the slime on the top of the water, because it
was on the city dump. And with that, it really stopped us from using it. So I knew
then that I could no longer survive here in this community. During the same time
came urban renewal, and when they just built this middle-African, middle-class
suburb, it was the second oldest in New Orleans. The first one was Ponchartrain
Park, and then came Truman Park. Truman Park was in our community, and it
was surrounded by homes, and faith-based institutions, and businesses that had
been established since the end of slavery. Most people wasn’t home-buyers,
they was homeowners. The city had decided, since they had built a bridge across
the Mississippi, that it wasn’t the right community for the first thing a person see
when they cross the river: our community. So under urban renewal, they forced
the majority of us to move and they built a project. Now, the stipulation was that
instead of a hundred or two hundred homes that—during pre-urban renewal, they
were going build a thousand units of housing for African Americans, with all the
amenities. And by that, I mean indoor plumbing, which is something that they
didn’t have up until that time. If you had indoor plumbing, you was classified as
rich, because most people didn’t have it. So with those and the fact that we had,
we was in a no-win situation, our community conceded and they built this project.
Well, when they built this project, most of us thought that they was going rename
it Oakdale after the old community, but they named it Fisher after an old White AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 6
guy that nobody never knew who it was about. So with the fact that what had
happened to our community, at that time, the thing was either you go to Chicago
or to California to escape that type of lifestyle, or you join the Service. So I
choose the latter and joined the Service, and I went into the Navy. And when I
went into the Navy, it was in January of [19]65. And then in February of [19]65
came the assassination of Malcolm X, and that’s what opened my eyes, because
I had never even heard of Malcolm X. And that’s what started opening my eyes
to our history. That summer I got out of boot camp, I was transferred to Long
Beach, so I was in California in [19]65 for the riots. This radio station, KGFJ, at
that time was the hottest Black radio station in Los Angeles. They had a disc
jockey called the Magnificent Montague. And Montague used to come on every
morning and holler, “Wake up, everybody! Los Angeles is on fire. Burn baby,
burn!”
H: [Laughter]
R: That’s where the “burn baby, burn” came from. I watched individuals that I’ve
seen—I say, well, “Wow, they rioting here, and all the rights they had, in
comparison to the [inaudible 15:00]. But then came the thing that it was on the
Naval base because of the riots, we was on alert, and many of us said, “Well
hey, we not going.” They put down our people. But the next thing you know, most
of us was being shipped to Vietnam. I was already on my way, but I started
seeing some of the Marines and stuff—because I was in the Navy, so I was on a
LPH, a helicopter carrier. So when we pulls off, we usually have about two
thousand sailors, but we would have about fifteen to twenty thousand Marines, AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 7 and this was the first combat troops being sent to Vietnam. So, while I was in Los
Angeles, there was a high school called Freemont. Now Freemont, Ron Karenga, he was teaching African American Studies there, and language. He was teaching
Swahili. But I was there, and I was blessed to be there while he was putting together Kwanzaa. That was my first involvement in the US Organization. I wasn’t a member, but that US influenced. Then I went to Vietnam. When I came back, the Panther party had started. The Panthers and US at that time, for a little short while that I was there, was sharing the same building. One was upstairs, the other one was downstairs. Then when I got out of the Service in [19]67, my first wife, she was from Los Angeles. But she was still in high school. I used to, after taking her to school, I would hang out by the Panther office because
Geronimo was from my community. Once I found out that Geronimo was there, I used to hang out there with him. But I didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles you had to be twenty-one to go in the nightclubs. But in
New Orleans, that’s all you had to was be as man enough to walk in there and hold your own, so I just couldn’t deal with that. So I told him, I said—cause I was going to journey out there. Again this, I said, “Well hey, man, listen; I’m going back to New Orleans. If y’all ever come to New Orleans, I’ll get involved.” Maybe a year and a half later, I was walking down Canal Street, and a brother named
Alton Edwards was out on Canal Street selling Panther papers. I stopped and talked with him, and invited him to come into the projects the next day. And the next morning, I had stopped working because I was working for a company called HC Price doing pipeline construction, and I was working as a welder’s AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 8
helper. And I asked about how to become a welder, and I was told, “Well hey, we
don’t hire niggers as welders.” So me and this dude, we wind up getting into it, I
got straight out fired. So with that, I stopped working, and I started hanging in the
projects selling weed. Smoking marijuana in my community is something that we
been doing for over two hundred years. So, I was selling weed in the project, and
I was in the breezeway, hanging out, when I was told, “Hey man, there’s a guy
out here looking for you. He’s got some Panther papers.” I said, “Woah!” So I
brought him around, showed him around, spent the day with him. The next day, I
went over to their office and I spent a couple of days with them. And afterward, I
brought my first wife over. And then as a family, we joined the party. At that time I
was married and had two kids. So I came and I was the first married couple, first
couple—we was the first married couple in the party, and we brought in the first
kids. That was in 1970.
H: Okay. So being in the party, what was it like kind of having a family and bringing
your family into the Black Panther Party?
K: Bringing them up in that environment?
R: It was the best thing that ever happened in my life. The first time and the only
time I seen brothers that have went from “me” to “we,” if you know what I’m—
understand.
K: Mmhm.
R: It was never about what you could do for me, it’s what we can do for our
community. The Panther Party brought love into my heart for my people. You
have to remember in 1970, the Black Panther Party had already been declared AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 9
as a threat, and Panther chapters was being raided and members was being
killed all over the country. We started meeting in December of [19]69, maybe a
month before—no, maybe in November of [19]69. We didn’t have a office then,
we would just meet at a brother’s house in the project. But this project was the
St. Thomas project.
H: St. Thomas project, okay.
R: All right? So we was meeting out of there when Fred Hampton was killed. And
we knew that Governor McKeithen had already stated that he would never let
The Black Panther Party get started out of Louisiana. We knew that our chances
of survival was without a confrontation was slim to none. So it was a time that
brothers had coined the phrase of revolutionary suicide. You know, that you was
going to live and do whatever you can for your people until it was your time to be
taken away. Most of us had made up our mind that, again, we was going take the
code of the maroons: that before we will live as a slave, we’ll live in the wild, on
our own. We would die; that slave mentality, we wasn’t going to allow that to be
the motivating factor in how we live. With that, we started the Louisiana—we
started the National Committee to Combat Fascism. And that was the first stage
of becoming a Panther chapter. It wasn’t like the way it is now with this New
Black Panther Party, it was the, you had to have survival program. You had to
establish so many survival program and prove what you were doing for the social
uplifting of your community, before you could even be considered for
membership in the Black Panther Party. I went to Oakland because I was the
second in command, I was the OD. And OD is officer of the day. So it was for me AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 10
to make sure everything operate. Whatever we was doing, if a person came to us
underground, make sure he had a safe place to stay; make sure that the program
was well-funded, and that individuals did they tasks. So with that, we started right
outside the St. Thomas project. As soon as we rented the building, put up our
first poster, we were served with an eviction notice. We stayed there three
months fighting that eviction. But as we as fighting, we was paying this judge
rent. It was owned by this judge, but it was rented through this realtor called
Strawder. We didn’t want to pay them, we say, “Why should we give our money
to someone who don’t want us to be there?” While we was there, some residents
from the Desire, there came because they was trying to organize a tenant’s
association. At that time, Whites had tenants’ associations but no Blacks was
allowed to have—
H: That was the Desire Projects?
R: And in the St. Thomas, because St. Thomas was just making the transition from
being a White project to an integrated project, and then Desire was all-Black. The
White project there was called Florida. In the Florida, they had the tenants’
association. In the Florida, they had all the amenities of social and economic
uplifting. But in the Desire, that didn’t exist. When the residents came and met
with us about that, we wind up moving to the Desire. They had a group called the
Sons of Desire, so Sons of Desire was at the bottom and we was at the top.
H: Right, right.
R: That’s where we opened our offices. AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 11
H: So were you—I know that there was a—I don’t know how to word or
characterize, but I know the Florida projects, eventually the Panthers did have a
presence in Florida, and there was an incident that they had a confrontation.
R: That was in Desire.
H: That was in Desire, okay. Were you involved in that?
R: I was in the first shootout. There was two shootouts. The shootout that I was in
was on September the 5th, I think. It was a Tuesday. Well, on Mondays we had
our political education class. I guess the greatest—the greatest and the proudest
part of my life as an African American was during that period of being in Desire.
We had established a breakfast program. My wife at that time, Barbara, she was
in charge of putting that breakfast program together. That first week we might—
the first day we opened, we might’ve fed twenty kids. By that Friday we was
feeding something like about forty, and within the month we was feeding between
two and four hundred kids. To see that program going on as well; our cleanup
program, our Sickle Cell awareness program. I mean, because see, every Friday,
me or Steve Green, we would have to go to central staff meeting, up in Oakland
or in New York. And when you go there, you meet comrades from all over the
country. And they would tell you what they doing. You dig? You get a chance,
“Well what kind of program you doing?”
H: Yeah.
R: And then you want to come back and do the same! [Laughter] So I mean it was a
good feeling.
H: Bring it to New Orleans now. AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 12
R: Oh yeah, because people that you didn’t even, you never met, never knew. Soon
as you walk in the room and say, “All power to the people,” the dude would say,
“Well hey, man, this is our comrade from New Orleans.” You dig? It was nothing
but love. It wasn’t no idea of “You an outsider” or anything, the territorial thing, all
that was ended: “This is my comrade.” It was just a great feeling. And then when
you see—it was like a painting. You ever seen an artist that does a painting, and
when that painting come into fruition, how we feel about it?
H: Mmhm.
R: That’s the way we was about the Desire, because the Desire was classified at
that time as the most dangerous public housing in the country. Because New
Orleans was classified as the worst public housing authority in the country, and
Desire was the worst in New Orleans. Within two months, we had turned it into
the safest community in the city. We went out, talked to brothers and told them,
“Hey man, if it’s wrong for you to sell drugs, it is also equally as wrong for you to
have to sell drugs. But if you got to do this to make a living, don’t do it up around
no parks. Don’t do it where the children and the elderly is at.” So we started the
first drug-free zones. Then go along with the clean-ups, you dig? And then we,
after we did the clean-ups, because we would just tell people, “Don’t civilized
people live in filth. This is your community. If you want to be treated as a civilized
person, then you got to act in a civilized manner.” So we start cleaning it up. The
place was inundated with roaches and rats, so the next thing, one of the first
programs that we started outside of our breakfast program, the second one was
our pest control program. Where we used—individuals would, like in this room, AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 13 they would put down all the poison and stuff to kill the roaches and stuff up in this one, but when you put it up in this one, they’d just go into the next one. That’s something that had never been done. The first thing we did, we went around the entire perimeter of the project, and then we started working in. Until we started ridding areas of it. The next program is then, you know, a lot of people’ houses was being broken into. We just was just feeding on ourselves like parasites. So the next program we offered was that if a person leave, they would call our office and tell us that they were going be gone all night, and we would send a party member to stay at your house. On check date, a lot of women were scared because of the fact that they would get robbed. That means that we started going out with them, making sure that, hey, that nobody messed with them. We always operated under three phases. The first time that you don’t comply, we’ll give you a warning. The second time, we’ll come out after you with some Louisville
Sluggers, and we’ll break your fucking leg. You know? You sitting out here with that dumb shit, we going break your leg. The third time, we going put you out of the community. Every time you come in, and we find out that you in the community, we going break another leg. By doing this, we stood up and most people understood it. Because we’d tell them, “Listen, your family stay here. Do you want your son to be a dope fiend? Or do you want your mother to be one?
Then you got to respect other people’ sons and mothers.” And most people understood. We only had one incident. And after that, the community start coming out. One of the most profound experience I had at that time was one of the brothers came and told me, he said, “Man, come on from behind that desk AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 14 and come on out brother, I got something that I want you to see.” “What is it?”
“Come on.” So, we walked. I said, “Well, let’s ride.” We had a cars. “No, brother, I want you to walk.” As we walking down, he said, “Now, what’s different?” And it took me a minute, it took a minute for me to say—because it was night. Said, “I don’t know.” He say, “Look around.” And families was out that night, they wasn’t confined to their houses. It was the proudest time for my life, you know that. Even though they didn’t know none of us by name, they all knowed that we was members of the Panthers, even though we wasn’t dressed in that beret and all that. They knew us, and everybody would just speak to us, you know? And thank us for what we was doing. Getting up in the morning and see—and this is a poor area—families would send they kids in the morning to the breakfast program with boxes of grits. Or one day we asked for eggs, and we was inundated with eggs, cartons of eggs. We had so many eggs! [Laughter] And we had to wind up giving them back! [Laughter] Because we couldn’t cook up a storm, you know? We started seeing the importance of self-sufficiency, and how we can help to uplift the community. When the first shootout happened, we had kids that used to sell
The Louisiana Weekly, and they used to sell it on Tulane and Broad. So they seeing these two guys that was hanging around our office with the big bush, looked more militant than the militants. Some little kids told us that those was police, that those was pigs, that’s what we’d call them. They said, “There were some pigs.” “Well, how you know they pig?” “We sell papers right there, and we see them go in and out of the police station.” So a brother from out of New York, one of them, one of my heroes—and at that time I was twenty-two, and he was AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 15 just nineteen. His name was Charles Chucky Scott. He was wise enough to say,
“Hey man, listen; don’t do nothing to them. Let’s keep them around, feed them with a long handle. Let’s use them. Use them to go to get to the airport, to get our papers, use them to ride around.” And always make sure it was somebody to keep an eye on them at all times. We was having our political education meeting that Monday, and I made the mistake of telling an individual to watch them, because they was agents, they was police. And she exposed it at our meeting. At that time, we might’ve had three, four hundred people come to our meetings. Our meetings was so big that we would close the street up, and from our unit—we was a two-story, we was at the top—we would be on the porch talking to the people, and the people was down below. He exposed that to them, but we didn’t know that he was an NSA agent. So they exposed it, and that resulted in the first shootout. But we knew that a shootout was coming, because we had—by the fact that I was a Vietnam veteran, we had a couple more of Vietnam veterans, Leroy
Jones, Walim—we used to, we started sandbagging one side of the house. But we had never gotten to the interior side. Because it was a double, and we was on one side. We set up bunkers in the roof or in the attic, but we had never completed, but that’s all—and that’s because of, to me as a spiritual person, the
Most High was blessing us that the shootout happened when it did. And on
September the 15th came that shootout. But the night before, one of the sisters in the project came and put a prayer cloth on the lawn. And told us, “Hey, if y’all pray, ain’t nothing going happen to you.” That morning when I—that night we held our meeting after we knew—because we knew that morning, there was AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 16 going be a shootout. By then, we knew how to take the sewer to get all around the Desire Project. And setting up safe havens under different buildings in the project. I was hoping that we would just take it to all the buildings, but Charles was wise enough and said, “Man, listen: you do this, and these people lose, they going lose everything. This our office, we going right here in our office. Those who want to leave, they can leave. Those who want to stay, they can stay.” But nobody left. And everybody know that the shootout was going to be that morning.
And in Louisiana history, when Blacks picked up guns, you die. So, it was honor to be in that house with them, to see that everybody decided they was going stay. We said that we had three phases, said this is the first phase, we going to stay. And then whatever happened to us, the second one was going to come in and reopen the office. And if something happen to them, then that third phase was going come in and keep the office going. In that first phase with us, it was were nine men and three women that decided to stay. The shootout happened maybe about twenty minutes. We had about a hundred, hundred and twenty police shooting at us in a wooden house. They would pull up an armored car with a sixty-caliber machine gun and literally spray the house, and the concentration of fire was so great, where the walls would literally explode and catch fire. So, we had buckets of water that we were throwing, and then they would throw the tear gas in there on us, and we would try to throw it back out. The house was just inundated. And after twenty minutes or so—but I thought it was hours—all the shooting stopped. I guess they figured that they done their dastardly deed. Then
Charles asked me to crawl in the different rooms and find how many was injured AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 17 and how many was dead. And as I was crawling and ask how many was injured, how many was dead, I was getting the same response. Nobody was injured, nobody was dead. I came and told him that, he just laughed. Then he said, “Well hey, get everybody and bring them up here.” When we brought them up, he said,
“Now it’s time for us to take it to the next phase. We going to walk out of here and we going take it to court.” So I told him, said, “Well brother, you know, you from
New York. But here, what they going do, they going drag us—if we come out, they going to bring us somewhere and lynch us. Or they going beat us to death.
But we’ll never make it to court.” And he said, “Well, if that’s what they going do, we going walk out here as men and let them do whatever they have to do. When we walk out, we going walk out as members of The Black Panther Party.” He led the way, walked out, and when we hit the door, “All power to the people.” And walked on out. And the people were still there. We went from Desire, to the court for arraignment, and then placed on death row, all in one day. I woke up in the
Desire, and went to bed on death row. We stayed on death row until the second shootout, but for the second shootout, when the police came with force and tried to raid us, the community wouldn’t leave. Men of public housing surrounded our office and wouldn’t let the police raid. And that was the proudest moment of my life, when I seen the police had to back away because of the fact that they couldn’t raid, because of the fact that the people wouldn’t allow it. What they had done for the second shootout, they had some priests from Loyola that had came over and had been helping us with our breakfast program, and they promised us AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 18
all the food and the freezers that they was going to bring us, to make sure—and
how they loved the breakfast program, and this was Thanksgiving of [19]65.
H: [19]65, okay.
R: I mean, of [19]70. So, they told us to tell them that they were going to get the
food and they was bringing it back, so that for that Thanksgiving we was going
have the breakfast and lunch program, and dinners for the community. But when
they left, they gave the priest uniforms to the police. So, the police came back
dressed as priests. That’s how they was able to come in and raid the office the
second time. And that’s when the only member of the party to get shot was shot,
and that was a sister by the name of Betty Toussaint. If you want to do an
interview, that would be good, Betty Toussaint.
H: Okay.
R: Would be a great one.
K: “Toussaint” as in Toussaint L’Ouverture?
R: After the second shootout, it were too many of us to keep on death row; that’s
when we was placed in the dungeon. In the dungeon is where we met Albert
Woodfox and Herman Wallace, and other brothers. Because what we was doing,
we would write articles. And put them as kites, and send them all throughout the
jail. So we organized a hunger strike. We organized a inmate council.
H: This was in Loyola?
R: No, no this was Orleans Parish Prison.
H: Orleans Parish Prison, okay, okay, okay. AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 19
R: We start telling brothers about why they need to stop abusing each other,
because then it was all—. The Parish Prison was called “House of Shock” after
this TV program called Marcus, Marcus the Magnificent, he used to come on in
New Orleans with the House of Shock. And it was sad to see how we was
treating each other. If you was weak, you was raped, and then you were sold.
That was us doing it to each other. So, we was constantly putting out articles
about, “Hey, don’t let no one cause you to lose your humanity.”
H: Right.
R: And we did not allow it to happen on our tier, our tier started being called a
Panther tier. And you ain’t raping nobody here. I don’t care how bad you are, you
ain’t bad enough to deal with all of us. So, all that bullshit that you was doing on
these other tiers, that ain’t happening. And with that, we developed that lifestyle,
that collective lifestyle, that if you didn’t get any visits and didn’t have any money,
it didn’t matter. If I got a visit, I turned in all of my money to one person. He made
sure that whatever he purchased, it was equally distributed to all. So nobody
without—and next thing you know, other brothers that even though they wasn’t in
the party from the—because of a political reason, they embraced us and joined.
Herman Wallace and Albert was two of those. Gilbert Montague; it was a bunch
of them that joined. And we took it to court and was found not guilty for the
shootout that we was at. So, when we was released, I was rearrested for
kidnapping. They said I had kidnapped a prison guard. So I was rearrested for
that, and while I was in jail for that kidnapping charge, a lot of the brothers who
had joined the party while we they was incarcerated was now being transferred AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 20
to Angola. It was about—Albert had knew that his transfer, him and Herman was
coming up. So that charge that I was on was dropped from kidnapping to false
imprisonment, so I pleaded guilty to the false imprisonment charge, they gave me
a credit for time served, and I was being released. And that night, we had a
meeting on exactly what we was going do with these brothers that wasn’t going
to be released. Because the least amount of time that a member had that had
joined us while in Parish Prison was ten years. Most of them had—let’s see,
Albert had fifty years, Herman had ninety years, some of them had two hundred,
some of them had life sentences. When I got out, I went to Oakland and met with
David Hilliard. Because at that time David was in charge of the party, because
Bobby and Huey was incarcerated. Bobby was still incarcerated because of the
Democratic Convention, and Huey because of the murder of a police. So David
was running the party. Eldridge was—
H: Was gone.
R: Yeah, yeah. I told David, him and Junior, about the plight of these brothers. And I
said, well, we a chapter, and we want to set up these brothers up in Angola to be
part of our chapter. But David had the wisdom enough to say, “No, uh-uh. We
going allow them to create their own chapter.” With that, the Angola chapter by
The Black Panther Party was started. They took all the lessons that they had
learned with us to Angola. The first thing they done was start dealing with the
rapes, but in Angola, they had what they called “khaki guards.” A khaki back
guard was an inmate that say, “I’ll pick up a gun and I’ll guard other inmates.” AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 21
The only free guards was White guards, and they’d covered the perimeter. But
the inside was khaki back guards.
H: They’re like overseers?
R: Right. The first thing they start doing is try to deal with them. That’s when Brent
Miller was killed, the prison guard. And even though the fingerprints that they
found didn’t match none of the members of what they called the brotherhood,
they singled Albert, Herman, and Gilbert Montique out, because they said they
was the ringleaders. But Gilbert went to trial, and he was blessed that the free
man wouldn’t lie and say that he wasn’t at his work station. If he was at his work
station, he couldn’t have committed murder.
H: Right
R: So, he was found not guilty. With that came the vendetta to make sure that
Herman and Albert would never get out. They was framed, and everybody knew
it, that he didn’t get a fair trial, they didn’t care. Because once they convicted
them, it took them twenty years to get their conviction overturned in a new trial.
Then when they got the second trial, they was convicted again because it was
right there in that same parish, West Feliciana Parish, and if Angola sent an
inmate to West Feliciana Parish, they would go to court in St. Francisville, no
one—the first time an inmate beated a charge in that court was Gilbert
Montague. So I tell anyone that Christ could have went to trial there, and all
twelve of his disciples could have been jurors; they would’ve still found him guilty.
That’s how powerful Angola prison is, and that parish. Because it’s the number
one business in that parish, and if you don’t work there, you was related to AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 22
someone that worked there, or there was a ripple effect of being a vendor or
things of it. When convict leasing was a thing, they would lease them to the
different farmers—even though it was outlawed, they were still doing it. So
people were still being used, basically as slaves. Because you was out there
working, you had to work fourteen hours a day, and then that was for two cents
an hour. So basically, that’s a slave. When that prison guard was killed, like I
said, they branded them they was convicted. Took them twenty years for the first
one, and then after they went to trial a second time, it took them another nineteen
years to have that conviction overturned. So by—after they got that second, it
was forty years of their lives gone.
H: In solitary confinement?
K: Mmhm.
R: That’s right. Right now, Albert, he’ll have been in solitary for forty-three years, but
he had been incarcerated forty-seven years.
H: So I think, thinking about the Panthers, it seems like when you look at the way
that they punished the Panthers, or lots of them, it was always something kind of
cruel and unusual—if him being in solitary for forty-three years or what they, what
happened to Assata—
K: The male prisoner.
H: Right.
K: In solitary.
H: Right, so I think, do you think that’s the state saying something about rebellion
and resistance? AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 23
R: Well it always was that way for a slave. In order to keep you as a slave, you have
to remember, the first thing that would keep you here, is the way to stop you from
running. I got to show that if you run, this is what’s going happen to you. If you
listen to one of them that’s saying it—because he didn’t ever call it “Black
Panther Party,” they called it “Black Pantherism.” “That Pantherism.” And that’s
what they was after. They was after, “How can we destroy that Black Pantherism,
and how can we use them as a living example? This is what’s happening to you if
you get involved in this.” So with that, they kept them locked up in what is called
closed cell restriction. Now nowhere when they was convicted was they
sentenced to life in solitary. But this is something that the state decided, that is
against the Constitution. The Bill of Rights clearly state about cruel and unusual
punishment, but that’s the exception to it.
H: Right, right. So I guess coming closer to now, with your work with people in
Hurricane Katrina and people; so, tell me about your work that you been doing
since Katrina hit.
R: Well when Katrina hit—and again, I told you I’m a very spiritual person, and I told
you about how this lady put up this prayer cloth. But I don’t believe that that’s
what happened to us on September the 15th. Because September 15, 1970, was
the seventh year anniversary of the Birmingham Bombing. It happened on
September the 15th, 1963. So it was exactly seven years that the shootout, and I
believe that the reason we was all saved, because we had four little angels on
our side.
H: Right. AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 24
R: When Katrina hit, the day before, it was heading straight for New Orleans. But
that Sunday it deviated just enough that New Orleans was spared and it hit
Burlington, Mississippi, which was over seventy miles away from New Orleans. I
believe it was the spirit of Emmett Till. Because August the 28th, 2005, was the
fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. So I believe it was the spirit of
Emmett Till that spared us. Because if the hurricane would’ve stayed on that path
and hit New Orleans, we would’ve lost about sixty to seventy thousand people.
Because that Saturday, when the evacuation orders was given, the city had prior
knowledge that there was a hundred and fifty thousand people, the majority
African American, that had no means of escape. In [20]04 they did a mock drill,
and that mock drill was Hurricane Pam, and under that mock drill they realized
that these people, it was a hundred and fifty thousand people that wasn’t able to
leave. When the mayor gave that evacuation order, that’s the time that I really, it
put me away from so-called Black leaders in New Orleans. Because to me, a
leader is defined by his leadership during a time of crisis. When the hurricane
came, they left. That Sunday, before the hurricane in Algiers, it was only two
churches that was open, and we are a community like most Black communities
that’s inundated with them. Now all of a sudden, none of them is open. When the
hurricane hit—and as bad as it was, New Orleans was spared the bullet. Now,
the Ninth Ward was flooded, but everybody knew the Ninth Ward was going be
flooded. Because after they built [inaudible 1:03:58], that was supposed to been
a shortcut for the petroleum industry to get from the Gulf of Mexico into the city of
New Orleans. Nothing in nature is a straight line, so that canal became a AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 25 freeway, and the levee was only thirteen feet in some areas, and only fourteen feet in other areas. So it’s impossible for a fourteen-feet levee to stop a twenty- to twenty-five-foot tidal surge. So it wasn’t the idea that those levees was breached; they was just overtopped. That’s what caused the flooding in the Ninth Ward, but the rest of the city was spared. And that Monday, everybody thought they had dodged a bullet. The federal government knew that the London Street Canal and this other canal was being undermined, and they knew that the city was flooding, and they wouldn’t warn nobody. They allowed people to go to sleep thinking they were safe, and then you would find that Monday evening, that’s when the flooding really hit the east bank of New Orleans. On our side, the west bank, we had an oceangoing freighter, to wind up breaking lose and drifting and hitting our levee, and like it was sitting on top of it, and didn’t break through. Because our levee was built to expectation, because it was protecting a naval base and a
White community. But these other levees, they wasn’t built with the proper material, or to the proper depth, or to the proper height. And that’s how people wind up being flooded and losing their lives. My son, one of my sons, he told me when he came to my house that he looked out—and he had a Ford F-150, so it was a big truck. He said he had went outside to straighten up his car, because the hurricane was gone. So he was out there, and he said that all of a sudden the street became wet. So he said he walked in the house to tell his wife, “Look, this water in the street.” He said by the time he got to his kitchen to tell her, and before he could get to his front door, the water was chest-high in his house. He had to take his kids, my grandkids, and carry them outside, and they said the AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 26 only thing that they was able to see was the top of his car, of their truck. So he had to leave my grandkids on the top of that truck to try to get some kind of belongings from them, so that they could get away. He said that him and about seven other families wind up staying in this two-story house until they ran out of food and supplies, and then they had to go down and try to salvage some supplies. Because at that time, he said that your first consideration is not clothing or food or anything, it’s how you going save your children. That’s how he wound up coming over to me, on the West Bank. That was that Tuesday. That
Wednesday he left just before all hell broke out in New Orleans, because that
Wednesday is when total madness wind up taking over. Vigilantes up in Algiers here, White vigilantes, on the East Bank they had police going wild with the killings. Through that, we started our common ground, a person that—I had a confrontation with some vigilantes. I knew I was outgunned, and I was seeing how well they was not only armed, but how much ammunition they had. I made a call, Scott Crow came down, a White anarchist, came down really to get King, found out about my plight, and decided that he was going to stay and protect me.
It was Scott Crow that decided it was time for us to form a organization. This was after the Danziger murders, and the murder of Henry Glover, and others. With it, we said that—because at night, we used to meet and have discussions on why social movements always wind up failing. When King came, he joined our conversation, he said, “The reason why they always failed is we allowed our differences to separate us. We need to always find a common ground that could be a nucleus.” And with that came the name of the organization, Common AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 27
Ground. I headed the collective because I’m a firm believer, I’m a socialist at heart, and I believe in a collective way of life. So, Common Ground Collective was established. Sharon Johnson, another powerful, Black woman. She was my mate at that time. She put up thirty dollars, I put up twenty dollars, and we prayed. And after that, we found Common Ground. Herman and Albert was in
solitary, but they put out the words to the support committee, telling them how to
get to my house to start helping, save our community. Through this, Common
Ground was established; we served over—we had almost twenty-two thousand
volunteers during the span that I was involved in it. We served over a half a
million people. We opened up four health clinics, we opened up a legal clinic, we
did bioremediation work. We do wetland restoration work. While I was in charge
of Common Ground, we planted over twenty thousand trees in our wetlands.
Talking about the other indigenous plants, we did maybe close to fifty thousand
plants. The only volunteer to be killed while volunteering, aftermath of Katrina,
was a lady that was volunteering with us named Meg Perry. But because of the
fact that she was volunteering with us, she wasn’t classified as a volunteer that
was killed, she was classified as a drifter that was killed. One of the things that—
because we never received no recognition. FEMA never gave us any funding;
the city, the state, we never received that. Never received a thank you. Right
now, my house I still have rooms that are still without walls, and I don’t even have
running water in my house. In the health clinics that we started, the only way the
federal government would fund them and make them a federally-funded health
clinic, they had to get rid of me. The relief, the only way they could get the money AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 28
for wetland restoration was they—even though I don’t have any dealings with
them, but they have been doing a good job with wetland restoration. But the only
reason why they was able to get funding for it, they had to get rid me. To get rid
of me, is to get rid of the Panther element of it, and the Angola Three of it,
because I’ve stated ever since Katrina that it wouldn’t have been a Common
Ground if it wouldn’t have been an Angola Three. And it wouldn’t have been an
Angola Three if it wouldn’t’ve been a Black Panther Party. So if anybody
deserved the credit, then you have to give the credit where the credit is due, and
that’s at its foundation, at its seed, and the seed of it is the Black Panther Party.
H: Do you think that, for people who live in New Orleans now, who lived through the
storm, has the trauma of that ever been dealt with?
R: You see it every day. I see it every day. That ten-year-old child that was left in
that convention center, in that Superdome? He’s not ten no more. He is twenty
now, full of rage, never seen no love. Most of them was from public housing, dig?
Instead of going back to they community that was spared, these buildings that
stood through Katrina, through Rita, then went through Betsy, and Camille; every
hurricane—all the way from Arthur—they have went through, they was locked out
of their community. They was displaced. That’s why you see the way these kids
is now. They didn’t have any trauma counselor helping them through this. When
they opened up the first high school in New Orleans, they had seventy kids to a
class—more guards than teachers. Now we are seeing the ramifications of it, you
dig? Where you see these kids are killed over anything, but they haven’t seen it AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 29
enough. You know, so I mean, this is something that we have brought upon
ourselves.
H: So I think, we have time to wrap up a little bit? Okay. Is there anything else you
want to state for the record, and I’m sure this is a conversation that we can
continue and through your talking afterwards, but is there anything else for the
record that you would like to have on there?
R: I would just like to say that, again, I’ve lived a blessed, a real blessed existence.
Because I have met the essence of humanity. In Common Ground we had, I’d
say a little over twenty, sometimes I say nineteen, but between nineteen and
twenty-two thousand volunteers, and over ninety-five percent of them was White,
that came down into the most dangerous Black areas of the city. And there never
was an incident. What they had done, they destroyed certain myths. The city was
saying that the only thing that was left in New Orleans was looters, but they came
down and found God-fearing, hardworking people that just happened to be poor.
With our community, those volunteers were the closest thing to a trauma
counselor that they ever seen. So they was able to dispel the myth that all Whites
was oppressors and exploiters. So with those two, I watched them stop New
Orleans from breaking into a race war that we couldn’t win. I seen what they can
do, and that’s why now, ten years later, even though the city won’t even
acknowledge that we exist, we are preparing. And we asking former Common
Grounders to come back for Katrina’ tenth. Then we will expose exactly what had
transpired.
H: Mr. Rahim, thank you for the interview. AAHP 387; Rahim; Page 30
R: I thank you, my brother.
H: Thank you, thank you. All right.
[End of interview]
Transcribed by: Shannon Cea, October 28, 2016
Audit edited by: Ryan Morini, July 3, 2018
Final edit by: Ryan Morini, February 26, 2019