Marshall “Eddie” Conway: Free at Last! Interview on Democracy Now!
As we happily announced yesterday, Marshall “Eddie” Conway was freed from prison after being framed and locked up for nearly 44 years. At the age of 24, he was torn from his family and friends and political work by federal agents intent of shutting him down and shutting him up.As anyone who has read his memoir (Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther) knows, they failed. Eddie stayed just as active, creating mentoring programs and prison labor unions, organizing prison libraries where there had been none, and generally refusing to accept the conditions the state had relegated him to.
After less than 24 hours on the outside (and with zero sleep), Eddie gave an interview to Democracy Now! You should give the whole thing a listen. It shows just how undefeated this amazing man remains after enduring some of the worst shit the state can dish out. And how sharp and relevant his analysis remains. Below the video, we’ve pasted a bit of that analysis, specifically about the government infiltration and counterinsurgency tactics used to unjustly jail him and so many other (right up to today).
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Marshall “Eddie” Conway. He left prison yesterday after nearly 44 years there. You mentioned that you realized later it was a member of the National Security Agency who was involved in setting up the Black Panther Party chapter in Baltimore, Eddie?
MARSHALL “EDDIE” CONWAY: There was a—the defense captain named Warren Hart, he worked for the National Security Agency. He set up the Black Panther Party. I was instrumental in exposing him after a lengthy investigation, and he fled the country. He went to Canada. He infiltrated Stokely Carmichael’s organization, All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. He was exposed up there after engaging in some skulduggery with the FBI. He went to the Caribbeans, I believe the Bahamas, and he actually undermined some of the political movements down there and actually caused a death or two. And I’m not really sure that he didn’t cause a couple deaths in Maryland in the Black Panther Party, and which is a part of what caused me to actually start investigating him, because one of our members were actually killed as a result of something that he encouraged him to do.
But apparently, and as Bob said, there’s like political prisoners all across the country now from the Black Panther Party that has been victims of the COINTELPRO operation. It undermined a lot of people. It painted a picture that caused people not to get fair trials. It goaded people into responding to the violence that it was encouraging. It caused a lot of our members to get assassinated. It caused a lot of conflicts with other organizations that normally wouldn’t have occurred had they not been in the background manipulating different organizations with poison pen letters, etc.
As a result of the Church Committee hearings in ’75, I believe it was, they determined that that operation was created to perpetrate violence among black groups and among other groups, and that was illegal activity. And some of the agents that participated in it got pardoned by the president, got presidential pardons. But all the Black Panther members that were victims of it didn’t receive pardons. And they are still in prisons right now across the country. They are victims, primarily, because of the skulduggery, but also because of the climate that was created. And so, that’s the kind of operations that were going on then. Now they have kind of like legalized most of that stuff, in terms of spying and so on.
WELCOME HOME, EDDIE!
