Stan Moody

POB 240
Manchester, ME 04351
www.stanmoody.com

Jim Crow Lives!

It was 1963. I had been accepted as a law student at George Washington University.
Lilly-white Eastman Kodak Co. graciously was sending me to law school on full salary while I
worked out of a DC law firm. Imagine the excitement as I drove our little family from
Rochester, NY to DC! The super highway ended in NJ, as I recall, and from there on it was
good old Rte. 1 that stretches from Fort Kent, ME to Key West, FL. As a Maine native, I was
familiar with Rte. 1. Rte 1 of the South, however, was a wakeup call.
Narrow, dirty, cluttered with unregulated and thrown-together small businesses, little
hand-lettered signs began to appear: “Colored Served in Rear,” “Rest Rooms, White Only,”
“Drinking Fountain, White/Colored.” For a lad from the whitest state in the nation, I found the
bile rising up in me that later had me protesting the whites-only policies of the Southern Baptist
Convention. By then, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had raised this insanity to the national public
conscience.
Dr. King compiled a list of typical Jim Crow laws. On that list was a MS law
(http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm) on prisons that said, “The warden shall see that the
white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro
convicts.” For most of us in America at that time, this was a reasonable restriction, just as it
seems reasonable to many today that gay soldiers be separated from straight, lest there be some
funny business in the showers.
In that same year, while this white boy was driving through what was then the best of Jim
Crow Land – DE and MD – Albert Woodfox, one of the Angola3
(http://angola3news.blogspot.com/) who has spent the last 37 years in Solitary Confinement at
Louisiana State’s infamous Angola Prison, was convicted of armed robbery. On June 21, 2010,
the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi, reversed a 2008
Federal District Court ruling that vacated Woodfox’s 1998 retrial for the murder of a guard at
Angola on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. For now, then, Woodfox shall
remain confined to a 6 x 9 ft. cell.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is described by Solitary Watch
(http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/) as “…the most ideologically conservative of the federal
appeals courts,” noted for its “overburdened docket and for its hostility to appeals from
defendants in capital cases.”
How about release from solitary? Don’t hold your breath. Woodfox, affiliated with the
Black Panther Party that protested against conditions at Angola, will stay right where he is if
Warden Burl Cain has anything to say about it. And he does have everything to say about it!
Warden Cain believes that Woodfox “…is and always will be a menace to society by virtue of
his political beliefs.”
 The only hope at present is that Woodfox would accept Jesus – Warden Cain’s Jesus, that
is, become a Republican and “step-and-fetch-it.” At age 63, he may never see those signs
removed.