Robert Hillary King of Angola 3: Surving 29 Years in Solitary Confinement

Robert Hillary King shares his inspiring tips for surviving 29 years in solitary confinement.

By Jessica Kinnison. Posted on January 13 2012

“There’s no describing the day to day assault on your body and your mind and the feelings of despair, but sometimes the spirit is stronger than the circumstances,” Robert Hillary King recently said at a speech in Pittsburgh.

King spent 29 years in solitary confinement in a six-by-nine-foot cell at Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary.

King was convicted of robbery in 1969 despite the testimony of the main witness who admitted he picked King out of a lineup after being tortured.

King escaped from the Orleans Parish Prison and joined the Black Panther Party in New Orleans—five years after the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act.

He was recaptured within weeks of his escape and sent to Angola, then considered the bloodiest prison in America, in the spring of 1972 where he met Black Panthers Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace in solitary confinement.

They became informally known as the “Angola 3.” Woodfox and Wallace remain in solitary confinement, while King was released on time served in February 2011.

King learned the power of creative, physical activity while he was in Closed Cell Restriction (CCR), also known as extended lockdown, at Angola.

Unlike the other living spaces on Angola’s 18,000-acre prison grounds, the CCR cells did not have a slot for passing food to inmates. King had to eat from his plate through the bars while the plate was on the floor or while he balanced the plate in mid-air.

As a solution, King built a cardboard food tray and hung it from strings outside his cell. “All the guys began to do it. Some guys got creative about it. They drew pictures on their trays. They covered them in table clothes. We had fun with it,” King says.

They also made chess boards out of tissue paper. They fastened sixty-four tissue squares to their concrete floors with toothpaste to make chessboards. They made expertly sculpted tissue paper rooks and kings.

King laughs when he talks about his chess games. King says Wallace was the best player. King spent countless hours creating and maintaining the chessboards and playing the game itself. The inmates called the moves out to each other through their cell walls.

King saw other men mentally disappear in solitary confinement; he decided to work to keep his mind moving.

“I read a lot of books. If it was funny, I read it. If it was about philosophy, I read it. I read everything I could get my hands on,” he says.

He also asked fellow inmates to save sugar packets from their food trays so he could make candy. He stirred the sugar into coke cans over toilet paper roll burners and mixed in the occasional supply of pecans to make pralines.

After his release, King went straight to his kitchen to stir sugar for his brand of pralines he calls “freelines.” He used the candies to earn some money and packaged them in Angola 3 branded wrappers.

When the levees failed following Hurricane Katrina, four years later, some of King’s friends say he didn’t leave New Orleans because he was waiting on a batch of “freelines” to harden. King says he had to stay with his dog. Either way, he stayed, fed his neighbor’s dogs, rescued wet birds from the oil-laced water and offered candy to the rescuers and survivors going by on boats.

“I think I cried more in those 16 days that I was in the house after Katrina than I did in my 31 years in prison,” King told NPR on November 4, 2005, just two months after the levee failures following the late August storm devastated his city.

“I think candy is a collateral. I am doing what I’m doing to keep focus on injustices that are taking place in Angola. If doing so by cooking, making candy, opening up kitchens can produce money to aid them, then so be it. Maybe that’s my calling.”

He says he will continue to travel and speak about conditions in Angola until Woodfox and Wallace are released. “Angola will never be free of me,” says King.

“Write letters, tell people you know and open up a conversation. If you throw a pebble in a pond, it may not create a wave, but there is a ripple.”

Filed under: Health and Wellbeing, History,

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