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“I promised myself that I would not let them break me,” he said. He’d made a vow. And after 43 years and 10 months, Albert Woodfox survived solitary confinement longer than anyone in U.S. history.
But he didn’t just survive.
Woodfox became an educator and motivator for other men incarcerated at Louisiana’s Angola prison. Sometimes that meant poring over the words of Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, or watching the news when he could.
Other times, he banged relentlessly on pipes and shouted to other solitary cells, teaching his neighbors to read and quizzing them on Black history. “Our cells were meant to be death chambers, but we turned them into schools,” he remembered.
Woodfox persisted for decades until his release in 2016. But he suffered - from regularly painful claustrophobia to panic attacks. “It’s an evil,” he said. “[It’s] the most torturous experience a human being can be put through in prison. It’s punishment without ending.”
On August 4, 2022, Woodfox passed away. We should be inspired by his resilience to not just fight for his own life but to improve others'.
As he rests in power, we should also fight to end the solitary confinement that disproportionately tortures us, and dismantle the prison system that forces our people to fight this hard to survive.