Abstract
On October 31, 1950, trouble brewed inside California’s infamous San Quentin Prison. That afternoon, during the daily exercise regimen, thirteen of the sixteen men condemned to death row sat down and refused to return to their cellblock at the conclusion of their exercise period. One hour later, following a considerable amount of patience and pleading from the prison guards, they were forcibly removed. Screams and shouts of protest filled the prison yard, and arms and fists flailed. Guards struck inmates, and inmates struck guards. When the dust settled, there were bumps and bruises, but, miraculously, no deaths. Some of the inmates were escorted to the infirmary to treat their wounds, while others were escorted to solitary confinement. The San Francisco Chronicle featured the scuffle on the front page. The banner headline read: SAN QUENTIN GUARDS BREAK UP KILLERS’ SIT-DOWN STRIKE. But, the story missed its mark. Indeed, there was a sit-down strike, but not every inmate involved was a “killer.” Wesley Robert Wells was on death row, but he never killed anyone. Instead, his sentence stemmed from a much greater problem affecting San Quentin: black prisoners’ growing discontent at racial epithets and physical abuse from guards and other inmates.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Bob Blauner, Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not To Sign California’s Loyalty Oath (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), xv.
For an overview of 1950s-era intellectual repression at California universities, see W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
For excellent histories of Pacifica Radio and its impact on Bay area politics, see Matthew Lasar, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000);
Matthew Lasar, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War (Cambridge: Germinal Productions, 2005);
Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
U.S. Congress. Select Committee on Crime. Reform of Our Correctional Systems: A Report by the Select Committee on Crime (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973).
For an exhaustive history of Carly Chessman, including his own works, see generally, Caryl Chessman, Cell 2455, Death Row: Caryl Chessman’s Own Story (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954);
Alan Bisbort, When You Read This They Will Have Killed Me: The Life and Redemption of Caryl Chessman (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006);
Frank J. Parker, Caryl Chessman: The Red Light Bandit (Chicago: Burnham, 1975);
Caryl Chessman, The Kid Was a Killer (Minneapolis, MN: Gold Medal, 1960);
Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
William L. Kunstler, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: The Original Trial of Caryl Chessman (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1973);
Caryl Chessman, Trial by Ordeal (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1955);
Caryl Chessman, The Face of Justice (New York: Longmans Green, 1958).
Kofi Natambu, The Life and Work of Malcolm X (Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books, 2002), 138–39.
Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 169.
Eldridge Cleaver, “Prisons: The Muslims’ Decline,” in Prison Life: A Study of the Explosive Conditions in America’s Prisons, Frank Browning and Ramparts Editors (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 100–03.
For books on McGee, the Martinsville Seven, the Trenton Six, Rosa Lee Ingram, and the work of the Civil Rights Congress, see Gerald Horne, Communist Front?: The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988);
Alex Heard, The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South (New York: HarperCollins, 2010);
Eric W. Rise, The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995);
Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Park to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 167;
Cathy Knepper, Jersey Justice, The Story of the Trenton Six (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). In addition, the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture has an archival collection on the Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1955.
Copyright information
© 2012 Donald F. Tibbs
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tibbs, D.F. (2012). At the Q. In: From Black Power to Prison Power. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34280-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01306-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)