Lessons in Love and Struggle: Twenty Years of Human RIghts Abolitionist Organizing

Edited by Kerry ‘Shakaboona’ Marshall, Patricia Marshall Vickers, and the Human Rights Coalition

Lessons in Love and Struggle traces the struggle of the Human Rights Coalition's twenty year history organizing against prisons and police long before it was accepted by the mainstream. From its beginnings as the first abolitionist organization in Pennsylvania to organize family members; to the creation of a quarterly news publication distributed throughout Pennsylvania prisons; to organizing rallies on the outside on behalf of prisoners; to freeing political prisoner, Russell Maroon Shoatz before his untimely passing, they eventually spawned three chapters across Pennsylvania and fostered the development of several other abolitionist organizations grounded in their philosophy. Throughout, the Human Rights Coalition has been carried by the relationships between its members, though separated by prison walls: parents, children, spouses, siblings, mentors and mentees.

The Human Rights Coalition, conceived by prisoners at SCI Greene in 2001, first took shape as a small group gathered in a mother’s home. Operating from the belief that each prisoner has at least one family member who loves them, the organization grew as prisoners brought their loved ones into the fold struggling to end solitary confinement and abolish the prison industrial complex.

Featuring interviews with current and formerly incarcerated political prisoners, archival material, and essays on how the terrain of abolitionist organizing has changed over the last twenty years from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror to the uprising against police in 2020, the Human Rights Coalition reminds us of the necessity and power of love and relationships in our struggle to abolish all structures that oppress us.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Edited by: Kerry ‘Shakaboona’ Marshall, Patricia Marshall Vickers, and the Human Rights Coalition
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781942173731
Published: August 2023
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8
Page count: 256
Subjects: Abolition/Organizing/Archive

About the editors

Kerry ‘Shakaboona’ Marshall is a cofounder of the Human Rights Coalition and coeditor of The Movement Magazine for 13 years. He has been incarcerated since age 17 and spent thirteen years in Solitary Confinement.

Patricia Marshall Vickers, or Mama Patt, is the matriarch of the movement. After her son was incarcerated at the age of 17, she has worked tirelessly to advocate for his release and to fight for the rights of all incarcerated people. She is one of the original HRC members, and coeditor of THE MOVEMENT magazine.

Rooted in the Black Liberation Movement, the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) was founded by incarcerated comrades in Pennsylvania prisons—specifically SCI Huntington and SCI Greene— in collaboration with their family members on the outside in 2001. Over that past two decades, HRC has fought tirelessly for the rights of incarcerated people, particularly for the abolition of solitary confinement, end of Death By Incarceration, and release of political prisoners. HRC’s mission is to empower prisoners’ families to be leaders in prison organizing and to teach them how to advocate on behalf of their loved ones in prison and expose the inhumane practices of the Department of Corrections.

About the contributors

Russell Maroon Shoatz: Beloved mentor, abolitionist thinker and political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz has been incarcerated since 1972 and spent 30 years in Solitary Confinement. A member of the Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Black Unity Council, he co-founded HRC and has served as a mentor to several HRC members.

Robert Saleem Holbrook: As an HRC Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, Saleem has long been at the forefront of campaigns against solitary confinement, incarceration of political prisoners, police violence, and death by incarceration. He was released from prison in 2018 after serving 27 years for an offense he was convicted of as a child.

Theresa Shoatz is one of the original HRC Members and the daughter of Russell Maroon Shoatz. She has been organizing about issues of prisoners’ rights since a young age.

Jerome Hoagie Coffey is an HRC Co-Founder and activist known for his creativeness, communication, and organizing talents. He is serving a life sentence for a crime he did not commit and spent 12 years in Solitary Confinement.

Karen Ali is an Activist, Long Standing member of the HRC team, and wife of Omar Askia Sistrunk Ali who is innocent, yet convicted to a sentence of LIFE in prison.

Bret Grote Before founding and becoming the Legal Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, a public interest non-profit that works to end mass incarceration and police violence, Bret was an active presence in the Human Rights Coalition starting in 2007. He is a 2013 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he was recognized as the Distinguished Public Interest Scholar for his graduating class. Bret was also the Isabel and Alger Hiss Racial Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2012.

Etta Cetera is a community organizer, artist, and mediator deeply committed to prison abolition work. She founded HRC FedUp!, a chapter of the Human Rights Coalition based in Pittsburgh. She is co-founder of the Pittsburgh-based Let’s Get Free: The Women and Trans Prisoner Defense Committee, which raises up the impacts of mass incarceration on women and working for parole reform in PA.In 2004 etta received a Creative Activism Award from the Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh’s Peace and Justice Center and in 2014 received the Volunteer of the year award from New Voices Pittsburgh: Women of Color for Reproductive Justice.

Shandre Delaney joined the Human Rights coalition in 2008 and was a lead organizer with the Justice for the Dallas 6 Support Campaign, a movement to support the 6 individuals at SCI-Dallas who were charged with inciting a riot when they non-violently protested the abuse they faced in solitary confinement and were attacked by guards. Her son, Carrington Keys, was one of the 6 men, and represented himself in court. Shandre is still doing the work to keep HRC FedUp! Going.

Excerpt

“I entered this decade beat down, carrying a huge amount of guilt. I had to remind myself to stand straight, head up, force myself to look people in the eye when I spoke, but wondering what they would do if they knew. I questioned my parenting and decisions: should I not have went for a college degree with four children?, was I not firm enough?, should I have stayed in an abusive marriage for “the sake of the children?”n”. I didn’t think I was wrong to move my two youngestyoungest two children out of Philly to a better neighborhood with better schools, but I’d left my oldest two who were just barely over 18 years old. Not sure that was a good decision.

Why question my life decisions? Because my youngest son, Kerry Marshall, was sentenced to LIFE in prison for murdering a beautiful white woman at the age of 17; and I didn’t know what to do. I usually called my Mom for advice when I was troubled, but I never told her about the guilt that followed me, even in my dreams. But, like mothers are, she knew, because one day out of the blue, she just looked at me for a long moment and asked, “You know what every single prisoner behind those walls have in common?”  I remember staring at her, wondering what that could possibly be. 

“A mother who loves them.” She said, “No matter what he’s done or accused of doing, you love him. He is yours.”  […]

I got a call from a stranger who identified herself as Walidah asking me about attending a meeting with the Human Rights Coalition (HRC). She tells me that my son, Kerry Shakaboona Marshall, told her to give me a call. Right away alarms went off in my head. I’m stressed. I’m wondering, who is this woman and what’s the real reason she’s calling me. But what I say is, I can’t make it; hoping she never calls me back. The next time I went to visit my son, he asked me had a person named Walidah called me. He tells me she’s good people and that he, Walidah, and a guy named Maroon is trying to start a human rights group. 

In my mind I’m thinking how do you start an organization in prison, and nobody cares about the human rights of prisoners. I ran through a ton of reasons why I couldn’t be a part of this group: a full-time job with overtime, his brother, his sister, my grandkids; and, how about I feel like I’m just barely holding on to my sanity. 

For over ten years I’d worried about my baby boy, conversations and letters were worrisome for me. He talked about the hole and being at war with the guards. He was in the hole for a long time, then out for a short time, then the same again. Always saying, “I’m good, I’m good.” He talked about guards gangs and that they had names and how they rushed into a person’s cell and gang beat them, or putting a plastic bag over their head while they beat them, or pushed a person down the stairs, or pulled a person into a secluded area while he was handcuffed, and gang beat them. He talked about, how if they came into his cell he would be ready, he wasn’t going down without a fight. And I’m sure he left so much more out of his stories because he didn’t want to worry me. I was in denial during his years in the hole. I thought this couldn’t be true. Or I tried not to think about it. Or when my thoughts went to it in a nightmare, I woke up praying that he survives. 

Later it was found out that between 2003-2004 an MP Specialist soldier by the name of Charles Graner led other soldiers from his unit in sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of prisoners in Iraqi. The US was outraged – we don’t condone that type of treatment of prisoners—and Graner was arrested, found guilty, sentenced to 10 years in prison, demoted to private, dishonorably discharged and forfeited pay and allowances. It never hit the front pages that Charles Graner had been a prison guard at SCI-Greene and was lead in the guard gangs that abused and tortured prisoners right here in the U.S.—this was exactly what Shakaboona had told me about and it was happening right here in the United States. WE HAVE PHOTOS AND NEWS ARTICLES.

With all of what had happened to both of us over the past decade, on that particular visit, I saw that he was passionate about this organization idea. It occupied our entire conversation; he was doing all the talking. As I was listening, I saw something in his eyes. It was something I’d never seen in him. I can’t describe it but it was definitely a good thing. By the end of the visit and seeing him in person, I felt different, I felt a promise of something better. Maybe he “could” do something with his little group or organization. So, I agreed to go to a meeting.

But when the call came the following month, I didn’t. I was afraid. I didn’t want to let him down, but I couldn't make myself go. Just saying out loud that you want to help a prisoner, for me, felt like I could again get arrested. I had thoughts that Walidah was a spy planted to get everyone to participate in this organization and then lock us all up.

I said “No, I can’t make it” to her every call for about five months and then finally I agreed.”