Russell Maroon Shoatz

Russell Maroon Shoatz
Born	Russell Shoatz (1943-08-23)August 23, 1943 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	December 17, 2021(2021-12-17) (aged 78)
Other names	Maroon, Harun Abdul Ra'uf

Russell Melvin Shoatz II (August 23, 1943 – December 17, 2021), also known as Maroon, was an American Black nationalist activist, writer, and convicted murderer. Shoatz was a founder of a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania group called the Black Unity Council and later a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. In 1973 he was convicted of the 1970 murder of Philadelphia police officer Frank Von Colln. He escaped from prison twice and was held in solitary confinement for more than 22 years. In the 2010s a lawsuit he filed to win release from solitary attracted international attention. PM Press published a collection of his prison writings in 2013. His memoir, cowritten with Kanya D'Almeida, was published posthumously a decade later.

Early life and activism

Shoatz grew up in Philadelphia, in a family of 13. His father worked as a long-haul trucker. His parents had come to Philadelphia from the South and he spent summers at his grandparents' farm in Georgia. In his memoir he describes a childhood of "quiet neglect...in a household stretched to its limits." He writes of being demeaned by teachers at school and witnessing racist police violence from an early age. He became involved in gang activity—ubiquitous in his neighborhood—and was in and out of juvenile detention. In his twenties he worked a variety of blue collar jobs (steelworker, machinist, cabdriver), as well as selling drugs and engaging in other criminal activities. Shoatz became more politically engaged after hearing Malcolm X speak in New York City in 1963.

In 1964 Shoatz married Thelma Christian, with whom he had four children before the couple separated in 1968. Shoatz physically abused Christian during this marriage. While still married to Christian, in the late 1960s he became involved with a fellow activist, Loretta Fairly (known as Bonnie). They had three children together.

In 1968 he founded the Black Unity Council (BUC) with other activists, originally with plans to create a community center. The BUC organized food drives and cultural events, intervened in gang conflicts, and campaigned against police brutality. Shoatz participated in the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., setting fire to White-owned businesses that he viewed as exploitative. By the summer of 1969 the BUC had shrunk to a small, radical, core membership of eight people, renamed itself the Black Liberation Army, and begun stockpiling weapons. After the police killings of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969 this group opted to move closer to the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party, expecting further attacks.

1970 shootings

On August 29, 1970, Philadelphia policeman James Harrington was shot and seriously wounded by a man who flagged down his patrol car. Soon after, Fairmount Park Police Sergeant Frank Von Colln (aged 43 and a father of four), who had just dispatched two officers to investigate Harrington's shooting, was ambushed and murdered in the Cobbs Creek guardhouse in West Philadelphia. In his memoir Shoatz writes that the guardhouse attack was carried out "at the behest of the leadership of the Black Panther Party.” Two other officers were shot and wounded in the same neighborhood a day later. After visiting the wounded officers in the hospital, Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo told reporters, "this is no longer a civilized neighborhood." Rizzo responded by raiding Panther party headquarters, arresting 15 people. Gunfire was exchanged during these raids, in which three police were injured by shotgun pellets, two superficially. Police publicly strip-searched the arrested Panthers, resulting in photographs that circulated in the national media. These events took place less than a week before the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention organized by the Black Panthers at Temple University. In 1996 Von Colln's son Kurt (19 at the time of the shooting) told reporters, "This completely changed my whole life. I never thought I could hate the way I did after this happened. I was the son of a man who loved everyone."

Arrest and prosecution

In January 1972, after two years on the run, Shoatz was arrested and charged in connection with Von Colln’s murder. In 1973 he was convicted of first degree murder, assault and battery with intent to murder, aggravated robbery and conspiracy. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Four other suspects were also charged, convicted and sentenced to life in prison in connection with the murder of Von Colln. A sixth suspect was arrested in Chicago in 1996 after decades of living under assumed names. He was acquitted in 1998.

Incarceration

Escape attempts

Shoatz's son, Russell Shoatz III, advocated for his release from prison.

Shoatz began serving his life sentence in 1973. In the early years of his sentence he converted to Sunni Islam, adopting the name Harun Abdul Ra'uf. He writes in his memoir that he "found tremendous solace in turning to a higher power—it was balm to the chafing reality of life in Graterford, where, to the guards, we barely qualified as human beings."

Shoatz began trying to escape close to the beginning of his time in prison. After several unsuccessful attempts, in September 1977, Shoatz and three other inmates took over a cell block at SCI Huntingdon, held six guards hostage for an hour, and fled the prison. Two of the inmates were quickly recaptured and a third was killed during the escape attempt. Two guards sustained minor injuries. Shoatz kidnapped a prison guard and his wife and son from their house near the prison, forcing them to drive south and west before fleeing into the woods near Cokeburg when their car broke down. He was captured on October 11 after a carjacking in Marianna. Charged with kidnapping, recklessly endangering another person and aggravated assault, he described himself as a "runaway slave" at his arraignment.

Shoatz has described being beaten, harrassed, and served contaminated food after his return to prison. Fearing that his food would be poisoned, he stopped eating anything other than commissary and vending machine food. In court he attacked his own attorney after he refused to pursue a line of questioning that Shoatz requested. Diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression, he was relocated to Farview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (now part of SCI – Waymart). For a time he was sedated with Thorazine until he began secretly spitting out his nightly dose. At Farview Shoatz became romantically involved with a young radical college student named Phyllis Hill (known as Oshun). In March 1980 Shoatz and another patient escaped after Oshun smuggled in a revolver and a submachine gun. Within days they encountered a hunter, who alerted authorities. After a two hour standoff with police and FBI agents, in which gunfire was exchanged but no one was injured, the group surrendered.

Solitary confinement, lawsuit, and release

Brought to trial on charges stemming from his second escape attempt, Shoatz represented himself and called Philadelphia police officers and FBI agents as witnesses, seeking to establish himself as a political prisoner rather than a common criminal. He further argued that he had been justified in escaping prison because his life had been endangered. He was convicted and sentenced to a second life sentence. On his return to prison he was placed in solitary confinement and shuffled between SCI Dallas, SCI Pittsburgh, Farview, and other facilities. Joined by other prisoners, he went on a series of hunger strikes, eventually attracting attention from activists outside the prison and winning a return to general population. In 1982, at SCI Pittsburgh, he was placed back in solitary after helping to organize a group called the Pennsylvania Association of Lifers. Shoatz would spend most of the next three decades in solitary, including an uninterrupted stretch between June 1991 and February 2014. In solitary he organized "seminars" of other inmates, studying various global revolutionary and national liberation movements (Palestinian groups, the PAIGC, the Red Army Faction, the LTTE). In his later years in solitary he was kept in a soundproofed 7x12 foot cell lit by overhead lights 24 hours a day, prevented from talking to other prisoners, and only allowed out to exercise one hour a day, five days a week.

In May 2013 he filed a lawsuit against prison officials alleging that he was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The Abolitionist Law Center, a Pittsburgh nonprofit focused on ending mass incarceration, represented Shoatz in this suit, joined by pro bono representation from Reed Smith. In February 2014, a month after a judge declined to dismiss the suit, he was released into the prison's general population. Shoatz told the court that his isolation in solitary had led to severe mental health problems that persisted after his return to general population. The case attracted international attention, with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Méndez testifying on Shoatz's behalf. Five Nobel Peace Prize laureates (Jose Ramos-Horta, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jody Williams, and Adolfo Perez Esquivel) expressed support for Shoatz's case. In 2016 the lawsuit ended in a settlement in which the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections agreed not to return Shoatz to solitary based on his past infractions; he was also awarded $99,000. Some of Shoatz's children participated in the activist campaigns advocating for his release. Frank Von Colln's son Kurt Von Colln called the settlement "completely ridiculous," adding, "This guy is in there for killing a police officer and he's not been a model prisoner."

Suffering from advanced colorectal cancer, Shoatz was granted compassionate release on October 26, 2021. After Shoatz's release Republican members of the Pennsylvania state legislature announced that they would introduce legislation restricting judges from granting early release in similar cases. Shoatz died less than two months later, on December 17, at the age of 78. He expressed regret for his part in Von Colln's murder near the end of his life.

Writing

In 2013 PM Press published a collection of Shoatz's writings, Maroon the Implacable, mostly consisting of previously unpublished essays originally written for fellow prisoners. The book was edited by Quincy Saul and Fred Ho (who Shoatz credited as an influence on his thinking), and included a foreword by Chuck D. In these essays Shoatz engages with feminist and ecosocialist ideas, reflects on the shortcomings of the Black Panther movement, and discusses the lessons of historical maroon communities for future revolutionary organizing. Without questioning its moral legitimacy, he dismisses the Black nationalist violence of the 1960s and 1970s that he participated in as a strategic error: "Panthers 'shooting it out' with more heavily armed police from fixed positions was downright ludicrous! Even if they survived, it still left them in jail or hospitalized, causing everybody else to have to drop important work to bail them out or raise money for their legal defense."

Steve Bloom, reviewing the book from a Marxist perspective in Against the Current magazine, praised Shoatz's writing as both accessible and insightful, "a rare combination." Bloom noted the significance of a feminist essay from 2010 ("Respect Our Mothers, Stop Hating Women") in the context of the masculine Black nationalist milieu in which Shoatz spent his youth and his current all-male prison surroundings: "This piece thus represents a significant personal testament by a human being who successfully challenged both himself and the culture which surrounds him." A review in Publishers Weekly described the book as "an engrossing portrayal of a life contemplated from the recesses of 20 years in solitary confinement," noting Shoatz's feminist and anticapitalist stances. In 2021 a conversation between Shoatz and his son Russell Shoatz III appeared in the essay collection Abolition for the People, edited by Colin Kaepernick and published by Kaepernick Publishing.

Shoatz's memoir, I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner, cowritten with Kanya D'Almeida, was posthumously published in 2024. D'Almeida first met Shoatz (introduced by Ho) in 2013 and the two worked together until his death. Kirkus Reviews described the book: "Tense, fast-paced chapters ably capture his fire and anger. A raw, unvarnished memoir." A review in Publishers Weekly concluded: "Shoatz is an impassioned and endearing narrator, clear-eyed about his mistakes even as he pushes back on his treatment by Pennsylvania prosecutors. Not every reader will be swayed by his worldview, but those interested in the Panthers and their legacy would do well to check this out."

Books

• Shoatz, Russell Maroon; Ho, Fred (ed.); Saul, Quincy (ed.); Chuck D; Meyer, Matt; Madlala-Routledge, Nozizwe (2013). Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz. PM Press. ISBN 9781604860597
• Shoatz, Russell; D'Almeida, Kanya (2024). I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner. Bold Type Books. ISBN 9781645030492.

See also

• Prison abolition movement in the United States

External links

• Russell Maroon Shoatz at The Anarchist Library
• Interview conducted by Dhoruba bin Wahad for the Peoples Video Network
• The Beginning of Understanding From Plough magazine, perspectives on Shoatz from Randall Kennedy, John J. Lennon, and others