 To me, the Black Panther Party was the only group that was one addressing the needs of the community in terms of feeding children, in terms of organizing, you know, self-defense, in terms of educating, and so on. So I decided that, okay, they're the people that I need to find. So I actually went in search form and I found them. On February 13th, former Black Panther and political prisoner Marshall Eddie Conway passed away. Conway dedicated his life to the cause of Black freedom struggle and the fight against racism and inequality. He spent 44 years behind bars as a political prisoner. You know, and I had been threatened at least three or four times with our guns, you know, at gunpoint, you know. And so that experience kind of told me that, you know, it was, it wasn't a fair and balanced way in which people were being treated, but I'm seeing also that we're being, you know, outnumbered and outgunned and abused in our communities, you know. Eddie was born on April 23rd, 1946 in Baltimore, Maryland in a deeply segregated city. He grew up with this awareness of racial inequality, which led him to becoming an organizer in his community. Before he joined the Black Panther Party, however, he had joined the US Army. Shortly before being deployed to Vietnam, he came to revolutionary consciousness and decided to fight against racial and capitalist exploitation at home in the US. And I opened the newspaper up and this is, you know, this is something that still haunts me. I looked at the front of the newspaper. It was the Stars and Stripes. And there in the middle of Newark, New Jersey, is a tank. And that tank has a machine gun on it. And that machine gun is pointed at 25, 30 Black women on the corner in their protest. And there's this little white guy. He's sitting there with his fingers like a half an inch from the trigger of that machine gun. And it'll fall off 25, 30 rounds. All of those women would have been dead on the corner. And I looked at that and I said, Dag, my mother could be in that crowd. And so, finally it dawned on me that, okay, you're in this army and you're promoting this stuff. And they're using that same army in the Black community to do what you get me to go in the Vietnam to do. Something's wrong with this picture. I need to get out of the army and go home and see if I can help fix things. Convay was an integral part of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. He felt compelled to join an organization working to advance rights for Black people after seeing the rebellion of Black people following the assassination of Martin Luther King. But it was scary in a sense of knowing that they had organized all around the Black communities, around the urban centers. They were this hostile white supremacist militant, Minutemen militia kind of thing that was being organized from the average white John Doe. And it was scary and it was like, God, do we realize we're cut off? And so it made me start thinking in terms of what are we doing in the Black community to protect ourselves, to look out for ourselves? What are we going to do if these nuts actually get a chance to act out? And that's what kind of drove me to look in for the Black Panther Party and to look for other militant kind of things that were going on. To me, the Black Panther Party was the only group that was one addressing the needs of the community in terms of feeding children, in terms of organizing self-defense, in terms of educating and so on. So I decided that, okay, they're the people that I need to find. So I actually went and searched for them and I found them. In 1970, Conway was convicted of murdering a Baltimore police officer and injuring another. This was one of the many frame-ups used to target Black leaders of that era. Some former Black Panthers continued to be behind bars till this day. Even in prison, Conway continued to organize and raise consciousness. He founded a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party and also played a leading role in the formation of several prisoner initiatives, such as helping form the Maryland chapter of the United Prisoners' Labor Union. And just to step back a minute to look at the prison experience, what we found was that in order for the guards to have authority, they have to continue to make efforts to dehumanize every person they see in the population. And it is nonviolent offenses that make up maybe 90% of the prison populations in America. And that's directly related to harassment. And taking into consideration that 13% of the population is Black, maybe 25% of the population is people of color, but over 75% of the people in the prison system are people of color. So it is this constant penny harassment, but it's also something else. It dehumanizes or desensitizes the police that's reinforcing that because they tend to look at the situation as if they're in enemy territory. They look at the poor communities, both white and black, as a hostile war zone. And they act accordingly and they're constantly trying to read out who might be a potential problem later on because their mandate is to protect the property and the wealth of the elite. In 2011, while still in prison, Conway published his autobiography, Martial Law, The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther. He writes in the book, From the very moment that the cell door slammed shut, I knew it would be my responsibility to resist just like my enslaved ancestors in Virginia must have resisted. At times that resistance would become more important than my actual innocence for it was this determination to resist white supremacy that led to my imprisonment in the first place. Conway was finally released in 2014 after Maryland's highest court ruled that the state's juries' instructions were unconstitutional. On finally getting his freedom, Conway did not face the movement and returned to Baltimore to organize and educate against social injustice. He also joined the Progressive News outlet, The Real News Network. He also played an important role in the formation of Tubman House which, in the wake of the Baltimore uprising, seized vacant property and land for community needs. Even as his health declined, Eddie never left the struggle. He lived his life for the people.