A small hearing March 4, 2014, in an obscure courtroom at the Circuit Court for Baltimore City ended with the release of former Black Panther Marshall Edward Conway, who has spent nearly 44 of his 67 years in maximum security prisons. Eddie, as he is known to his thousands of supporters, entered the courtroom wearing a Department of Corrections sweatshirt, in handcuffs and leg chains, and walked out of the courthouse about an hour later in civilian clothes to greet a host of family, supporters and old friends:
“I am filled with a lot of different emotions after nearly 44 years in prison. I want to thank my family, my friends, my lawyers and my supporters; many have suffered along with me.”
Marshall “Eddie” Conway headed the Black Panther Party in Baltimore.
Despite Eddie Conway’s insistence on his innocence, it took years for Conway and his attorneys to find a way to overturn his conviction. Finally, in May 2012, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Unger v. State that a Maryland jury, to comply with due process as stated in the U.S. Constitution, must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that someone charged with a crime is guilty before that jury can convict the defendant. What made this decision momentous for many people in prison, including Conway, is that it applied retroactively.
Robert Boyle and Phillip G. Dantes, attorneys for Conway, filed a motion on his behalf based on this ruling, arguing that the judge in Conway’s trial had not properly instructed the jury that this “beyond a reasonable doubt” proviso was mandatory for conviction. Based on this motion, they negotiated an agreement whereby Conway would be resentenced to time served and be released from prison. In exchange, Conway and his lawyers agreed not to litigate his case based on the Unger ruling.
As he walked away from the courthouse, Boyle said: “It’s a big day for Black political prisoners that one of them has finally gotten out. I feel that (the late mayor of Jackson, Mississippi) Chokwe Lumumba was speaking into the judge’s ear, to urge him to let this happen.”
Eddie’s attorney, Robert Boyle, said: “It’s a big day for Black political prisoners that one of them has finally gotten out. I feel that (the late mayor of Jackson, Mississippi) Chokwe Lumumba was speaking into the judge’s ear, to urge him to let this happen.”
Scores of former Black Panthers are serving virtual life sentences in prison, largely the result of the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered his FBI in the 1960s and ‘70s to target the Black Panther Party – as revealed by the 1977 Church Committee Senate hearings. The first Panther chapter was started in 1966 in Oakland, California, but by the time a chapter was formed in Baltimore in 1968, the FBI had had ample time to insert more than its usual share of informants into the fledgling organization.
The FBI, moreover, often worked in league with various municipal police departments. As Conway wrote in his political memoir, “The alleged murder of police officers would soon take the place of the mythological rape of white women as the basis for the legal lynching of Black men.”
Morgan State University is launching the Global School of Journalism and Communication School to better prepare students entering the competitive field.
- Gus Foley, of Westminster, a senior computer science major at McDaniel College, brushes flour off of head stones at an African-American cemetery. The students rub flour on the head stones to make the carvings easier to read. McDaniel College students, under the guidance of chemistry professor Rick Smith, are working to document grave sites in an African-American cemetery in Libertytown, Md. Photo by: Kenneth K. Lam/The Baltimore Sun
In Libertytown on a steep hillside up the street from an auto repair shop, a group of McDaniel College students are piecing together long-forgotten lives. The students pull back bramble, trim branches and press flour into tombstones carved a century or more ago. They are trying to uncover the details of the lives of some of the early African-American residents of this small Frederick County town.
“They were forgotten, but we’re bringing their names back,” said junior Emoff Amofa, 21, who is taking professor Rick Smith’s January session class on tracing family histories. Among those buried on this hillside are Alfred B. Roberts, a sergeant who fought with the United States Colored Infantry in Civil War; Ellen Mayberry, who died in 1885 “in hope of a glorious resurrection”; and little Margaret E. Stanton, who was just 3 when she died in 1886.
For the next three weeks, the students will be seeking to document the lives of inhabitants of John Wesley Church cemetery, many of whom were buried in the decades after the Civil War.
Alvin Hill, Student Government Association vice president at Morgan State University. (Photo L. Kasimu Harris)
