"An Insinuating Voice": Angelo Herndon and the Invisible Genesis of the Radical Prison Slave's Neo-Slave Narrative

You may do what you will with Angelo Herndon. You may indict him. You may put him in jail. But there will come other thousands of Angelo Herndons. If you really want to do anything about this case, you must indict the social system. But this you will not do, for your role is to defend the system under which the toiling masses are robbed and oppressed. You may succeed in killing one, two, even a score of working-class organizers. But you cannot kill the working class.

—Angelo Herndon, Let Me Live

My ancestors were chattel slaves and the memory of their tribulations gnawed at my spirit like an unhealing wound.

—Angelo Herndon, Unpublished Manuscript

Composed during the middle of the Great Depression, Angelo Herndon's Black radical prison autobiography Let Me Live represents a searing indictment of United States racial capitalism as it laid siege to Black people, and poor people in general, in the United States South through share-cropping, peonage, industrial labor exploitation, and inter-locking systems of extra-legal and legal terrorism. The text recounts Herndon's life trajectory as it spanned from suffering as child laborer in the coal mines of Kentucky and Alabama, to becoming a young Black communist organizer, to his ultimate ascension to the status of internationally recognized political prisoner. Indeed, it is his confidence in his newly achieved role as cause célèbre for the US and international left that partially informs the above-epigraphed section of Let Me Live wherein Herndon uses the occasion of being found guilty in a Georgia courtroom on the charge of "attempting to incite insurrection" among the state's Black and White poor people to brazenly pronounce the guilt of the entire system of Jim Crow capitalism for its oppressive "robbery" of the "toiling masses." Notwithstanding being sentenced to what he calls the "slow death" of a Georgia chain gang, Herndon describes feeling emboldened by the international campaign that, by the time of his courtroom speech, had placed his case right alongside that of the "Scottsboro 9" as one of the most pivotal rallying points in the overall mass mobilization against politicized imprisonment, Jim Crow apartheid, lynching (of both the extra-legal and legal variety), white supremacist capitalism, and US imperialism.¹

As the first autobiography published by a Black political prisoner in the United States, Let Me Live stands as a critically important—if almost completely ignored—progenitor of modern Black radical prison writing (Ross vii-x). In a manner similar to the prison narratives produced by Black socialist, leftist, and (inter)nationalist prisoners from the commonly recognized "Movement Era" of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Herndon transmutes the individual predicament of political imprisonment into a platform for radical social analysis—both of the regime of official incarceration as it exists in the prison world, and the system of social incarceration experienced by Black and poor people in the "free world." Furthermore, while Herndon's courtroom speech clearly represents the fact that he consciously positioned himself as champion of the cause of the international working class writ large, the second epigraph suggests the degree to which Herndon's writings and political activism were also focused on the uniquely terrorized predicament of Black people under various systems of legalized terror and neo-slavery. In a manner that prefigures the epistemic interventions of later Black political prisoners such as Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Robert Hillary King, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, Herndon considers his experience of twentieth-century imprisonment as a state-inflicted reopening of what he describes as the unhealing wound of chattel enslavement. Therefore, inasmuch as Let Me Live proffers a doctrinaire Marxist position with respect to the universal predicament of an exploited international working class, it also presents a Black Marxist exposure of the intimacies of modern racialized imprisonment and the chattelized incarceration of Africans during the Middle Passage and plantation slavery.²

When viewed from this vantage point, Let Me Live represents a prime example of a nearly limitless assemblage of Black prisoner songs, writings...