<Begin Segment 20>

PI: Now, I have a vivid memory, and I'll tell this little story because it means something to me, actually. I was told that I could report to the federal marshal's office in Cincinnati any time before the end of the year. And I took that literally. I showed up on New Year's Eve. And just before their office closed, and they put me in a little holding cell in their office in the federal courthouse to be transferred to the county jail in Cincinnati to be held there before I was transferred to a federal prison. I didn't know which one I would go to. And so I showed up, turned myself in, had a very pleasant, shook hands with the federal marshal, a very nice man. He was the first federal marshal in the country who was black. And he said, "Well, we're going to take you over to the prison, to the county jail later on. But for a while, you'll have to sit in here." A little holding cell. And one of the deputy marshals came over, and he said, "Is there anything I can get you? You've got a couple hours to wait." And I said, "Well, could you get me a copy of the New York Times?" [Laughs] And there was one newsstand in Cincinnati right across the street from the federal courthouse -- and I knew this because I had lived there -- where you could get the New York Times. And he went over and got me a copy of the New York Times. So I sat there reading it in this cell while I waited to go to jail.

And when I went, they took me over to the Hamilton County jail in Cincinnati, and I realized right away, this is a terrible place, overcrowded, noisy. I was a federal prisoner, not a local or state prisoner, and I was not even really supposed to be there. But I spent about a week in that jail waiting to be transferred. And the thing I remember the most is that most of the, about half of the inmates there were white and half were black, and they kept pretty much to themselves. It's not rigidly segregated because we'd, it wasn't a big prison, it's just a local jail. And I wound up for four or five days that I was there getting to know a group of black inmates. And we would sit around and sing gospel music. And from my days in the Civil Rights movement, the sit-in movement, I loved singing gospel music. And the white prisoners in there thought I was something very strange. But, and there's a big difference, a local jail, it's noisy and crowded all the time. They don't turn the lights off, and it's, and the food is terrible. And people kept saying, "You're so lucky. You're going to a federal prison. You get regular meals. We have to sit here."

AI: Well, what was going through your mind at this time as you're mentally preparing yourself to serve your sentence in prison? Did you, had you started formulating anything yet about the future, thinking, "What I'm going to do during my prison time and then after." Had this experience of the trial and this extremely negative experience with the judge, your first judge if, had this had an effect on your thinking and plans for the, the coming years after that?

PI: Truthfully, I didn't have any long-range plans. I just wanted to get through the prison experience. I had pretty much decided that I didn't want to go back to the union and that I wanted, because I'd been in graduate school before I left for prison just for two or three months, that I wanted to go back to graduate school. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to study. I had no idea at that time of going to law school or being a lawyer. So I had been advised by several people who'd been in prison to use your time productively. That's one reason I didn't want to resist because they just throw you in a cell and there's nothing, literally, to do. So I decided to use it as a chance to educate myself. And you have a lot of spare time in prison. I could read. I didn't realize at the time how hard it was to get reading material, but that was my plan. And in fact, since I was in prison for almost two and a half years, I did use that time.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.