Popular representations of the Black Panthers often focus on their armed self-defense activities, but medical services and health justice were a tremendous part of the party’s work. This legacy continues today as Black activists work to transform the medical industrial complex and its relationship to the prison system. Erica Woodland (he/him), co-author of Healing Justice Lineages, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss this history, his current activism, and the role of The Real News’s own beloved Eddie Conway in influencing his path.

Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

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Transcript

Mansa Musa:  Marshall Eddie Conway, former Black Panther and political prisoner, served approximately 44 years in captivity before he was released. While in prison, he and his wife, Dominque Conway, created a series of programs designed to raise prisoners’ consciousness. One program was Friend of a Friend. Friend of a Friend was a mentor program that taught prisoners critical thinking skills.

Throughout his imprisonment, Eddie Conway advocated for the liberation of all political prisoners and the abolishment of the prison-industrial complex. After his release in 2014, Eddie joined The Real News Network and started this very program, Rattling the Bars.

Recently I interviewed Baltimore native Erica Woodland, one of the many people influenced by Eddie Conway and Dominque Conway.

Welcome to Rattling the Bars, Erica.

Erica Woodland:  Thank you for having me, Mansa. It’s good to see you.

Mansa Musa:  All right, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and one of your latest projects.

Erica Woodland:  Yeah, for sure. So I’m born, bred, and raised in Baltimore, East Baltimore, to be specific. And for the past 20 years, it’s been really an honor to be part of abolition work and liberatory harm reduction work, and work that’s really thinking about how to disrupt every single aspect of the way the criminal justice system disappears our communities.

And so I had the great pleasure of meeting Eddie Conway 20 years ago, and when we met, he immediately decided that I was going to be part [Musa laughs] of his liberation struggle — And you know Eddie, you can’t really tell him no. And also through organizing on behalf of his liberation and liberation of all political prisoners and being mentored by him and Dominque Conway, it really, as a young person, shaped the work that I’m doing now, which is primarily focused on Healing Justice.

And Healing Justice is a political and spiritual framework that helps to remind our people that, in addition to us liberating our minds and revolutionizing our consciousness, we have to also make sure that we’re taking care of people. So feeding people, making sure people have access to healthcare, making sure people have access to spaces for healing and collective grief.

And a lot of this work might sound familiar because it’s the work that the Black Panther Party was up to. But unfortunately in our movements now, a lot of that care and safety work has been forgotten, in part because the state has been extremely strategic and successful, in many ways, of co-opting our movements and then criminalizing our traditions.

So the project that I am spending a lot of my time with today is called Healing Justice Lineages. And so, it started off as an anthology, and I was able to contribute to this with my dear comrade Kara Page, who is one of the co-architects of this framework. But Healing Justice Lineages is an opportunity to tell the true lineage of this framework, which is actually having us think about what are the ways that historical and generational trauma are affecting our minds, our bodies, our spirits, our organizations, our revolutionary groups, and our ability to actually build power to get free, right?

Mansa Musa:  Right.

Erica Woodland:  So when you have communities that are highly traumatized, cut off from basic human needs, they’ve stolen our traditions — White people are selling our traditions back to us.

Mansa Musa:  Right.

Erica Woodland:  — And they’ve demonized our traditions. You have communities that are more easily surveilled and controlled and disappear.

And so the project has tried to map a lot of different voices and trying to bring up examples like, here are people who are doing liberation work, but also thinking about how do we feed people? How do we love up on people when they’ve experienced grief, loss, and violence?

But that project has led to a lot of other aspects, including a listening and cultural memory tour that we did in 2023. We went to seven cities across the country to actually lift up local work around healing justice and collective care and safety. And then we also did strategy sessions with organizers and practitioners in particular to say, what’s possible when you have health healing practitioners and organizers at the same table before we turn up on the state?

Mansa Musa:  Right, right, right. And that’s a good observation, because me and Dominque talked about this oftentimes, about, as revolutionaries, we find ourselves in a space that we human, we made a decision to fight for our liberation, but in that, oftentimes, a lot of our emotions get wrapped up in that. And we look recognized that in the Black Panther Party — And our anniversary just passed — We recognized that, during that period, and which is a good observation on your part about the healing aspect of, is during that period they ain’t have no therapy. They ain’t have no, oh, this is trauma. They ain’t have no, oh, yeah, well, you an alcoholic, and it’s a result of the police wanting to kill you, or the police been locked you up seven times, and you been locked up, in the seven times you done spent a total of five years in and out of county jail. You ain’t have that then.

Now that particular aspect of the contradiction didn’t subsided, where the antagonism don’t exist because the formation is not in the same space. What do we do now? What do we do? But more importantly, the lessons learned and how do we pass it on? I think this is what you are telling us right now. That, OK, we need to be in this space right now because we ultimately going to have to turn it up.

Erica Woodland:  Exactly.

Mansa Musa:  And when we do turn it up, we want to be in a space where we don’t find ourselves so burned out that we become suicidal, even if it be in the form of substance use, it be in the form of spousal abuse, all the things that we oppose, if we don’t take and look at our mental health as it relates to our struggle. Talk about that.

Erica Woodland:  Yeah. No, this is really important, and I also want to just name that I’m a therapist, but mostly my work is organizing therapists to understand their role as politicized. Because for me, the prison-industrial complex is actually deeply connected to the medical-industrial complex. And we saw that very clearly with Eddie’s experience at the end of his life. That you have social workers like me who are in positions where we’re actually facilitating the dissolution of families, where we are facilitating people experiencing psychiatric detention and psych hospitals.

And so, one of the things I want to bring attention to is I was able to interview Eddie for the book. And Eddie’s interview is a lot of people’s favorite, because what we know is that Eddie was willing to talk about things that a lot of other folks weren’t willing to talk about.

Mansa Musa:  Right, right.

Erica Woodland:  And so in this conversation… I’ve been talking to Eddie about trauma, probably our whole relationship, even if I didn’t use that language, because I want to understand what made it possible for him to survive those conditions and hold onto his humanity, when many, many people are out here and they have survived much less and they don’t have that same connection to their humanity.

So I’m always thinking about, where are the ways that we’re already knowing how to heal without an external person or professional? And what are the consequences of us not taking that work seriously? So therapy is one aspect, but we have traditions in Black community, the ways that we come together when we experience a loss, the way that we pour a little bit out for the homie that we lost to violence. That these are all things that are happening. But if we don’t understand trauma, then the state can exploit that.

And so in the interview, which is the chapter’s title, “Don’t Give Up and Don’t Make the Same Mistakes”, because one of the things I really appreciated about my relationship with Eddie is that he was very generous with his wisdom. He’s very generous about, here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know, and here’s the things we did not think about because we didn’t have the language, we didn’t have the tools.

And the reality is when COINTELPRO came on the scene, it hadn’t existed before. It’s not like the Panthers had the knowledge, they didn’t have the playbook. They were writing the playbook down.

So one of the things that I’m committed to is documenting and preserving our political and spiritual traditions. Because disconnection from those traditions, that’s a tool of genocide. That’s essentially how the state continues to dominate and control our minds, first and foremost, and our radical imagination.

So that interview we got to talk about… You know, Eddie didn’t necessarily call his work healing justice, but I’m like, I wouldn’t even be talking about healing justice if it wasn’t for the Black Panther Party and their commitment to making sure our people were well. To making sure that we preserved our dignity and wholeness, and to say, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with these conditions, and we actually have to build power to change the conditions. We don’t heal just to heal. That’s cute, but I don’t want to heal, I don’t want to learn how to cope with this, I want to actually figure out how we change this, because it’s unacceptable.

Mansa Musa:  And you know what I was thinking about what you were saying when you were saying how you title the chapter of Eddie and “Don’t Give Up”. Because me and him did a lot of time together, we was incarcerated together. And he was my mentor. And I used to always joke about him having gray hairs, and I would say 80% of them gray hairs in his head I put it in there myself, from him dealing with me.

But in terms of how you articulate his outlook, that’s just how it was. I recall when I hadn’t seen him for a while, we wound up in an institution together, now JCI, and he said, man, let’s go up to the library and talk. So we made a schedule, we would go to the library once a week and talk. And I didn’t think too much of it at the time. I hadn’t seen you in a while, so we just catching up. But as we talking, we’re talking about events. We’re talking about stuff that’s going on around the world. We’re talking about what I’ve been doing. We’re talking about what he’s doing.

And then it got to a point where he said, we was getting ready to bring friends of the friends in. It got to a point where he said like, yeah, well, we don’t have to come to the library no more, and we getting ready to do this with this group. And the reason why I had you come up here is because I wanted to see where your thinking was at. Because I didn’t come in contact with a lot of people in the system that started out a certain way, but as time went on, their thinking didn’t evolve. They regressed, and they abandoned any politics, they abandoned any instinct to survive, they just allowed themselves mentally to accept where they was at.

And he say, and he was telling me, he said, well, that ain’t you. And I was like, man, what you think? You the one that educated me. So I’m a product of this education in terms of, like you said, we didn’t say trauma, we didn’t say healing. If something went on. This is what we did.

And I think that, and I want you to speak on this, how you unpack that within the community. Because traditionally we always done that. And traditionally we don’t call it, we don’t give it no clinical definition. This is what we did. This is our nature, to be there for each other. What happened?

Erica Woodland:  A lot of things happened [Musa laughs]. So this is a great way to bring in the medical-industrial complex, which includes, obviously, hospitals, health clinics, doctors, nurses. But it’s a broader system that includes pharmaceutical companies. And that’s basically a for-profit system that is trying to surveil, control us, and preserve the life of certain people, primarily white men of wealth, and to exterminate or extract labor from the rest of us.

So part of what happened is, you take people, even if you just think about the attempted genocide against Indigenous people on this land. They literally cut you off. They put you in a residential boarding school, cut you off from your language, cut you off… I mean, this happened to Black Americans, too. But I want to just make that connection because I think we forget. And all of these things we innately know how to do, they turn you against them. They tell you that is uncivilized. That’s not the way to do it.

Then you bring in somebody who’s deemed professional. So, I have what one of my comrades called colonial credentials. So I’m a licensed clinical social worker. I didn’t get that license to be an arm of the state, I got that to be able to disrupt and understand how the state is working through things like social work and therapy and the mental health system. So I’m a professional, so I get told I’m legitimate. You’re allowed to work with survivors, you’re allowed to do all this healing work.

Meanwhile, this work is happening not paid. People aren’t getting support in community all the time because the vast majority of marginalized people’s mental health support comes from their friends, it comes from their family members, comes from their homies. Most people don’t have access to therapy. And those therapeutic interventions weren’t designed for us. They were designed to control us.

So one of the things that I do in my work in my organization is we really disrupt that. So we organize mental health practitioners — And that includes people like me who are licensed, but it includes all the other people who are attending to the emotional and spiritual well-being, specifically in my work of queer and trans people of color. So we don’t prioritize my training over the actual lived experience, but you’re getting on-the-job training. Actually, nobody trains you at all. You’re self-taught. You’re taught by community.

But those relationships is what the state has tried to disrupt. So we wouldn’t need a whole… Nothing’s wrong with therapy. I think therapy is actually a great tool, but it’s not a cure-all. But we wouldn’t actually need therapists in the same way if our siblings and our family members who were behind these walls were home, if we had food, if the air we were breathing was not toxic. If we actually restored our ability to be in right relationship with the land and every other being that we have to be on this planet with, we wouldn’t have this kind of trauma.

It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t suffer. But what we’re seeing at this point, at this scale, especially with the genocides happening across the globe, is this is unnecessary, manufactured suffering. And if we don’t understand how it’s affecting not just the way we treat each other, but how are you going to strategize? How are you going to make a strategy that’s actually going to work when you are highly traumatized? And the ways that you’re attempting to heal, the state is saying, oh, you have a substance abuse problem? You’re getting locked up. Oh, you are hallucinating, for instance. We’re going to lock you up in a psychiatric facility and potentially give you forced treatment — Not potentially, give you forced treatment that then takes away your rights the same way that happens when you’re incarcerated.

So it’s a setup and it’s a scam, but I think there’s a growing conversation in the communities that I’m in of Black and Brown people who are like, we are going to figure out how these systems work, to tear them down, and to abolish them. And we’re also going to create alternatives because that’s what we need.

So that story you just told about Eddie sitting with you weekly, I was like, that was therapy.

Mansa Musa:  Exactly.

Erica Woodland:  That was you having human to human connection. That was also a vetting. I keep that. I’m like, we need to bring vetting back. I just had a conversation about that earlier. I’m like, we just out here trusting people that have not demonstrated that they’re trustworthy with the kind of liberation work that we’re talking about.

Mansa Musa:  And that’s a good segue to talk about Eddie, but I wanted to unpack that a little bit more. Because right now you have trauma, and they starting to monetize trauma, saying trauma, resilience, and define it, [inaudible] and everybody and their mother coming around with an approach. But at the same token, it’s the same old story and the same old song. It’s just a different band playing it.

But speaking of Eddie, so let’s talk about the campaign to exonerate Eddie. And for the benefit of our viewers, this is one of the posters that was put out by some college students in conjunction with myself, Erica, and Dominque comrade, and some other comrade that’s advocating for Eddie to be exonerated. Speak on why do you think that Eddie’s been transitioned? Why is it important that, in your mind, or that our audience should want to know, that we should try to have Eddie exonerated? He’s gone, he was out, he lived his life, and he lived his life to his fullest, or what was left of it.

Erica Woodland:  Right. This is a really good question and I think it ties into a lot of the archival work that I’ve been a part of over the past three years, that we have to hold on to the truth of Eddie’s life, Eddie’s work, and what the state did to Eddie. There has been no redress. Eddie’s name has not been cleared, and Eddie was innocent.

So one of the things that, it happens with a lot of revolutionaries, we’ve seen it many times, is the sanitization of their actual work. And there’s a way that we all then kind of forget. You could actually make this sound like some kind of happy story in the end. Oh look, this person, wrongfully convicted. Well, they got out [Musa laughs] in the end of their life, they were able to do this, that and the third. No, let’s go back to the fact that this person literally did almost 44 years for their political work, and they were targeted by the state. And that is happening now.

Mansa Musa:  Exactly.

Erica Woodland:  So to me, part of the campaign is about telling the truth. That is always, to me, a healing act. To tell the truth of what actually happened, to move with the knowing that this was a wrongdoing. And if we do not prioritize the exoneration of Eddie and all political prisoners, then when this… Political prisoners are being manufactured right now.

Mansa Musa:  That’s right.

Erica Woodland:  They’re being manufactured right now.

Mansa Musa:  That’s right.

Erica Woodland:  Young people are political prisoners right now. So this is part of a larger struggle to combat state repression. And I think spiritually it’s also really important to preserve Eddie’s legacy by telling the truth. And then it’s also really important to think about how that supports our generational healing, our healing as a community. Somebody who did nothing but sacrifice on our behalf, and we’re going to let the state continue to lie? We’re going to let the state continue to try to manipulate the story of what really happened.

Mansa Musa:  When me and Dominque was having this conversation and we decided like, well, this is something that we want to look at. And we start organizing, got some of the supporters together and start talking about it. Everybody had the same perspective, just like you said, it is about we want to be able to say, like you say, tell the truth. And it’s important that we tell the truth about what happened to Geronimo Pratt, what happened to Fred Hampton, what happened to Malcolm. That because of their political views and their aspiration to be free, that they was targeted and set up and, in most cases, assassinated or died a death of a thousand cuts.

And they did the same thing with Eddie. And only for no reason other than the fact that he believed in his right to self-determination. He believed that he had a right to be treated as a human being. He had a right to our people being free.

Talk about where we at in terms of some of the things that we’re doing with the campaign, for the benefit of our viewers and listeners.

Erica Woodland:  Yeah, absolutely. So we’re doing a couple of things. We currently have a petition and a website, which is at marshalleddieconway.com where you can get information about Eddie’s case and why exoneration is so important. But you can also sign the petition so that we can actually put some pressure on Gov. Wes Moore to move forward with this exoneration.

Part of what we’re also doing with the website and with some filmmakers is to help to document more of Eddie’s story, in particular how we build a case for exoneration and why that’s so important, I think, to Baltimore City in particular. The history, the legacy, the revolutionary lineage here, I only know about that because of Eddie. And so this is part of a larger effort to get Eddie’s story out so we can have redress and justice in this situation, as much justice as you can have with how much harm and violence the state has engaged in towards Eddie. But this campaign is really, really important.

And so, I know we’re also doing some things coming up in 2025 to help honor Eddie’s legacy around his birthday in April. So there’ll be more information about that. I’m sure you’ll get the word out, Mansa.

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, most definitely.

Erica Woodland:  But right now we need people to educate themselves and to sign the petition and get the word out.

Mansa Musa:  And we was real strategic in making sure that all this information that’s coming out about Eddie is not being repackaged for the benefit of changing the narrative or minimizing his contribution. We was real mindful to make sure that the social media that have any representation of Eddie is authorized by us. To ensure that the truth — Because it’s all about the truth.

And in this case, it might sound cliché, but they say the truth will set you free. What we talking about, the freedom of the truth setting Eddie free in terms of him being recognized for the person that he was and the impact that he had on people that exists today. Whenever anybody come in contact with Eddie, even to this day, they make the observation that the impact that he had on them, how he was able to tap into their thinking, how he was able to get them to maximize on their potential.

And this is something that we want to make sure that people understand. That had he not been set up, had charges [not been] fabricated against him, no telling what he would have done. And he done a lot while he was incarcerated, while he was on the plantation. But no telling what he would’ve done.

And I want to go back to your point. Political prisoners, young people right now are being manufactured to be political prisoners. And as we move forward in this country, it is going to come a time where they going to be like 1984. Like your thoughts, literally going to be the law saying, if you think this way and then you going to be charged with being a terrorist or whatever.

But as we close out, Erica, tell people how they can get the book and where we at in terms of the exoneration.

Erica Woodland:  Absolutely. So again, if you want more information about the exoneration campaign, that’s at marshalleddieconway.com. And then if you want any information about the Healing Justice Lineages project, we’re at healingjusticelineages.com. And we have a digital archive that we’re building out there so you can hear more voices about the work.

Mansa Musa:  All right, and you got the last word on this subject matter. What you want to tell our viewers and our audience as you rattle the bars?

Erica Woodland:  I appreciate the last word. I neglected to say, the work that we’re doing right now around Eddie’s legacy is also about getting ahead of and interrupting co-optation. And there’s a lot of co-optation that happens here in Baltimore City. It happens everywhere. But there’s a particular way that people like to manipulate the story of revolutionaries to actually fuel work that is deeply harmful to Black people. And so, I just wanted to end on that. That we actually need to be very clear about we’re protecting Eddie’s work and Eddie’s lineage because it deserves that much. And co-optation is a tool of the state. And even if our own people are doing it, it’s unacceptable.

Mansa Musa:  There you have it. The Real News round about. Erica, you rattled the bars today. And I’m reminded of what you just say. Dominque reminds us that she owns… She don’t own Eddie, but she’s not going to let nobody co-opt the narrative or taking change who he was. And this is something important that we must always be mindful of, that we should never let people continue to define us, tell us who we are, what we are, and what we’re doing, and then give us some money to accept that what you just said about me is acceptable because I’m getting paid. No. Our legacy, our image, our heritage is not for sale.

There you have it. And we ask you to continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars. It’s only on Real News and Rattling the Bars that you get this kind of information. That we have a professional therapist. We don’t have a professional clinical therapist that’s certified by the state and recognize their state credential. We got somebody certified by the people and recognize their people credentials, which is way more important than any credentials that they can get, even though they do have the documentation that the state say they should have. But in terms of their application and practice, it’s all about the people.

Thank you, Erica. Continue to rattle the bars, and we ask you to continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars. Because guess what? We really are the news.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.