“Rioting Peacefully”: How “Slaves of the State” Fashioned a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement

This paper places the prisoner rights movement of the 1970s squarely in the civil rights mobilizing and organizing tradition.   It considers how inmates housed in a racially segregated and antagonistic environment joined together to create an inter-racial alliance that built on the lessons of Attica and the Soledad Brothers by learning to “riot peacefully,” as one inmate aptly put it.   In the early 1970s, inmate Fred Cruz confronted the Texas Department of Corrections and their reputation as a model for national prison management by exposing in the courts the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population.  The paper also considers the story of David Ruiz, whose 1978 lawsuit against the inmate-controlled prison became the omnibus civil rights case Ruiz v. Estelle, which became the nation’s largest and longest prisoners’ rights suit.  Together these inmates made common cause with other prisoners across the Texas prison system, particularly with such noted African American inmate activists as Eddie James Ward, the former defense minister of an Austin-based black power organization, and Ernest McMillian, an active member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Johnny Swift, a Black Panther and street organizer.  Through acts of self defense, political organizing, a massive letter writing campaign, and an eventual system-wide work strike, this inter-racial movement of inmates opposed the prison system’s modernization narrative with their own “slave” narrative that brought the civil rights revolution from the streets to the cell block. 
This study of a prison-made civil right movement is based on privately held inmate writings, David Ruiz’s unpublished memoir, Fred Cruz’s diary, legal depositions and affidavits, previously unreleased court room testimony, and my own oral histories of over thirty-five inmates.