Fall 1996 Human Rights Magazine

Interview with Lori Andrews by Vicki Quade

Lori Andrews first met Johnny Spain in 1989. Seven years later, she has chronicled his life in a riveting new book, Black Power, White Blood.

It is a story about the life and times of a biracial man who found salvation in the Black Power movement and then was rescued from a life behind bars by a team of lawyers who dedicated themselves to freeing him.

There is lawyer Dennis Riordan, who worked on the case without pay and took unemployment compensation to pay his rent, staying with the case from the trial in 1975 throughout the appeal process. And Charles Garry, who had defended other Black Panther leaders before working on this case.

But at the core of the story is Johnny. And looking at the photos of his life are as telling as the tale itself. These pictures are as different as black and white.

Here he is as little Larry Armstrong, born in 1949 in Jackson, Mississippi, the son of a married white mother and her black lover. Raised in a white world, he was six when his mother could no longer take the tauntings about her dark-skinned child. To protect him, she put him on a train to Los Angeles to live with a childless black couple called the Spains.

They renamed him Johnny. He would spend the rest of his childhood in a tumultuous black world, watching the Watts riots in 1965, eventually killing a white man during a robbery attempt. He was 17 when he was sentenced to prison and would spent the next 21 years there.

In jail, he found friendship with prison revolutionary George Jackson and an identity as a member of the Black Panter Party. When Jackson made a failed attempt to escape San Quentin, Johnny was running ahead of him. Jackson was gunned down, but not before three white guards and two white inmates had been killed.

Here's the next picture. A defiant and angry Johnny sits in a chair bolted to the floor in a California courtroom. He is wearing 25 pounds of leg irons, a belly chain, hand shackles, and a dog collar. Plus he and his fellow defendants are separated from the spectators by armed guards and a sheet of bulletproof glass.

Johnny would become the only defendant convicted of conspiracy in the 1975-76 trial of the San Quentin Six.

Sentenced to life in prison, Johnny Spain underwent a transformation, becoming an ardent spokesperson for prisoners' rights. Over the years, as his case became publicized and his lawyers fought for his release, Johnny's supporters--including prison guards and the mayor of Oakland--argued that he had rehabilitated himself.

In 1988, a federal district court overturned his conviction. Johnny Spain is now a community organizer in San Francisco, has lectured on criminal justice, race and community at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, and conducts seminars for both police and inmates. He now teaches a course called Society Behind Bars at the New College of California School of Law, in San Francisco.

It took Lori Andrews a long time before Johnny Spain opened up to her, but her persistence has paid off. Her book has helped to explain this epic battled.

A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Andrews is a recognized expert in the field of biotechnology and civil rights. A professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, she has been named one of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America, according to the National Law Journal.

At the age of 44, Andrews lives in Chicago.

This interview, recorded from her office, was conducted by Human Rights Editor Vicki Quade.

Johnny Spain is free today because his lawyers wouldn't give up on his case. It's as much a story about his struggle and the work of his lawyers.

Absolutely. They thought they had so many good legal grounds on which to appeal--a juror misconduct issue, the chains--but those arguments didn't work. They had to do a new brand of law. They did a tremendous amount of social science research, finding out what happened to everyone else who had been convicted in 1967, what were their crimes, when were they out. They could show that the real reason Johnny was still in prison was his commitment to the Black Panther party and not the nature of his crimes . His lawyers also mobilized groups to work on this case--state and local bar associations, Amnesty International, and other groups.

This was more of a political trial.

Yes. And reading the 30,000-page trial transcript, I was struck by the nature of the trials in that period. The Soledad brothers, Angela Davis.

These were very controversial trials and anything could happen in the courtroom--and often did. It makes you realize how fragile the trial system actually is for control in the courtroom.

Judges often keep control by embarassing lawyers in front of their clients, so lawyers have to behave in a certain way to each other, toward the judge, and so forth.

But at that time, with these sort of defendants in the '60s and early '70s, they thought it was a great thing if their lawyer could annoy the judge. When the judge thought he had lost that control, the contraints escalated.

We remember the Chicago Seven trial where Bobby Seale was gagged in the courtroom. Here we had Johnny wearing 25 pounds of chains everyday for the trial, and being chained to his chair, which was bolted to the floor.

Did prisoners rights grow out of those years?

They did. And Johnny specifically made changes in the rights of prisoners.

For example, he won the right to exercise, not just for himself, but for the entire class of prisoners. The main U.S. Supreme Court case on reporters access to prisons--Pell v. Percunier??--comes from Eve Pell, the journalist, trying to get in to see Johnny at San Quentin.

When he went into prison, blacks couldn't be electricians. This was challenged by lawyers.

Other things that came up were access to reading materials. When his friend tried to send him The Velveteen Rabbit, prison officials said it was too incendiary and didn't allow it; the legal battle to get access to even children's books changed the nature of prisons.

One depressing thing that I'm seeing now is that we are reinstating many of these harsh rules that Johnny and others of that era challenged.

For example, four states have reinstated chain gangs, which were eliminated in the 1960s.

There's a move to eliminate habeas.

Exactly. First of all, had they not overturned the death penalty, Johnny would have been killed at the end of the San Quentin Six case.

You can ask what special things occurred in his case that allowed him to come out and teach at Stanford and Berkeley. He's now been out for eight years.

Some of it had to do with what lawyers did to get him jobs in prison and access to reading materials in prison.

I troubled when I hear about some of the current policies toward inmates. In Washington State there was a successful experiment to have computers in the prisoners' cells. And people were coming out of prison and getting jobs making $35,000 a year.

That program has been eliminated because the state said it was too much of a hassle.

There's a state legislator in Wisconsin who wants to eliminate grants for education for prisoners on the theory that why should someone who has done a bad deed get educated when it's hard for blue collar students on the outside to get educated.

These seem so counter-productive in an era when 95 percent of people get released. Wouldn't we rather have them getting trained, getting jobs?

I was struck by one of the Washington prisoners saying that prison is about teaching failure. That's what we learn in prison, failure. That was his response to them taking away the computers.

What are you hoping will happen out of the telling of this story?

On the issue of race, Johnny had to come to grips with his own identity. He was in all of the places where social conflicts occurred around race in this country--the deep South in the 1940s, Watts and the Black Panter party in the 1960s.

At some level, Johnny and people like him are white America's worst fear. He killed someone. He was thought to be such a wild animal. He was in solitary confinement, chained--and yet, if you look at his story, there is so much that could have been done at any point to change the ending.

We are no longer in an era where we think individual actions make a difference.

You have no idea the difference it made to him when his friends wrote to him about changes in the price of bread, so when he came out it wasn't a shock to him.

Also, I think the story will help lawyers who might want to take on a case like this. Lawyers who get involved in these kinds of cases go in with such starry eyes. There was such a backlash against lawyers who got involved. They were spied on by the FBI. There were federal investigations about whether attorneys in these prisoner's rights projects were stirring up the inmates, as though inmates had no legitimate grievances.

To many lawyers, that was unexpected. They failed to see the various ways they could be tripped up outside of the courtroom.

Isn't that happening now with the Legal Services Corporation being cut? There just aren't the number of lawyers available to take on these cases.

That's right. And we'll never realize the people who need help.

We tend to forget that there is a need for taking on these prisoners' rights cases.

Here Johnny--someone who in prison designs a lighting system that can save lives. He does pre-release classes for inmates now.

He's making a large social contribution that we would have lost.

Johnny isn't an isolated case. A number of people were involved in student protests, in black power movements, and have paid the price. They haven't been allowed fully back into our society.

There was something unique about those times. White collar students were being put in jail for protesting against the Vietnam War. We paid more attention to prisons then and made them a larger issue in society.

Defense committees would spring up all over the state for George Jackson and the Soledad brothers case. Luminaries from the art world, the writing world, the science world would join committees on Jackson's behalf. We're not seeing that now.

Instead we're seeing a society that's terrified and thinks it can keep building more and more prisons and put more people behind bars.

The number of prisons in California has tripled in the past 15 years. Prison is now a $165 billion industry in this country. The Wall Street Journal compares it in size to the U.S. military industrial complex.

Organizations that used to have lucrative contracts with the Department of Defense are now moving over into the prison services businesses.

The public, at some level, is being sold a bill of goods because they think they're someone going to be safer--even though none of the studies in the past 90 years indicate that harsher sentences or longer sentences deter recidivism.

The prison industry is the new growth industry. Correctional officers in California are now a major lobbying group. Money for education in California is way down, money for prisons is way up.

The Rand Corporation released a study that if it keeps up that way in California, the educational system will be bankrupt by the year 2003. At the rate prisons are being built, the whole state economy will be bankrupt by 2005.

What's the answer to more prisons?

It isn't taking away the computers, the books, the access to education in prison. We're turning out a defective product. There is no evidence that just having people sit around and releasing them works.

The answer starts much earlier. Beginning teachers in California make $22,000 a year. Beginning correctional officers make $34,000.

We're spending money on the wrong end.

What else needs to be done?

Well, we're also sending the wrong message to kids about what is good and acceptable in society.

Johnny's mother had to send him away in order to save him, but she could keep her three white children. What does that say to kids in our society? What message do they grow up with?

Johnny wondered why he was the monster. Why his mother couldn't keep him. We tell kids in all sorts of ways that they are monsters. We're giving up on our kids at an early stage.

Johnny has reconciled what happened to him. Now he attributes his success today to the fact that at least for those first six years, he was loved. He was hugged. His mother cared about him.

Both of them were victims.

Yes. Johnny's mother sent her son away to save him, but she also lost him and lost that contact with him. And Johnny lost his real mother and someone who truly cared about him.

Also, his parents couldn't marry, not in that society at that time. It was the South and that just wasn't done.

So there were many victims in this story.

There's also something I didn't put in my book. When Johnny killed a white man and went to prison, he was still a youth.

I looked at the cases of other teenagers in that era and found that a black teen who killed someone black was tried as a juvenile. A white teen who killed either a black or white was tried as a juvenile.

But every single black teen who killed a white person, including Johnny, was tried as an adult.

The system, obviously, was not racially neutral. People who wonder how I can write about this man and champion his cause don't look at the fact that the usual term people would do for that would be seven years. Johnny did 21.

What can we do about the overcrowding in prison and inmates who haven't been educated or who have no skills to survive outside of prison?

It's hard to say the best thing is a three strikes law.

Do we really want to spend $65,000 a year to keep someone over the age of 60 in prison when people in that age group rarely commit crimes?

We have to change. We can't lock them up for years, open the door, give them $200 and tell them to go out and make it on their own.

There are so many counterproductive rules. For instance, there was a rule when Johnny went to prison that the only people who could come to visit were people you had known for the six months before you went into prison.

Great, that lets you see all of your crime partners.

We grow as people by meeting new people.

There's one study that shows a lower rate of recidivism occurs among inmates who have conjugal visits. But that's looked upon as this liberal idea of giving a cushy life to prisoners. Society is a social institution. You have to interact with other individuals.

As published in Human Rights, Fall 1996, Vol. 23, No. 4, p.8-11.