Hi, my name is Ivan Kilgore, and the name of this piece is “Smash the State, Open the Gates.” In 2014, I was introduced by a mutual friend to the co-founders of the Free Alabama Movement—Melvin Ray and Robert Earl, aka Kinetic Justice. Within a matter of days, the Free Alabama Movement and the United Black Family Scholarship Founders, which is a nonprofit organization that was founded here from prison, we began forming a national strategy to promote our activism and to gain support for our organization’s respective goals. Together, we took contraband cell phones and began hosting a national radio program, the Free Alabama Movement Blog Talk Radio. So, we did this from our prison cells. I was in New Folsom, in Folsom, California at the time, whereas a number of prisoners’ advocates and entertainers from across the nation discussed issues of mass incarceration, police brutality, educational reform, and the real about what’s happening in American prisons.
Now realizing that the public would be distrustful of our allegations of rogue prison guards etc., Melvin and Robert filmed and recorded over 60 videos and interviews in the Alabama Department of Corrections which range from unconstitutional living conditions to the warden saying he didn’t give a flip about prisoner rights. You can google this stuff: YouTube, Ivan Kilgore, Free Alabama Movement, Free Alabama Movement, or freeabamamovement.com. Now, needless to say, this eventually set fire to the seats of Alabama Senator Ken Ward, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, the US Department of Justice, and would cause the guards of several Alabama prisons to go on strike and refuse to report to work after the warden and several guards were stabbed in a riot at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility.
Since 2014, the movement has gone viral. Prisoners around the nation have begun protesting, conducting worker stoppages, etc. We were better able to organize all this stuff once the momentum got going with the assistance of the Industrial Workers of the World, at the urging, of course, of Black anarchists and former prisoner Lorenzo Irving, who formed the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, which critically burgeoned into a national and international organization to assist us to combat, among other things, penal slavery. Right now, we have some 75 cadres throughout the United States and several in the UK. For more information about the Free Alabama Movement, Ivan Kilgore. Simply google it. It’s online. You’ll be able to see everything. Thank you.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
