On Feb. 1, 1985, prison guards sprayed tear gas in the cell of a prisoner named Lincoln Love (a.k.a. Lokmar Yazid Abdul-Wadood) inside the Indiana State Reformatory (now Pendleton Correctional Facility), on the pretext of searching for weapons. They handcuffed him and “maliciously held him down and unmercifully stomped and kicked the inmate all over his body and hit the inmate upon and about his upper body and head with nightsticks,” according to a lawsuit. A prison guard later testified that some of the Reformatory guards were in a Ku Klux Klan splinter group known as the Sons of Light. Fellow prisoners Christopher “Naeem” Trotter and John “Balagoon” Cole came to Lokmar’s rescue, leading an uprising from within against the prison. According to Trotter and Cole, they fought several prison guards in self-defense and to protect Love from further beatings. To avoid being attacked themselves, they took two guards and a prison counselor hostage and negotiated with the prison. The hostages were released unharmed. No one died. Trotter was sentenced to an additional 142 years and Cole to an additional 84 years. They remain incarcerated today as political prisoners.

As part of a Brown University symposium inspired by the Pendleton 2 called [Autonomy] Amid Fascism, we screened our documentary The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up on March 9, 2024. In the following conversation with University of Cincinnati professor Felicia Denaud, Brown University graduate student Justin Lang, and organizer and former Black Panther Ashanti Alston, we discuss researching the P2 case, organizing for political prisoners, working on a defense committee, and ways people can get involved. Click here to donate to the Pendleton 2 cause.

Felicia Denaud I work with SNCC veterans, and they always say, “We archived ourselves.” Their research was organized and sophisticated — that was a huge part of why SNCC was what it was. I want to know how you all went about this, how we can think about revolutionary research, and how we all become a part of that in some way.

What were the ethical guidelines? When you sat down together and decided you were going to take this on, what were two or three things guiding you?

At the beginning there was the line “Some form of terrorism is going on.” And it’s not the ones that they’re telling us about — that’s going to stay with me forever. I’d love to hear about your emotional and psychological connection to the brothers, the relationship you’ve built with them. I think that’s quite powerful, the principles that guide how you do this work and that intersection of creating an art form around a story.

Too Black If you notice, there’s not a lot of lawyers and judges and cops interpreting the story. Naeem and Balagoon are locked up, so we have to talk to them on the phone. But we put them at the center of the story, not their lawyers or someone else. Often when you watch these true crime documentaries, some lawyer or some civil rights leader will pop up. Our point is to get them out, not to win an Oscar. But often people take that approach to bring legitimacy.

Then the question became: How do we verify some of the claims without it being so much about the lawyers and the judges and everything else? I want to give Balagoon and Naeem credit, particularly Balagoon, who saves everything. We have a PDF that’s a hundred pages of a bunch of newspaper articles that he sent. It was my job to go to newspaper archives and verify those articles and find new ones, and we had other people helping — just spending a lot of time in the archives going through the dates 1985 to 1987. Then you read the court documents. There’s a document that’s funny to read because it’s as if the guards never threw a punch and just got attacked. You have to check all those things.

Some stuff is just an aesthetic question. Some of those clips of people getting beat up, that’s just in prisons in general. Those are real clips. Those aren’t reenactments. There’s more than enough beatings online to throw in because another challenge we faced is they’re not on camera. So what are the visuals going to be?

TheKingTrill is an artist, an illustrator, and he drew a lot of the pictures you see. We put them on the screen to try to dramatize the events because even though we know the story is hard to watch, it still has to look somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

A lot of the research was done by other people. There was a Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2 project; we weren’t just us by ourselves. Ben, who is on the committee, is one of Naeem’s main contacts and did all the transcribing. Somehow he transcribed everything in a day. I don’t know how he did it. We moved the lawyers and the judges out — they probably weren’t going to talk to us anyway. [laughter] You’re also trying to respect the way they want their story told, which isn’t just Oh, this happened to me, this is so hard — which would be fine if that’s what they wanted. But they want the broader political analysis. They want it to be connected to other struggles because that’s what they put their lives on the line for. They always are very clear: “We want the whole thing to be exposed because that’s what we did all this for.” It wasn’t just Lincoln Love. You hear the story where people see the beating and immediately knew to call Cole and Trotter, who are in the Maximum Restraint Unit, and say, “They’re trying to kill us down here!” Balagoon goes to talk to Trotter and other prisoners who were involved in the uprising, and then they all go to see what’s going on. That level of coordination is spontaneous in that moment because they didn’t plan it, but it’s not spontaneous in the sense that they had preexisting relationships. When we think about if we’re going to intervene, it’s not just about whether we have the individual courage, it’s about our preexisting relationships. How are we working with each other? What have we established so that when someone does that, we know what to do, we know how to intervene? If that’s not there, the courage often is harder to find because you don’t just draw courage from yourself. You draw courage from other people. I have way more courage with the Defense Committee than I do as an individual.

I was on a panel where your question about how we deal with this emotionally was asked in a kind of self-care way. And I was just like, “Yo, we’re not the ones in prison. I’m here to talk about it — they’re in prison.” They’ve been in there for over 40 years. That doesn’t mean my emotions don’t matter. It’s just that if they sacrifice the way they did, the least I can do is edit a film and do some talking about it and try to get them out. That’s not comparably that hard.

The footage is tough to look at because you do have to listen to it over and over again because you’ve got to make sure stuff is right. That does sit with you a little bit. But you remember why you’re doing it any time it gets tough. I’m more carried away in anxiety over whether I’m representing them properly. That’s the stuff I’m more stressed about. Am I doing everything I can? We do these talks and are the front men, but you never want to become a celebrity off of it or hustle their story.

TheKingTrill I got with the Defense Committee after I heard about this story because I did 15 years in three different penitentiaries. I did two years here, four years here, three years here off and on — the life installment plan. I had no intention of being a director. I never said, “You know what? I’m going to film a documentary.” I heard the story at different events, and then I asked Naeem and Balagoon, “Hey, brother, can you tell me this and can I record it?” So I started recording our conversations. Initially, it was just me holding a cell phone and just listening to them speak.

And then I would hear the incredible vastness of everything that this tale encompasses and was so moved collecting this information and hearing these horror stories from the men directly. After I listened to 45 minutes of horror stories back to back, I’m saying to myself, “Oh my God, oh my God,” and “Wow, the things that they’ve suffered, so much anger they must have.” But at the end of the conversation, they say, “How you doing, brother?” Every time! Such conviction. You’re concerned about me! I’m out here, I’m free. “Do you need something? Do you need some money? Is there anything that we could do for you?” And I’m like, oh my God, they trying to do something for me? In their position?

It left me without any excuse. So I started collecting this information, talking to Brother Balagoon, talking to Brother Naeem, talking to their family members, their loved ones, the people that knew them best and knew that story from firsthand experience, and then putting it all together and making the first run of this documentary and finding that this is enough — to have these brothers tell their own story with their own words — and it being so impactful.

Justin Lang What kind of methods of defense does the Defense Committee get us to think about?

Too Black One of the many terrible things prisons do is it isolates people. Part of why these things happen is because they’re behind walls and there are no cameras, especially back then. There’s no oversight, and in this case the guards are in the Klan. A lot of the work is the boring stuff. You’ve got to call all the time, especially if they tell us that something’s happening. Balagoon had a tumor in 2022, and he couldn’t get the medical attention he needed. One of the ways people die in prison is medical neglect. So we had to call and demand that the doctors see him. He had congestion from pneumonia or something of that nature. A lot of this stuff stems from the torture that we talk about in the film. It also stems from eating horrible food or the water. Balagoon would say he couldn’t drink the water; he said it was poison and that’s why he thinks he has a tumor. When they tell us these things, we have to be responsive as a committee, whether that’s posting something online to gather people for a call, posting in the group chat, or sending emails. The prisons know once people have support: one, they get annoyed if you call them too much, and two, they don’t want to be exposed for all the stuff they’re doing. So that’s one of the ways of applying pressure. Another way is finding lawyers. If anyone knows any, we’re literally in the process of finding them a new lawyer.

We also have got to raise legal funds. We have got to find lawyers who are willing to take on the case; self-defense cases are always tough, and a lot of lawyers don’t want to take them on. People will ask us, Why don’t you try the Innocence Project? But a lot of those entities seem to want to support people — and I’ve been told this by lawyers, so this isn’t just my opinion — who the DNA shows weren’t there the day of the crime or something like that. But people who say, “Yeah, we did it, but we were justified,” can’t win as easily. A lot of times there’s a respectability element; they don’t really want to be associated with that kind of thing. You’ve got to vet the politics of lawyers. We’ve tried to deal with lawyers who say, “Well, I don’t know. I think they were kind of wrong.”

So all that stuff is often the defense. Think about raising a child or protecting a family: a lot of it is just making sure that if someone’s sick, you get them their baths and they get the right food. It’s not that much different. Defense work is care work, right? You are literally caring for someone and trying to make sure they can be alive to get them out. Because we know with a lot of political prisoners, particularly Black political prisoners, they’ll let them out two months before they pass away. They can barely talk. They’re pretty much already gone. They get to be with their family, and that’s better than nothing, but we want them to get out while they’re still well, while they’re still lucid, while they have their wits about them so they can enjoy life. So when we say “Free the Pendleton 2,” it’s not just “Release the Pendleton 2.” It’s getting them out and making sure that they can have a life of freedom to whatever extent that exists in America and have some kind of quality of life.

Sometimes I worry I don’t call them enough because we can get caught up in all this stuff, but you’ve just got to call sometimes and check in and just let them rap. It ain’t got to be about any of this. Last time I talked to Balagoon, he was going off about the Russia-Ukraine situation, then he was going off about Biden. [laughter] They can break down the whole geopolitical situation anywhere. Sometimes I don’t even think they want to hear an update, they just want to hear from us.

All of those things are defense formations.

TheKingTrill One person, man or woman, can only do so much, but all of us together, we can pick a mountain up and move it to a whole different place if that’s what we choose to do. So creating allies, building relationships, bringing people in and saying, “Okay, anything that you can bring?” “I know someone at Brown University who probably can help us get established there and get this narrative to go further there.” And then somebody else says, “My cousin works at the news station. I bet I can talk to them about this.”  So as long as we keep these conversations going and build this allyship — comrades, people coming together, like minds who realize the seriousness of the situation — we advance it. It’s all about moving it just that little bit further. Once we get to a tipping point, that’s when the whole dam bursts loose, and we finally get to bring these brothers home and let them experience the freedom that they deserve.

Ashanti Alston Thank you. First, I really appreciate what you all do, and I appreciate that the brothers inside, after all these years, are still carrying it on in a way that fits their sense of integrity. And they know what they’re up against. It’s pretty hard.

I’m on the advisory board of the National Jericho Movement. We’ve been doing this for a long time, fighting for our political prisoners. It’s a hard struggle because there are few immediate rewards. We don’t get too many victories, and the response that we would want from our communities is not there. We’ve got to continually figure out ways to break into that kind of mental block to get our folks to realize that these are our warriors inside. These are our Malcolms inside, our Mandelas. We need to figure out how to keep it in people’s consciousness as part of the struggle for our liberation. We’ve got to figure out ways to get people to take this political prisoner issue on. The brothers inside are the most discarded members of this evil empire that has taught the general population that we ain’t shit and we deserve to be there. Yet it is in that extreme situation you see the beauty of our humanity. We’ve got to free them.

Yuri Kochiyama, longtime supporter of Malcolm X, political prisoners, and the Panthers, would say that the political prisoners are the heartbeat of our movement. Our heartbeats are behind these walls. That’s another reason why we need abolition.