This piece was originally published in ANTIGRAVITY magazine.
Alfred Marshall was only 17 years old when he was arrested and sent to jail for a crime he did not commit. He was sentenced to three years and ultimately served his time while maintaining his innocence.
Despite the miscarriage of justice, he spent those three years within the prison system organizing for better conditions—books to build a library and the right to religious freedom within the prison, to highlight a few.
He was galvanized by the experience of being wrongfully convicted as well as his success as an activist while imprisoned. And he noticed quickly upon his release other people like him in the community who needed access to jobs, and thus the ability to support themselves and their families.
Marshall began organizing for more and better employment opportunities and since then has worked on housing campaigns, warrant clinics, and contributed to the Ban The Box initiative that eliminated a potential state or local government employer’s ability to legally ask an applicant about their criminal history on job applications.
During election season, he has been canvassing neighborhoods with Voters Organized to Educate (VOTE), advocating for the human and civil rights of those most affected by the “criminal (in)justice” system (as VOTE calls it) in Louisiana.
The organization is currently campaigning to pass a charter amendment that’s on the Oct. 11 ballot. It would amend the New Orleans Bill of Rights to add “conviction history” alongside race, religion, disability, and gender.
Marshall and I sat down together outside of St. Noir back in August to talk about his childhood and his wrongful conviction, and how both contributed to his career in organizing.
We met as neighbors in St. Roch. How long have you been in the neighborhood?
Just about five years, I would say.
Where were you living prior to this neighborhood?
Before that, I was up on Austerlitz Street, up around Magazine, Garden District. But I was born and raised in what they call—we call—“Brick City.” It’s called the Calliope Projects and was built in 1941. I came about in ‘59. My mother was able to get a place there. And I came up with three other siblings.
And where do you fall amongst the siblings?
There’s four of us, so I’m in third place. I got an older sister and an older brother and then me.
And then there’s a younger brother. Coming up in that household was a beautiful thing. The Calliope was beautiful, what we call a project. And I hate to hear that word because “project” sounds like an experiment. But it was a village. And within that village, it was like 1,500 units. When you do the math, it’s like 4,000 people concentrated in that one area. We got along. We had a vegetable garden. We didn’t know we were poor.
As a child, what was it like to have that many people around you in a village, as you’re describing it?
It felt good to me because coming up, I didn’t have anything. But I can go right next door and get it. We wore each other’s clothes and we didn’t see no signs of hunger. Everybody would call everybody. We would eat together at different places. We ain’t had no childcare. Miss Hazel, Miss Bridgie would watch us while our mother go to work. So, it was a beautiful thing, you know?
You had a blueprint for community and social togetherness and resource sharing even as a small child.
Totally. And when we didn’t have money, we would go down the store to Mr. Dan and all we did was bring a note down there. Hey, Mr. Dan, Mama says she wants these things, just a note. And it might come up to $35. I get stuff, bring it home. Then when Mama get the money, she pays Mr. Dan.
How long were you in Brick City? Until about what age?
I was in Brick City until I was just about 35. At 35, I got my girlfriend and I lived with her for a while, just going back and forth to work. I was a merchant marine at the time. I was able to travel, get on the boat, and go. They were passenger ships.
I used to get on those and go traveling from New Orleans all the way up to Minnesota with stops all the way in between.
Doing so, I found out that this ship was stopping at plantations all the way up to Mississippi for the tourists. I’m in the back of the house, you got the waiters in the front of the house, and you got 400 white people that’s cruising, and all they want to do is make stops. We made the stops in major cities and every stop they made until we got to a major city was at a plantation.
Can you remember what your feelings on that were at the time?
Something is wrong with the system. I can relate it back to when I was 11 years old and my mother asked for some [governmental] assistance for my little younger brother. My mom always worked, she just needed a little extra help.
And the government told her that to get assistance, our daddy couldn’t live in the same house. Now my dad is no longer in the household and I felt some kind of way at that age. Something is wrong with the system. It divided the household. In order to get assistance, you had to split the family.
Yes, the government became my daddy because of the money that was given to my mother, which was little-to-nothing. And from that, I knew something was wrong.
And then, at 17, I was arrested and sent to jail for a burglary that I did not commit. I experimented with some Valium and I fell asleep in school in the bathroom. When I woke up, it’s like 8 o’clock at night and I’m trying to move and get out of school, and the alarms went off. Police come tackle me. “Oh, you a burglar, man.”
There’s no burglar, I told them. ”I didn’t break in. I go here. I went to sleep in the bathroom. Nothing even been tampered with.”
And they wind up giving me three years for that. Took me out of school, sent me to the prison system.
Are you able to remember your emotional state when that was happening, either during the arrest or immediately after in prison?
I think the real shocker for me was when I was at the prison because, remember, this is my first time.
And you’re also just a child.
I was shocked. Then I became nervous. And I said, “OK, God, is this reality? I need a phone. I need to call Mama. I need to come up out of here.”
That became a problem because my mother didn’t have the money to get me out. So after a while, they sent me somewhere else inside the jail and I got to know a lot of dudes that I was coming up with. I wouldn’t say a lot, but I know about four or five guys that was from the hood, that now was down inside the system. And I got with them, talked to them, and tried to make a way. If I’m going to be here, I’m going to try to make it as comfortable as possible.
But there was a lot of things you had to deal with because of all the violence that was happening. You got to find a way to stay away from all that and stay focused on getting out. I did my time. And I seen a system that I didn’t want to go back into.
I wanted to tackle the system. The system is a problem. How can I fix this system that is broke, that is creating struggle for people of color?
And when was it that you began organizing for change?
While I was in prison.
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
The system was so wild. Dudes were just going crazy in there. Sixty-five guys in one dormitory, one TV to look at. My interest is not in this TV. But these guys were so wild and crazy, making noise, rapping, and didn’t want to look at nothing positive. They just wilding out. So me and another guy from Alabama, we got together and I said, “It’s too chaotic. We need something else to do in here.”
“What can we do? Let’s get some books.” You know, most of these people probably can’t even read in here. “Let’s just get some books and maybe we can tone this thing down some.” And we were able to talk to some of the young guys and they signed off. Now we’ve got all these people saying that they need books.
And in three days, people started to get books and the dorm got kind of quiet. The wilder guys who was killing and stabbing, they was still about doing what they do, but the dorm quieted down and you could see the change that had happened.
And I’m so proud of that because I come from the [Black] Panther Party. When I was in middle school, the Panthers would pick us up, bring us into the program, and show us how and teach us about who we are. And that we were strong[er] together versus apart, right?
I kept that in mind. I knew if I can get all these guys to get on board, we can be powerful. We can change this system. We can demand what we want. We got the power. And that’s why I still do this work today. Because once you get a group of people, and it’s a collective group of people, we can change something. We are a force.
From what you can recall, what was your first interaction with the Black Panther Party?
Right outside the village was a house that they had and that we passed on the way to and from school. They would feed you breakfast before you go to school, and they would teach that. They weren’t teaching about no white man, but just about who we were as a people and how strong we were.
That resonated with me. I am a strong Black man. And collectively as a group of us, we are even stronger. We are a hurricane. We are a force to be reckoned with. And that just lived with me and I seen the truth in that. You know, we would go into school and come out and fight with each other and we’d go back to the village, but we didn’t kill each other. There was always an elder to say, “If y’all want to fight, here’s some boxing gloves.” That was the net that the Panthers gave us: that we were strong.
We were astrophysicists, we were geniuses, we were scientists. There was so much talent within us, you know? Chocolate Milk, The Meters, The Neville Brothers, all those dudes came out this village. And we had not only artists, we had doctors and lawyers and people that made it through because we got along and kept each other safe.
You unknowingly collected your own inventory of how to be an activist. Was advocating for the library the only organizing you did while inside prison?
That was one of the first things I did. Another thing we did… I became Muslim while I was in, and around Easter time, people gotta watch Jesus of Nazareth.
Well, as Muslims, we said, we don’t mind watching Jesus of Nazareth, but our faith means we also want to see our religious leaders. Put that on for the population. We were also able to fast at certain times and to eat when we needed to eat. That was powerful.
So you were fighting for literacy and religious freedom?
Yes.
How old are you at this time?
I was 18.
When you were released, what did that feel like?
I knew that I didn’t want to go back to the system. I knew that I had to come back. And at this time — we talking about the late ’80s, early ’90s — it started snowing in New Orleans. When I say snow… cocaine was flowing. We had come from under Reagan and his [escalation of the War On Drugs] and now had Clinton, who signed his three-strikes bill. It was so crazy in New Orleans and I did not want to be a part of that. I learned from what the Panthers had taught us. And I seen the destruction of self when I see these dudes hurting each other. And why would I want to do that?
What does it feel like to come out of a broken system but still have to act in accordance with that broken system?
It doesn’t feel good. When you talk about a broken system and how it feels—especially being a person of color—when the deck is stacked all the way against you, it’s not a good feeling. So my intention is to find the right people that have the same feeling I have and be a collective group.
Let’s fight back against this system, right? That’s the only way I’m going to be able to do it. So I’m with the organization VOTE, and that’s what they do. Early on, I was with another group called Stand with Dignity. I’m so pumped up about it because we got people that are really on the ground doing it and fighting back against the injustice system. They feel the same way I feel.
You’ve brought up VOTE, which stands for Voice of the Experienced, and that you’ve been with them for about five years. How did you first come to know about them? And then how did you start working with them?
I was working with the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice [through Stand with Dignity]. That was Black and Brown people organizing following [Hurricane] Katrina. We were fighting around living wages and the right to work in this city. The stigma was that Black people of all ages don’t want to work. But in reality, we built this city, we live in this city, and we’re not working at no $8 an hour to rebuild it. We’ve done that before as slaves.
Then they were discriminating against us on the jobs. We said, OK, we gotta file some kind of ordinance or something that “bans the box. So the organization went to Norris [Henderson]—founder and executive director of VOTE—and we collaborated on that and we were able to get the question of conviction history taken off job applications [for state and local government]. It was a small win for us, but they found a way to get around it by not asking on the application but asking later during the interview.
That feels like a good encapsulation of one step forward, two steps back. For people who haven’t done activist work or are just getting into it, what would you say is your advice in terms of holding on to your passion and fire and having longevity in the fight?
It’s a continuing fight. The answer to your question is: You never win in this city, you never win in this state, you never win against the system. It’ll push you back and you have to go the other way and fight that same fight all over again. But you’ve got to understand that you’ve got to raise one up after you.
Say: Look, get into this fight early, ’cause this is what’s happening. First, you want to go out to the young people and just hear from them. Find out what it is that they’re going through, right? And then you can clearly draw a picture. Whoever the kid may be, their daddy may be going through something. Why is it that your daddy is not there? Why is it that something happened to your daddy where he can’t participate with you or why he got a record?
Therefore, you have to get in this fight, not only for yourself, but for your children as well. Because remember, this been going on for generation after generation after generation. This fight ain’t just started with me. So you want to encourage that young man. You have to start organizing other young people to come here, get in this fight, for the sake of our next generation.
What are some of the other new or ongoing initiatives that VOTE has going right now?
You seen this guy, Calvin Duncan, running for Clerk of Criminal District Court in Orleans Parish.
He did 27-and-a-half years in Angola. The reason why Calvin couldn’t get out was he could not get his court records. Calvin had been fighting to get his records for years.
Did they have any sort of reasoning as to why they didn’t have them?
They’ve been telling all the people. “We don’t know about those records.” That’s what they’ve been telling a lot of guys.
So what does not being able to get your records mean exactly in a practical sense?
If you’re filing something to come home, you send these papers to the court, right? Well, if they say they don’t have any account of who you are, then you don’t get your records. We don’t have a record of them, so they’re just stuck there. When Calvin finally did get his records, there were inconsistencies that led to proving his innocence — and ultimately making him eligible to run for public office.
And we have to put him in office so we’re doing a lot of work to make that happen. Because if we don’t, then we get the same people doing the same thing.
Is there a particular kind of work within this organization that you enjoy most? Do you like talking to people? Do you like the legal side of things? What is fueling you specifically?
I’m an organizer for the most part. I like talking to people. Because they dismantled the housing projects after Katrina, people left. Twenty percent of the population ain’t even come back, right? You got Latinos coming in, and you got white people. And I couldn’t stop the gentrification. It just ran clean over.
Where I seen brothers used to be at, where we used to be at, there were white people there. So, I said, let me get to know these people who are coming in. So I started engaging with white people, giving them history. You know where you at? You know what this was? Some of them good and some of them, you know, ain’t so good. But I like talking to people to get to know people. Remember, I came up with the Panthers and we said: ”Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud.” My community don’t look the same no more, so how do I say community?
Well, I get to know those people by having a conversation with them and find out who they were.
Community don’t mean you’re just right here, live right here, we live amongst each other… community is when you sit down and talk to people, know where they stand. You’re an editor, you’re a writer, you put on your talk, you do what you do. And if I ever need that, they’re part of my community, I can go sit down and talk to them. My community has gotten broader, it’s bigger now, and it’s not concentrated to one place. You’re a part of my community now.
I’m grateful to be a part of your community.
I love it.
For someone who wants to do more in terms of assisting their own community but doesn’t know where to start, what would you say to that person?
I would say go out and talk to neighbors. Find out who shares the same thoughts that you may have and whose might be a little different. Somebody else is going through the same thing you’re going through. You just got to find that commonality, find those people, and get with those people.
Let’s come together. It’s the only way we can get through it. You’re not alone. And whatever it is that you face, somebody else is going through it with you.
That’s an incredible sentiment, honestly. Is there anything further that you want to add?
I just know that I’m so happy that I continue to go out and try to meet people with my kindness and find out what we have in common. How can we work together and live in a better world?
That’s all I want to do, to find that and live in peace. That’s all I want, for this world to be peaceful. We all are beautiful.To find out more about volunteering or to get in touch with a member of VOTE, check out voiceoftheexperienced.org or their Instagram at @voiceoftheexperienced.
