Solitary

While in isolation at Camp J, Woodfox had been garnering more public support. Chapter 40 opens with a description of more people, Black and white, asking to come visit him, as well as Wallace and King, sending a shock through the guards, as “it didn’t compute with their belief system” (261). Eventually, this led to the creation of the National Coalition to Free the Angola 3.

This coalition worked to raise awareness of the Angola 3’s situation, as well as hiring investigators to track down leads, or looking for leads themselves. The prison responded by increasing pressure on the Angola 3, censoring their mail and shaking down their cells more aggressively. However, Woodfox writes that their resolve remained strong, fueled by the feeling that “for the first time in decades there were people outside prison besides our families who cared about us. People were fighting for us” (264). One of the people who had become involved in the fight was Scott Fleming, who’d initially heard about Woodfox’s case as a law student. In 2000, he joined the fight pro bono and turned over every stone possible in search of evidence of ineffective counsel or misconduct by the prosecutor—an effort Woodfox credits with keeping the case alive in the decades to come.