Susie Day - The Brother You Choose

PRAISE FOR THE BROTHER YOU CHOOSE

The Brother You Chose moves the BPPs center of gravity from the Oakland leadership to explore the very different dynamics in the Northeast, in which the Panthers emerged from dense Black communities in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. There is so much to be learned here about the BPP, the Black Liberation Army, the effects of state repression, and the role of political education and publishing in the fight for freedom. I have read all of the Panther autobiographies and this is one of my favorites. The Brother You Choose is an ideal book to assign to undergraduates as well as for the larger reading public. Its elegant structure and powerful content speak directly to the moment we face as the urban uprisings against state violence sweep cities across the US. DONNA MURCH, author, Living for the City: Education, Migration and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

Too often unheard above the sirens, the desperate gasping for breath, is the consistent language of love, of tenderness, of support between men. In this powerful offering, Coates and Conway speak to us of the brutal harm visited upon Black people, and they speak to us of revolution and freedom. But woven masterfully throughout the conversations shared is a life-giving narrative that recalls the history of a people who walked as much as a hundred miles barefoot to find their families when slavery came to its bloodsoaked close. The Brother You Choose, like the men who tell it, is a national treasure. asha bandele, author, The Prisoners Wife

The Brother You Choose encompasses all that is embodied in the soul of Gwendolyn Brooks words when she writes: we are each others harvest; we are each others business; we are each others magnitude and bond. The relationship that develops between the pages of these brothers lives is reflective of true heart and soul. The inimitable brotherhood chronicled here can only be measured by the depth of ones own sense of grace and humanity. Over a span of fifty years, Paul Coates and Marshall Eddie Conway have remained rock-solid comrades and extended family in the Black Empowerment struggle. Their friendship exemplified the early promise of the BPP and its core meaning as articulated in the Ten Point Program, illustrated through Days poignant account of racial injustice, resistance, and unyielding solidarity. HAKI R. MADHUBUTI, poet, founder of Third World Press/Third World Press Foundation, author, Taught By Women

By turns touching, enraging, moving, tough, and tender, always riveting and ultimately inspiring. WARD CHURCHILL, author, Wielding Words Like Weapons

Beautifully edited and narrated by Susie Day, The Brother You Choose allows us to eavesdrop on a humor-filled, heartwarming conversation between Eddie Conway and Paul Coates, whose love for each other and for their people carried them through revolutionary struggles and decades of wrongful imprisonment. An engaging read, these deeply personal perspectives on a common journey toward Black liberation encapsulate a history critical to movement-building today. NATSU TAYLOR SAITO, author, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists

A jewel of oral history. Put it alongside Studs Terkels Working. Here are voices intimate, everyday, world historical, all at once. Here is lifethe texture of thought, work, commitment, love: Just that simple. Just that complicated. It is a personal/political history that is deep and funny and tragic and radically astute. JOANN WYPIJEWSKI, author, What We Dont Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority & the Mess of Life

My beloved comrade brothers, Eddie Conway & Paul Coates both with unflinching self determination and unconditional brotherly love and appreciation for the others humanity. Eddies confined in maximum security prison(s) while Paul navigates minimum security, the world we all live in, informing and educating the world to FREE EDDIE CONWAY. What an amazing story of triumph over a system of wicked injustice. EMORY DOUGLAS, revolutionary artist & Minister of Culture, Black Panther Party 19671981

With a dramatists eye and a radicals heart, Susie Day has crafted a conversation between two titans about fighting the good fight, enduring the hard stuff, and living to tell about it. The Brother You Choose is smart, endearing, funny, and inspiring. Paul Coates and Eddie Conway reflect on commitment to the world and to each other. Pull up a chair and have a listen. DAN BERGER, author, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

@ 2020 Susie Day

Published in 2020 by Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-64259-201-6

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email for more information.

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

PREFACE

LIFE, POLITICS, THE REVOLUTION

This book is about Paul Coates and Eddie Conway, who met years ago, neither can remember exactly where or when, in the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). Eddie and Paul are two solid, intelligent, funnytwo very different African American men, who, through time, space, and all their differences, remain connected. This book is about their lives, their politics, and their friendship. Just that simple. Just that complicated.

In 1970, Eddie Conway, twenty-four years old and Lieutenant of Security for the Baltimore BPP, found himself facing chargesbased on sparse, governmentally skewed evidenceof fatally shooting a police officer and attempting to kill two others. Scores of local people pitched in to help Eddie, including Paul Coates, who knew Eddie slightly, but didnt much like him. Although this support probably allowed Eddie to escape the death penalty, he was given a sentence of life plus thirty years. Finally, in 2014, on the strength of a recent legal precedent, Eddie Conway was released from prison.

All during the years that Eddie lived behind bars, Paul never left him. Now that Eddies out, Pauls still around. Today, Paul is the celebrated founder of Black Classic Press, one of the few remaining independent publishers of work by and about people of African descent. Paul is also the father of seven children. Over the decades, as he built his business and raised his family, Paul visited Eddie in prisons all over the state of Maryland, often taking his kidsone of whom is the writer Ta-Nehisi Coateswith him.

I too visit friends in prison and have done so for more than twenty years. Most of these people come from a protest lineage that crested in the United States when a new Black militancy was emerging from the civil rights movement. These were years when the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense formed around a Ten Point Program beginning with the revolutionary imperative that Black people determine their own destiny; when Indigenous Americans fought to take back what little remained of theirs at places like Wounded Knee; and when many white people sidetracked their life trajectories to end racism and the Vietnam War.