“This is To Say Your Own Words. And you ought to view and express yourself the way you see it.”
Marshall “Eddie” Conway1
Over the course of 50 weeks, from October 1979 to September 1980, the “To Say Their Own Word” prison program invited scholars, journalists, social activists, and incarcerated audience members to discuss various topics surrounding the United States’ carceral system and its social consequences. Some of the issues covered throughout the program included U.S. fascism, capitalism, the prison-industrial complex, and government surveillance. The “To Say Their Own Word” prison program collection consists of 29 videos of these presentations at the then Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore, Maryland.
The program was a collaborative effort between Marshall “Eddie” Conway, Brenda Vogel, and sponsors, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and Correctional Libraries of the Maryland State Department of Education. Conway was himself incarcerated as a political prisoner when he helped organize the educational outreach program. Brenda Vogel was a librarian with the Maryland Department of Education who collaborated with Conway and wrote the grant to fund the project. Eddie Conway’s work as a leader of the Black Panther Party before being incarcerated provided him with the background to organize to improve the lives of himself and his fellow inmates. At the time, the Maryland Penitentiary was known for its brutality and low literacy rate. As Conway got into the prison movement, he worked to make change, including advocating against beatings by guards and creating a library, newsletter, and radio program.
Through the “To Say Their Own Word” program, literacy levels among the incarcerated men at the Maryland Penitentiary increased, with some going to school and graduating from college. In the words of Conway, “We decided to develop a larger university style people’s program in the prison that would help educate prisoners that weren’t necessarily involved in the local politics, but would bring them abreast of what was going on locally, nationally, and internationally.”2 For the organizers of the program, the goal was to provide this university-level program to the men at the Maryland Penitentiary and acknowledge the talent, intellect, and ability among the incarcerated men by allowing them a space to speak and share their thoughts.3
The videos in the collection were digitized by The Real News Network (TRNN) from the original Maryland State Department of Education VHS tapes, and are now hosted on the UMBC Special Collections’ Vimeo. In another collaborative effort, much like the original “To Say Their Own Words” program, TRNN, UMBC’s Special Collections department, UMBC’s Public Humanities program, and the Baltimore Field School partnered to develop programming around the collection. Excerpts from the oral history interviews conducted were featured at a free public event on April 26, 2023. Additionally, the Baltimore Field School provided funding to summarize the contents, which is available in each video’s description. Each video begins with the speaker’s presentation on their topic and ends with the incarcerated audience members providing questions, comments, and reflections. A few of the presentations centered around media portrayals of incarcerated people and life in the carceral system. The discussion from January 14th, 1980 featured Eddie Conway and Brenda Vogel along with 4 other panelists to discuss the movie Fugitive from a Chain Gang and the book I Am a Fugitive From A Georgia Chain Gang!. The final presentation of the program centered on Convicts 4 with Constance Goldman, a correspondent for National Public Radio, and the audience reflecting on the movie.
Other panels spoke to national and international concerns such as Askia Muhammad’s talk “Cultural Imprisonment: The Effects of Foreign Policy,” in which the discussion focused on genocidal conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as well as the weaponization of United State foreign policy. There were also two panels revolving around women for the final presentations in 1979. The first video features the audience posing questions to Professor Nijole Benokratis on topics such as the power dynamics between gender roles. The second, from December 17th, is another talk centered on media with Alfie Brown speaking on the conceptualization of women through the film I Want to Live and the image of the white American woman incarcerated in the 1950s.
The To Say Their Own Word prison program collection provides an important glimpse into the prison organizing movements of the 1970s, and the importance of having one’s voice heard. Saleem El-Amin, a former participant of the program, remarked that “When people listen and you feel like you’re a part of something, it gave you a chance for change. I think it kind of kept us in touch with our humanity, really.”4
The videos in the collection can be accessed through the Vimeo landing page and the Additional Information Descriptions in the collection’s Finding Aid on the UMBC Special Collections website.
This post was written by Annyah St. Louis, ’23, history, M.A. ’25, history, a graduate assistant in Special Collections. Thank you, Annyah!
- Musa, Mansa. “How Maryland Inmates Organized for University-Level Education in Prison.” The Real News Network, September 8, 2023. https://therealnews.com/how-maryland-inmates-organized-for-university-level-education-in-prison. ↩︎
- Musa, Mansa. “How Maryland Inmates Organized for University-Level Education in Prison.” The Real News Network, September 8, 2023. https://therealnews.com/how-maryland-inmates-organized-for-university-level-education-in-prison. ↩︎
- Musa, Mansa. “How Maryland Inmates Organized for University-Level Education in Prison.” The Real News Network, September 8, 2023. https://therealnews.com/how-maryland-inmates-organized-for-university-level-education-in-prison. ↩︎
- Musa, Mansa. “How a 1970s Prisoner-Organized Literacy Program Changed Maryland’s Penitentiaries.” The Real News Network, April 25, 2023. https://therealnews.com/how-a-1970s-prisoner-organized-literacy-program-changed-marylands-penitentiaries. ↩︎
Sources
Conway, Marshall, and Dominique Stevenson. Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.
Day, Susie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Brother You Choose: Paul Coates and Eddie Conway Talk About Life, Politics, and The Revolution. La Vergne: Haymarket Books, 2020.
Musa, Mansa. “How a 1970s Prisoner-Organized Literacy Program Changed Maryland’s Penitentiaries.” The Real News Network, April 25, 2023. https://therealnews.com/how-a-1970s-prisoner-organized-literacy-program-changed-marylands-penitentiaries.
Musa, Mansa. “How Maryland Inmates Organized for University-Level Education in Prison.” The Real News Network, September 8, 2023. https://therealnews.com/how-maryland-inmates-organized-for-university-level-education-in-prison.