I Am Maroon

August 15, 2024
A prisoner testifies. Award-winning journalist D'Almeida met Russell Shoatz (1943-2021) in 2013 at a state penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where he was an inmate. The purpose of her visit: to audition to be his biographer, to turn his disorganized 280-page memoir into a salable book, and, his supporters hoped, to free him from decades in solitary confinement. They worked together for nine years, and she completed the manuscript shortly before his death. The result is a brisk first-person narrative that reveals a life steeped in violence. Suffering what he called "quiet neglect" as a child, Shoatz hated school, where teachers bullied and demeaned him. Gang culture became his world, and by the time he was a teenager, he was "like someone trapped inside a revolving door," repeatedly in and out of prison, "each time a little more hardened than before." Energized by seeing Malcolm X at a Nation of Islam rally in 1963, he became a political activist, first joining the Black Unity Council in Philadelphia and soon the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army. Militant, with arsenals of weapons, he was intent on "dismantling a system of white oppression and winning freedom for Black people in America." Involvement in a raid, however, changed his life forever. Accused of killing a Philadelphia park guard, he was captured after two years underground and sentenced to life imprisonment. Two daring escapes from prison earned him the nickname Maroon, an epithet for a runaway slave, of which he was proud. Describing himself as "a politically motivated individual, who had been officially affiliated with a group that had declared itself at war with the US government," Maroon continued bearing witness to injustice and racism in his writings from prison. Tense, fast-paced chapters ably capture his fire and anger. A raw, unvarnished memoir.

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October 28, 2024
Former Black Panther Shoatz (1943–2020) recounts his controversial life and work in this illuminating posthumous memoir coauthored with journalist D’Almeida. Shoatz grew up in Philadelphia and joined the Coast street gang when he was 11. In 1963, after nearly a decade of criminal activity, Shoatz heard Malcolm X speak in Harlem. Though he didn’t immediately quit the gang, the “life-altering event” spurred Shoatz to join Philly’s nascent Black Unity Council, where he planned food drives and cultural events and, eventually, intervened to stop gang conflicts throughout the city. In 1970, after the BUC allied with the Black Panthers, Shoatz joined an attack on a Philadelphia police station that left Sgt. Frank Von Colin dead (“I will not jeopardize any party’s freedom or safety by revealing what I know about that attack,” Shoatz writes). He was sentenced to life in prison, though he managed to escape twice, before dying of cancer in 2020 while out on compassionate release. Shoatz is an impassioned and endearing narrator, clear-eyed about his mistakes even as he pushes back on his treatment by Pennsylvania prosecutors. Not every reader will be swayed by his worldview, but those interested in the Panthers and their legacy would do well to check this out. Agent: Alison Lewis, Frances Goldin Literary.