Billy Hand Robinson, former prisoner, anti-prison activist and friend of CEML, died this past May at the age of 63. Perhaps no single word better defined Billy’s life than the word struggle – struggle, as in "struggle against the odds," struggle, as in "inner struggle" or, struggle, as in a life-long commitment to "the struggle" for social justice.

Billy was extraordinarily gifted. He was a writer, a teacher, a counselor and an activist. He directed a halfway house for ex-prisoners and founded an organization run by, and for, homeless people called EMPTI-SPOON. While these achievements were impressive, none was more impressive than the fact that he attained them in spite of obstacles that must have seemed to him, at times, insurmountable – a near life-long battle with alcohol and drug addiction, spending 15 years or more of his life in jails and prisons and repeated bouts with homelessness.

Billy was always very open about these more painful experiences in his life, speaking and writing about them often, and pondering them deeply. What troubled him most was not just that they had been a part of his life but that they had been a part of the lives of so many others in his community. The question haunted him: Why had so many Black men and women of his generation and of succeeding generations succumbed to addiction and, subsequently, to a life in prison?

It was the answer to this question that troubled him even more. Billy was never one to avoid accepting responsibility for his own actions and, where befitting, was all too eager to do so. Yet, he felt certain – the kind of certain that comes from a lifetime of experience and witness – that the lives of so many Black people had come undone, neither by chance nor by personal failure but by design, and that nothing he or his peers could have done would have changed anything about that. Oh, perhaps under just the right set of circumstances he, or any other given individual might have been spared but, then it would have only meant that some other Black man or woman would have become the "statistic" rather than he. In his (yet unpublished) autobiographical novel, The Lynching Tree, Billy writes about being set up for failure, like this, by powerful elements in a society that was both racist and unequal:

"When I graduated from grammar school in June of 1949, I was strung out. I had a dope habit. There was nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. It was like an osmosis process. The syndicate dumped tons of extremely potent, dirt cheap heroin into Black and Latino communities. I was one of those who was permeable. I wound up going to the penitentiary in 1951, (Yes, I was too young but, I, wanting to be grown too soon, had put my age up), and stayed there until 1956. I went back to prison in 1959 and 1970 – all convictions having to do with narcotic obtaining activities."

As with so many of his peers, Billy struggled against the odds from the very beginning. He was a gifted, Black child at a time when gifted, Black children were seldom encouraged, an impoverished child at a time when impoverished children were given few opportunities. He was a young Black man at a time when young Black men were routinely targeted by the police, a politically-minded, Black man at a time when politically-minded Black men were targeted by F.B.I. operations like COINTELPRO. More succinctly, he was a black man in an America where Black men and women have never counted – or, at least, have never counted as much.

It is remarkable that, under such circumstances, he achieved so much. A 9th grade drop-out, he became self-educated, reading books by the dozens in jail and prison cells, taking courses, and eventually gaining a Masters Degree. It is perhaps even more remarkable that he never lost his spirit, never lost his determination, his dogged persistence to fight, at all costs, against those who attacked his people, Black people, and poor people everywhere.

At age 54, Billy was diagnosed with kidney failure and his health gradually declined. Despite being saddled with these health deficits, including dialysis treatments that eventually had to be done several times a day, he continued his activism. Prison related issues, homelessness, the widening gap between rich and poor, U.S. aggression in the 3rd World . . . all of these concerned him. What struck him hardest, however, was the plight of young people, especially young people of color, in America today. He saw them as counterparts to the youth of his own generation, and he saw the same deadly games being played with their lives as with his and that, if anything, the stakes had been raised even higher.

He saw that drugs were continuing to be dumped into poor Black and Latino neighborhoods, even as opportunities were withdrawn, and that the youth of such neighborhoods were being sent to prison at unheard of rates, 3, 4, 5 times the rate as in his day. Each time he looked, the rate had risen higher. He heard new code words being used to blame the victims, like "personal responsibility," "zero tolerance" or "war on drugs" . . . and he knew the fix was in. He read about the C.I.A./ Contra/ inner city L.A. drug connection or of the 100-1 ratio of crack to powder cocaine used in drug convictions (which meant, in effect, that poor, youth of color would get sent to prison much more often and with far longer sentences than anyone else), or that in many U.S. cities, 30, 40, even 50% of young, Black men were in the grasp of the Criminal Justice System – and he compelled himself to keep on trying, to continue to go to community meetings or to take the L to 51st Street, where he used to live – no matter that he could barely manage to do so – to talk to the young people on the streets there, to educate, to raise consciousness, to organize. . . .

He desperately wanted to save as many of these youth as he could from both addiction and prison. He knew that the former had robbed him of a great deal of his own productivity and peace of mind, and he hated prisons. He hated their cruelty and violence, their mindless regimen, their arbitrariness and pettiness. . . He hated their dehumanizing qualities and the way they wasted lives. He hated the part they played in the larger society, in maintaining racism and inequality, and in controlling any resistance to those in power.

Billy struggled to the very end and, despite all that he had seen and experienced, found hope in that struggle. He knew he could not give up. He knew that, while things looked bleak, now they would look brighter only if he and others like him "kept the faith." Much like the time-honored chant heard at so many rallies and demonstrations – "The People United Will Never Be Defeated" – he felt that if enough people joined the struggle, even seemingly invincible forces could be overcome.