“ … For Strictly Religious Reason[s]”

Abstract

In 1957, Thomas X. Cooper, a Chicago native and former Roman Catholic, wrote to Elijah Muhammad to be registered as a member of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam (NOI). Like tens of thousands of other African Americans during the 1950s, he looked to the NOI as an answer to both social and spiritual questions. But unlike other NOI converts, Cooper was prisoner no. 33527, serving a 100-year homicide sentence at Illinois’ infamous Stateville penitentiary, an institution whose administrative rules classified the NOI as a hate group and hindered its operation. This article uses Cooper's decade-long combination of legal and extra-legal efforts to gain administrative recognition for he and other “Black Muslims” as a window into the emergence of a nationwide prisoners’ rights movement. By adapting his suit to fit a Cold War civil rights framework, Cooper was able to bring his suit all the way to the Supreme Court, thereby prompting a precedent-setting decision regarding the courts’ recognition of prisoner's constitutional rights. Although situated squarely within the NOI's millennial eschatology, Cooper's protracted campaign to the challenge Stateville's prison conditions reflect the development of a prisoner's civil rights movement, growing within the shadows of a Jim Crow civil society.

Keywords:

• Black muslims
• civil rights
• mass incarceration
• Nation of Islam
• prisoners' rights

Notes

James B. Jacobs, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 65.

Memo to Warden Frank Pate from, July 3, 1964, 6. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 3.

Ibid.

Jacobs, Stateville 61–62.

See “4 Muslim Convicts Stage a Rebellion,” New York Times, July 4, 1964, 7; “Four ‘Black Muslims’ Revolt at Stateville,” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1964, 3.

Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 175.

Oliver Jones, “The Black Muslim Movement and the American Constitutional Order,” Journal of Black Studies13, no. 4 (June 1983), 431.

James B. Jacobs, “The Prisoners’ Rights Movement and Its Impact, 1960–80,” Crime and Justice 2 (1980): 434.

Long time warden Joseph P. Ragen promoted this notoriety, even making the term the title of the 1962 book length portrait of Stateville, Inside the World's Toughest Prison, he co-authored with journalist Charles Flinstone in 1962.

Ibid.; John M. Lamb, The Collected Works of Historian John M. Lamb: The History of the Illinois and Michigan Canal and Related Subjects (Romeoville, IL: Lewis University, 2004), 234–236.

Gladys Erickson, Warden Ragen of Stateville (New York: Dutton Books, 1957), 34.

Jacobs, 46.

George Wright, “Inside Stateville—World of Its Own,” Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1955, 1.

Jacobs, 42.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 205.

Ibid., 231.

Roger Touhy, “Stateville Prison and Warden Ragen,” in Gladys Erickson, ed., Warden Ragen of Stateville (New York: Dutton Books, 1957), 192. Prisoners even developed a term, “going stir bugs,” to refer to a sort of paranoia that came from feelings as if one was constantly being watched and discussed. See Jacobs, 45.

Wright and Manly, “Some Convicts Make a Tough Life Tougher,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 6, 1955, 1.

Erickson, Warden Ragen of Stateville, 132-3.

Jacobs, 49–50. It is worth noting that between 1944 and 1957, Stateville's most prominent jailhouse lawyer Maurice Meyers unsuccessfully appealed ten separate cases against warden Ragen to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also assisted a number of inmates in preparing writs of habeas corpus. At one point, Ragen placed Meyers in segregation for a year for refusing to return records he smuggled out of the prison in order to blackmail Ragen into allowing inmate commissary funds to be used for a legal assistance program. See, Jacobs, 50.

Claude Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), 37; Paul Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Urban League, 2005), 2.

This increase in policing took place within the context of the Chicago Police Department's crackdown on the South Side policy racket. For decades, a web of police payoffs and political corruption had allowed the policy to flourish under the control of black organized crime. This “hands off” attitude left Bronzeville under policed and a haven for vice. It also left the policy racket a multi-million dollar operation employing an estimated 7,000 and providing capital for numerous legitimate businesses. Interestingly, more aggressive policing coincided with the Italian mafia's efforts to take over South side policy wheels. After the kidnappers of Policy King “Big” Ed Jones wounded a police officer during their get away on May 11, 1946, Police Commissioner Prendergast's promised to stamp out the policy before the Outfit could take it over. Yet arresting numbers runners, suspected raiding policy stations, and indicting the alleged operators of policy wheels drew harsh criticism from community leaders, especially Representative William Dawson. See Robert Lombardo, “The Black Mafia: African-American Organized Crime in Chicago, 1890–1960,” Crime, Law & Social Change 38 (2002): 50–52.

Arnold Hirsh, The Making of the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing, 1940–1960 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1998) 58.

This was not just a local phenomenon, but part of a national trend. Legal scholar Scott Christianson suggests that in the ‘40 s and ‘50 s this shift in the racial makeup of prison populations was taking place across the country. “During the postwar years,” he writes, “it became more evident that an increasingly disproportionate number of inmates were Negro, Hispanic, or Native American, and that virtually all prison administrators and correction officers were white.” Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press 1998), 253.

Latinos and other non-black racial minorities were officially counted as white. See Jacobs, p. 235, table 8, fn. a.

Jacobs, 57, 235, table 8.; After the implementation of the state's new Model Penal Code in 1962, the numbers of both black and non-black prisoners in the two prisoners declined, as made thousands eligible for an early parole Jacobs notes while there were 739 paroles from the Joliet-Stateville complex in 1961, there were 1,046 paroles in 1962. “The figure has remained at close to or above 1,000 ever since” (57).

Sundiata Acoli, “An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle (Abridged),” in Joy James, ed. Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 143–144.

Jacobs, 59–60.

According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, the other three members of the “gang” were supposed to have helped with the Mattioli robbery, but did not meet up with Cooper and twenty-three-year-old Oscar Beadle as planned. “Report 12 Bar Robberies and Murder Solved,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 29, 1952, 16.

“2 Killings Bring 200 Year Terms for 2 Robbers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 20, 1953, 4.

William G. Clark et al., “Brief of Defendants-Appellants,” May 17, 1966, 6. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 3.

“Memo to Joseph E. Ragen Re: Inmate #33257—Cooper, T.” March, 29, 1975. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 62.

Erdmann Doane Beynon, “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants to Detroit,” The American Journal of Sociology 43, no. 6 (May 1938), 901.

William G. Clark et al., “Brief of Defendants-Appellants,” May 17, 1966, 6. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 3. [“Black Muslims at the Illinois State Penitentiary” pg. 23.].

William G. Clark et al., “Brief of Defendants-Appellants,” May 17, 1966, 5–6. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 3.

Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis, The Other Malcolm X—“Shorty” Jarvis: His Memoir (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1998) 56.

Thomas X. Cooper, “An Appeal from Federal District Court,” Cooper v. Pate. February 3, 1963. No. 62C138, 8. For several decades, the Ahmadiya movement was influential important in introducing African Americans to Islam. The Moorish Science Temple of America's Noble Drew Ali also learned of Islam from members of the Ahmadiyya movement.

“Memo to Joseph E. Ragen Re: Inmate #33257—Cooper, T.” March, 29, 1975. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 62.

Ibid., 2.

Ibid., 7. Cooper's NOI-appointed attorney conceded that his client had violated a rule by loafing on a work assignment, but disputed Ragen and Pate's account: “[Cooper] was walked towards the isolation cells where he was to be confined as punishment. While walking towards the cells, an altercation arose among plaintiff, two other inmates walking with him, and the guards who were escorting him. After fifteen days in isolation, plainfiff was incarcerated in the unit of the prison known as ‘Segregation’ and a separate establishment located some distance away from the building housing the general population.” Edward Jacko, “Brief of Plaintiff-Appellee,’ September 16, 1966, 6–7. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 3.

George Wright and Chesley Manly, “Some Convicts Make a Tough Life Tougher,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 6, 1955, 1.

“Disciplinary Record of Thomas Cooper,” n.d., 1–4. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 4.

Cooper transcribed both Bibbs response each letter as exhibit A and B in his 1963 appeal affidavit. In both letters, Bibb advised his Cooper to take these complaints up with Ragen while proposing that the disciplinary records of he and other “Black Muslims” was a possible explanation for the restrictions of the so-called Religious literature. See Thomas X. Cooper, “An Appeal from Federal District Court,” February 3, 1963, 15–16. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 351, Folder 14127.

Ibid., 10.

Ibid.

Thomas X. Cooper, “An Appeal from Federal District Court,” February 3, 1963, 8. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 351, Folder 14127.

William G. Clark et al., “Brief of Defendants-Appellants,” May 17, 1966, 10. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 3.

Thomas X. Cooper to Mrs. Ollie B. Cooper, August 24, 1959, 1. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 3.

Ibid.

Ibid., 2.

Appendix of Defendant Appellants, Volume 1, 602–4, 1. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 6.

“Constitutional Law. In General. Right to Practice Black Muslim Tenets in State Prisons. Pierce v. LaVallee (2nd Cir. 1961); In re Ferguson (Cal. 1961),” Harvard Law Review 75, no. 4 (Feb, 1962): 837.

Pierce v. LaVallee, 212 F. Supp. 865, 1962 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 3322.

See In re Ferguson, 55 Cal. 2d 667, 361 P.2d 417, 12 Cal. Rep. 753 cert. denied, 368 U.S. 864 (1961).

“Constitutional Law,” 837.

“Black Muslims in Prison: Of Muslim Rites and Constitutional Rights,” Columbia Law Review 62, no. 8 (December 1962): 1503.

Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 204.

“Black Muslim Convict Wins Religion Plea: Claims Rights are Ignored,” Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1964, A7.

Although the court's ruling the year prior in United States v. Muniz had extended this right of access to federal prisoners, the Cooper ruling opened the possibility of civil rights for state prisoners, the overwhelming majority of the national prison population.

Jacobs, 67.

Memo to Warden Frank Pate from Senior Captain E. E. Morris, January 15, 1965, 1. Records of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Box 15462, Folder 6.

Ibid., 2.

As NOI ministers were at pains to stress in their public statements, Muslims were law-abiding people who would only consider using violence in self-defense. Prison riots raised the specter of violent racial conflict that had haunted the organization's public image since its inception. Moreover, the NOI leadership was likely distracted by a severe internal split. On March 8th, National Spokesman Malcolm X publicly broke with the NOI following a ninety-day suspension imposed by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for comments made to the press in the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Since the beginning of this period of silence, tensions had increased between the thousands of Muslims who left the Nation with Malcolm and rival ministers who remained loyal to Muhammad. Throughout the spring and summer of 1964, Muhammad Speaks, the news organ Malcolm had established, was turned against him. Over several months, various ministers—including his own brother and the person who had first introduced Malcolm to the Nation, Philbert X—publicly castigated him for hypocrisy and betrayal, while ominously hinting at bloody reprisals. These threats of violence were nearly realized on the night June 16th, as police arrested six armed followers of Malcolm following their confrontation with thirty-five members of the NOI's security force, the Fruit of Islam (FOI). By July, Malcolm would counter by making public allegations of Muhammad's adulterous affairs, thereby escalating the internecine tensions that would ultimately lead to Malcolm X's assassination on February 21st, 1965. Clegg III, An Original Man, 214–216.

“Illinois Court Forced to Uphold Muslim Rights to Freedom of Religion,” Muhammad Speaks, June 18, 1965, 6.

Cooper v. Pate, 382 F.2d 518 (1967), 1.

Jacobs, 65.

Cooper v. Pate, 1967 U.S. App. 5793, 16.