Woodfox, Innocent Yet Imprisoned for Decades, to Receive 2020 Stowe Prize

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center plans to honor Albert Woodfox, known as one of the Angola Three, as the 2020 Stowe Prize winner. Woodfox is receiving this year’s award for Solitary, his memoir about the four decades he spent in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit.

The Stowe Prize recognizes the author of a distinguished book of general adult fiction or nonfiction whose written work illuminates a critical social issue in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The winning book applies informed inquiry, is accessible and engaging to a wide audience, and promotes empathy and understanding, according to officials.

Plans are for the Stowe Prize programs to include a free public program with Woodfox on Wednesday, September 23 and the presentation of the Stowe Prize to Woodfox under the Big Tent on Thursday, September 24.  If public gatherings are once again permitted by late September, the programs are scheduled to take place on the historic Stowe Center grounds at 77 Forest Street in Hartford.

Woodfox spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. In Solitary, he shares not only how he survived his ordeal, but also how he was able to inspire his fellow prisoners – and now all of us – with his humanity and devoted activism.

In making this award, the Stowe Center “recognizes the value of diversity to strengthen our communities.”  Woodfox is the seventh recipient of the Stowe Prize, following Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in 2011 for Half the Sky, Michelle Alexander in 2013 for The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015 for The Case for Reparations, Bryan Stevenson in 2017 for Just Mercy, and Matthew Desmond in 2018 for Evicted.

Author of the international best-selling novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s words and actions remain relevant today. Stowe believed her purpose in life was to write, and her most famous work exposed the truth about the greatest injustice of her day – human slavery.

The Stowe Prize 2020 Selection Committee included Cheryl Greenberg, Ph.D.; Joan Hedrick, Ph.D.; Patricia Hill, Ph.D.; Jared Jeter; Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Ph.D.; Robert Roggeveen; Barbara Sicherman, Ph.D. and Mary Ellen White.

Albert’s ability to emerge whole from his journey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit and makes his book a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement. Remarkably self-aware that anger or bitterness would have destroyed him in solitary confinement, and sustained by the shared solidarity of two fellow Black Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. 

Said Woodfox:  “We had been through so much brutality, so much pain and suffering that we had every right to be hard, bitter, and hateful toward almost everyone and everything in life. But instead, we did not allow prison to shape us. We defined ourselves.”

Stowe Center officials explain that the Angola Three resolved never to be broken by the grinding inhumanity and corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners.  “Woodfox survived to give us Solitary, a chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds.”

Woodfox was born in 1947 in New Orleans. A committed activist in prison, he remains so today and speaks to a wide array of audiences, including the Innocence Project, Harvard, Yale, the National Lawyers Guild, and at Amnesty International events in London, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium.

The mission of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is to “preserve and interpret Stowe’s Hartford home and the center’s historic collections, promote vibrant discussion of her life and work, and inspire commitment to social justice and positive change.”  In keeping with current coronavirus restrictions, the Stowe Center has been closed to the public since mid-March.