mr mark cook and i have to call you mr levin after the whole interview but lisa at the beginning just because of the things that you've been through situations the things that you have seen in your life that i think is very important for the audience to know a lot of people talk the talk but you were able to walk it so tell us some things about just some of things that you've gone through and  early what you call the early forty's where there's still a lot of racial racism in seattle and there was redlining saying where black people could live or where they could not live and other people like that my mother kind took over the family when my father died i was about four years old oh yeah so she worked as a domestic for the wealthy people of course and sometimes she was working sixteen hours a day so we were let's keep kids we took care of to church until we were twelve years old and then we'd make we make our own choice where they want to go to church or not anymore and i decided not to after a while when i became twelve years old i went through all the public schools in seattle got my education there into high school and ran into a incident of racism in queen and high school where i threw a milk bottle through a window and that caused the beginning of my the judge sends me to three years in death it indefinitely for breaking a window right wow yeah and this is the thought of what they consider was a posturing program and it really was it was a horrible place i tried to break out of that went to another hospital where they i was tortured i was stretched you know like like you see in the movies the old days and beaten and this was to keep us in compliance with their program and people who are working as attendants in fact that one of them forget his name is name just templeman he was tried and convicted for torturing his wife and daughter and then it committed suicide because he wasn't going to penitentiary going on will meet all those people that he had tortured right yeah so the kind of the beginning of my being politicized i complain to the doctor you say when you're abused you should have somebody to complain to right i complained to the doctor or i was going on he says well you have no right to complain you're insane that was so i learned then that who we believed as responsible authority did not exist and that drilled into me at that point well as things went on going to get out the conditions in the prison at the time are really bad about nine hundred sixty nine i comment on mine i saw this  me on this and it was in a sense they were saying what the government will not do for us we're going to do ourselves and that's what my heart when i became a panther became the lieutenant information education at that time ok  we were functioning at that point we were confronted by some canadians can they you can call them by they call themselves canadian first themselves and white but these radicals too  place but we never had any problems in this newsletter we are trying to get the prison population to come together and there was the billions in the prison population the black we never printed anything but it could determine who is doing it and we spoke about things that the prisoners knew and everything was on everybody was on the same page with the complaint you know things they were going to do it he added things like keeping your hair  short down to a quarter inch no facial hair keeping the shirt tails tucked and we complain about little stuff like that but we also can't complain about the serious stuff you know rehabilitate rehabilitation program paroling  good for themselves together and everybody went on strike to ask for a change in the prison eventually we got a fifty fifty program the people in limpia security in custody that if they agreed they agreed ok you want to do this but if it fails you know what you can go back to c m o stuff right it ran for that way that way for about two years but what i'm the point i'm trying to born but the idea is that show you know it is action radical action we took that blossomed into something that the whole world was seeing at that time were the first penitentiary in the world in the united states have this type of a program well we also wanted to have a work program this resurfaced as the black panthers at this time in these canadians asserted connects the surface to we decided we want to work program ran by prisoners you know not making license plates stuff that we could do here on the street we convinced them to let us do a real poultry shop so we got this guy who's who is a sentence by the judge he was an up real poster which called and he was an alcoholic and the judge had sentence him to do community service because of his driving recklessly and stuff like that in the city so he came up to the penitentiary and taught us for the first time how to do re upholstery ok this is i'm scratch and there was about fifteen of us we convince the warden to give us a separate living quarters separate from the rest of population industries it was all of their program this is the only one that was making a profit and we were doing our own management there was nobody we had a guard the major w tried to run off or steal anything but other than that it was run totally by the prisoners here we understand you can do that with a nice idea you got what the program inside forget about it but i'll let you said if they get the money let them do it well there were six of us we wrote a grant several grants and we got two hundred fifty thousand dollars wow yeah and we created a couple of bridge project and they did give us the building the money was used to do maintenance on the building to hire our own staff we had one guard no two guards to do security  down and i got out but even while i was in a halfway house i started a program called combination seventy two giving asking for the president right to vote and working labor rights inside a prison and changing conditions you know in prison and out at one of the  once a year the there was the radicals in community joined in that helped me do this thing when i got to seattle from the penitentiary by the way the panthers had left some most of my less yelling go on to the oakland yeah  taking care of him i was working in an upholstery shop and learned the skills so i got a job as a host or well one of the canadians got out he came to seattle and told me at the closing down the program and all and i said why he says i don't know it but it was r and i said sounds good but we need that money again and we don't have those other guys out there to help us do it right here and he said we can do it here so he he did most of the work in the roger braithwaite he's passed away and  we wrote the grant two hundred fifty thousand dollars again and we got this place up in northwest north yell to call for winter there's a place up there where they used to do you take care of people that tuberculosis but it closed down a long time ago so we had that the set up shop in i mean shop in one of the main projects was for king county it was to do with micro micro graphics but they're all they're legal in criminal files ok mostly white organization underground organization working in the seattle area in one teams seven the two hundred seventy four seventy five i think it and because of using the name of jackson oakland want to know who they were i didn't know who they were myself but the radical underground radicals in seattle came to me and said we can get you to if you want to find out and i met them for the first time  color bombings and things like that i'm insecure and i don't take care of myself and i really don't want to get involved but i got to find out what can i run with you guys for a while and he said yeah so i was with them for a while i says put all your grievances aside and come together because you know that shit is here now and people are dying and blah blah and they said all we were doing is walking around in circles with them signs you know walk around the community go down in the courthouse and about it come home he said we're tired of doing that and explain to be what they were doing they had but they called on the propaganda you had to get the attention of the public and the government or the people you are who are offending you in order to get things done right and i said all the some kind of weird go ahead and do what you got to do so they did one of the things they did was there was  but it worked well so i decided i'd ride with them for a while i report to oakland what they did you know i rode with them and they did other actions similar not quite kite the kind is a term used in prisons both the prison staff and prisoners understand what it is if in the what's called contemporary time if prisoners needed some kind of attention or help with medical what they want to see a counselor did write a note and put it in the mail this is called a kite the prison staff  ministration got i got onto it maybe two decades ago and created forms that were called the kite and they were form you know zero five five five or something like that and if you needed something you had to write it on their form and send it to him so the prisoners decided to do a national prison strike across united states so i'm working with washington and west oregon state printers and this is what i audience for watching thank you very much