Black Panther Party Member Eddie Conway Speaks with teleSUR

Marshall “Eddie” Conway was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1967 after an honorable discharge from the U.S. army and then later became part of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in April 1969.

He was falsely imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and was released this year after serving 44 years of his 66-year sentence in a maximum security prison.

Watch the video of teleSUR’s conversation with Eddie Conway below.

Conway worked extensively with other BPP members to address rampant police brutality in the city. During this time, the FBI infiltrated the Baltimore chapter of the BPP and began to monitor Conway.

Conway was falsely implicated in the murder of a Baltimore City police officer, as well as the assault and attempted murder of two others. Conway repeatedly voiced his innocence and denounced the FBI's Counterintelligence Program for the trumped-up charges.

Upon his release from prison in March 2014 after decades of court battles, Robert Boyle, one of Conway's attorneys said, "There was a de facto war being waged between the police and the black community … Eddie Conway was a well-known person in the Baltimore Black Panthers. If it wasn't Eddie, it was going to be someone else from the Party."

Conway remembers and recognizes the continuous war being waged against black communities at the hands of state sanctioned violence and surveillance. His insights regarding the current organizing efforts coming out of Ferguson will surely enrich conversations about the transformation of a moment into a mass movement.