As my Instagram feed darkened with black squares in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, I felt a persistent discomfort. I didn’t want to just post my support for Black Lives Matter and move on, perform outrage and then return to the soft, suspended unreality of lockdown. I was on COVID unemployment, drifting through long, indistinguishable days where time felt both infinite and strangely airless.
My screentime was ungodly, the glow of it constant, narcotic. It was in that haze that I stumbled on an article about Fate Winslow – a homeless Black man sentenced to life in prison for selling a $20 bag of weed, swallowed whole by Louisiana’s Jim Crow juries and draconian three-strikes law.
It came as a grotesque shock to learn that Louisiana still had “Jim Crow juries” until 2019, only the year before. In every other state, as mandated by The Sixth Amendment, a jury had to unanimously agree – twelve out of twelve. But in Louisiana and Oregon, ten out of twelve could make a conviction, because of a Jim Crow law designed to discount Black jurors’ votes. No more than two Black jurors were typically seated on a jury, so the law ensured their dissent would be overridden, erased in the final count.
In April 2020, the Supreme Court ruled Jim Crow juries were unconstitutional – but they left it up to Louisian and Oregon to find a remedy for the people now unconstitutionally imprisoned. Oregon provided new trials for them. Louisiana decided not to, and continues to illegally imprison roughly 1,000 Louisianans – over 80% of them black.
A friend of Fate’s had set up a GoFundMe – which no one had donated to yet – explaining that he didn’t have any financial support, and it’s extremely difficult to survive prison without it. Especially the Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed Angola for the African country many of Louisiana’s slaves were kidnapped from, where Fate was doing life without parole at hard labor. He worked 12 hour shifts for roughly 20 cents a day. A small carton of OJ cost $3.50 at the commissary. I was surprised that despite all the press attention his case had received, Fate still had no financial support.
I found him on JPay, the dated hellscape of an online system that Angola uses for inmates to send emails and receive money. It only took about ten minutes to set up an account, send $50 and a letter. It felt so strange, the disproportion of ease compared to the weight of what he was enduring. He wrote back:
“First, let me start by saying thank you, for your kind support and words. Also, I want to thank you for the big blessing you’ve put upon me in my time of need and as of now, I’m just waiting on the Innocence Project out of New Orleans, has been helping me. Well, I know you said that, “if I need something to let you know.” Well, it won’t be what I want but it’ll be something that I desperately need. Like a pair of boots, these have so much thread in them holding them together they look like Frankenstein(smile). I’m trying to take some of that blessing you gave me and have a new pair of boots or jeans. The boots are $48 and the jeans are $38, hard to decide which one to get???
May God put his Blessings and Grace upon you and your whole family and loved ones!!!! Like you put your blessings upon me, Thank You, again!
CORDIALLY, MR. FATE VINCENT WINSLOW”
After reading his letter, I posted Instagram stories – screenshots, details, his exact words. I explained who he was, what had happened to him, what he needed. Within minutes, three friends sent enough to cover both the boots and the jeans. My phone buzzed with DMs. There was something electric about it. People wanted to help – they just hadn’t known where to direct that energy. Once there was a face, a name, a concrete need, the response was immediate, generous, urgent. It made me realize how much untapped willingness there was, how many people were sitting in that same discomfort I’d felt, wanting to do something real but unsure how to bridge the gap between awareness and action.
In July, Fate told me a non-profit called the Promise of Justice Initiative was fighting for everyone imprisoned by a “Jim Crow jury.” The state had never kept a record, so PJI was trying to locate everyone with a non-unanimous verdict. He emailed me 15 names to send to them.
Fifteen men, each one carrying their own version of his story. Fifteen lives stolen by a system that had admitted, at least in theory, that it was wrong. I sent $50 and a letter to each of them. Most replied back and still correspond with me periodically, but in addition to Fate, I became especially close with Quierza Lewis, Aljerwon Moran, and Joe Litton Bailey.
Quierza got life without parole (LWOP) for a small amount of crack cocaine found in his girlfriend’s purse. Joe got LWOP for breaking a car window. Aljerwon got LWOP for fatally shooting an armed intruder who broke into his girlfriend’s apartment, even though he’d used a legally owned gun, in a state that proudly touted its “stand your ground” law.
By then, COVID prevention had become the norm in the outside world – masks, social distancing, hand sanitizer stations – but inside Angola, there was nothing. No PPE. No protections. Just overcrowded dorms and a virus moving silently through them. Every few days, with growing terror, one of them would let me know someone else in their dorm had caught it.
Aljerwon wrote an article and got it published in the SF Bay View National Black Newspaper: “Angola prisoners, fearing COVID-19, seek aid and release.”
Quierza, always thinking, always strategizing, asked me what I thought about his idea for a non-violent labor strike, to demand basic protections. That email alone was enough to get him thrown into the “dungeon.” Solitary confinement.
They took his inhaler. Even though he had severe asthma, and was legally supposed to have it at all times. They stripped him down to the bare minimum – no change of clothes, a sweltering cell in the thick, unmoving heat of August in Louisiana. They scattered his legal papers like they were trash and told him he was under investigation for a “terroristic threat.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about him in that cell – the heat pressing in, the air heavy, his chest tightening without the inhaler he needed to breathe.
Before COVID, I’d worked as a music publicist. I knew how to build attention from nothing – how to make people look, how to rally them to care. It was a skillset I’d once used to promote new artists, albums and tours, deploying the much-maligned but undeniably effective follow/unfollow strategy on Instagram, and pitching relentlessly to anyone who might listen.
Now I used those same tactics for Quierza.
I made an Instagram page: @freequierzalewis. I followed thousands of accounts – Louisiana locals, activists, influencers, anyone even loosely connected. Every day, I’d do 10–20 minutes of steady, methodical interaction with them. The page hit 1,000 followers in about a month. I joined Facebook groups – Black Lives Matter groups, prison reform groups, local Louisiana groups – and posted constantly. I emailed journalists, podcasters, organizations, mutual aid groups, anyone who might amplify his story.
People responded.
Not all at once, not overwhelmingly, but enough. Enough to create pressure and visibility. Quierza’s sister was interviewed on a nationally syndicated podcast, By Any Means Necessary. The Party for Socialism & Liberation’s official newspaper, Liberation News, published an article titled “‘It’s a Death Trap:’ Angola Inmate Put in Isolation For Organizing Against COVID-19.” NOLA Workers Voice, a print newspaper distributed throughout Southeast Louisiana, published an article titled “Free Quierza Lewis! Angola Inmate Targeted for Organizing to Contain COVID-19.” My petition got over 7,500 signatures.
When I started a GoFundMe to help his family hire a promising new lawyer, the response followed a similar pattern to that first post about Fate. People showed up. Not just with sympathy, but with money, likes, reposts and comments, raising over $2k in less than 24 hours.
That’s why what happened next felt so crushing.
Prison officials added new charges against Quierza, claiming the GoFundMe somehow constituted “bribery and solicitation.” It was illogical, baseless, and devastating. He hadn’t asked me to do it. The money wasn’t even going to him; it was going to his family, for legal representation.
My attempt to help had made his situation worse. The guilt was overwhelming, a constant, gnawing presence. I couldn’t think about anything else. I took down the GoFundMe immediately, called the prison every day, and demanded explanations that never came. I barely slept. I posted relentlessly, channeling that panic into action, urging people to call, to demand the charges be dropped.
And somehow, incredibly, it worked.
They dropped the bribery and solicitation charges, and for emailing me about his idea to organize a strike, he was sentenced to 30 days in solitary – time served. He was to be released the next day.
It took nearly a month.
When we asked why, the answer was almost absurd in its simplicity: there weren’t enough beds.
It was so casual, so bureaucratically indifferent, like they were talking about a hotel overbooking instead of human beings being held in cages past the point even the system itself had deemed acceptable.
This shocking response led Eli Cahan – a journalist I’d reached out to, half hoping, half expecting nothing – to start digging. Quierza connected me with others who’d remained in solitary for weeks, sometimes months, past their official release dates. I collected names, dates, fragments of timelines, details scribbled down and passed along however they could. I organized and forwarded everything to Eli. It felt like we were building a case out of whispers.
After the charges were dropped, I put the GoFundMe back up and raised $3,000 for Quierza’s new lawyer. It wasn’t a massive amount in the grand scheme of legal costs, but it was just enough to cover the balance that his family still owed.
In December, The Innocence Project helped Fate come home after serving 12 years of his life sentence. Twelve years for a $20 bag of weed. Twelve years of birthdays, holidays, ordinary days that he would never get back.
He called me the day after he got out. I remember exactly where I was when my phone rang, how my heart jumped. His voice sounded different – lighter, almost disbelieving, like he hadn’t fully adjusted to the fact that he was speaking to me from the outside. We kept talking over each other, laughing, both of us a little overwhelmed. He sounded buoyant in a way that made my throat tighten. I had to keep swallowing, steadying my voice, because I didn’t want to cry and make it about my emotions when this was his moment. But it was hard not to. I kept telling him how happy I was for him, over and over, like saying it enough times might somehow match the magnitude of what had just happened.
And then he started building a life. Not slowly, not tentatively, but with an urgency that made perfect sense once you thought about everything that had been taken from him. He found a good job. Rented a house in Shreveport. Started dating a beautiful woman named Tammy Sheree. Adopted a puppy. Each update felt like a small miracle, a privilege to watch someone make up for lost time in real time. It was joyful in a way that felt electric.
In February, Aljerwon put me in touch with Fred, another one stuck in the dungeon well past his release date. He and fourteen others were organizing a hunger strike to demand their release. But a hunger strike only works if people on the outside know about it. Otherwise, he told me, it’s just suffering in silence. They needed people to make noise.
On February 17th, I announced the strike on my @angola_watchdog Twitter page, which had become a running log of everything I was learning about Angola’s human rights violations. I organized another call-in campaign – drafting scripts, posting phone numbers, asking people to take five minutes out of their day to demand their release. I sent in news tips to every local and state media outlet I could find, and mass-emailed a variation of the same plea: this is happening, please pay attention.
And people did.
Within weeks, the story was picked up by Truthout.org, then the local news, then Democracy Now. Each time something was published or aired, I felt a jolt of adrenaline, like maybe this would be the thing that tipped it, that forced someone, somewhere, to act.
Fred was quoted in Truthout: “I really love and appreciate the call-in campaign, because it lets Angola know we’re not standing alone… All [prison officials] really respect is outside support and pressure.”
A few days after the story aired on Democracy Now, all the hunger strikers were released.
It felt almost surreal – how quickly things could shift once enough attention was applied. Like pressure building behind a dam, and then suddenly, a crack.
Then in March, about four and a half months after Fate came home, I got the news.
He and Tammy Sheree had been killed during an armed robbery while sitting in their parked car.
There are moments where your brain just refuses to process what you’re reading. Where you reread the sentence over and over, waiting for it to rearrange itself into something else. This was one of those moments. It didn’t make sense on any level. Not after everything. Not after he’d made it out.
The unfairness of it was almost disorienting in its scale. It wasn’t just grief – it was this layered, tangled thing that I couldn’t quite sort through. Yes, his life was taken by the person who shot him. But it had also been taken, piece by piece, by the state of Louisiana long before that. Twelve years stolen. Twelve years he never got to live. And then, just as he was rebuilding – just as things were beginning to feel full and hopeful and expansive – it was all cut short.
Everything he’d done in those four and a half months had felt so alive. So full of momentum. And then, suddenly, it just stopped.
It knocked the wind out of me. I was afraid, in a very real way, that I wouldn’t ever feel quite the same again – that something fundamental had shifted, deadened.
I started a GoFundMe for his daughter, Faith, and raised $2,000. It felt small in the face of everything that had been lost, but it was the only tangible thing I could do in a moment that otherwise felt completely out of control.
In July, word of the hunger strike at Angola had traveled. A group of more than 20 men at David Wade Correctional – trapped in the same hell of indefinite solitary confinement – organized their own hunger strike. One of their wives reached out to me, her message carrying that same mix of urgency and hope I’d come to recognize. By then, I knew what to do.
I coordinated articles in The Lens, The Advocate and Liberation News, and pushed the story wherever I could. It felt almost procedural at that point – like muscle memory – but the stakes never felt routine. And again, just a few weeks after the articles were published, and a dozen people had gathered to protest at the State Capitol, the strikers were released.
By December, the information my friends at Angola had been sending me – those scattered pieces we’d been gathering for months – finally came together. Eli’s article, titled “Louisiana Policy Intended to Reform Solitary Confinement Still Leaves People in Indefinite Lockdown,” ran in The Intercept. His investigation confirmed it: Louisiana prisons were keeping people in solitary indefinitely, by exploiting a loophole in a policy that had – ironically – been meant to reform it. The irony felt almost too on-the-nose to be real. Seeing it all laid out, documented, undeniable – it felt like a kind of validation, but also a reminder of how much had to happen just to get to that point. How much evidence, how many voices, how much persistence it took to make something visible that should have never been hidden in the first place.
In March 2021, Aljerwon was re-sentenced to 40 years. I did the math automatically, figuring out when he’d be eligible for parole. September 3rd, 2032. His 45th birthday. Getting out of a life sentence still felt bittersweet when hope was pushed so far into the future, it was hard to fully grasp.
In June 2021, Joe Litton Bailey went up for parole. For months, I’d been back in the now-familiar rhythm of outreach and organizing, raising $4,000 through my @freejoebailey page to hire a lawyer for his parole hearing. He was released on parole and went home to Shreveport, immediately married his longtime girlfriend, and started working as a cook. He’s promised me a Cajun feast when I finally make it down to visit.
The lawyer Quierza’s family found was able to get him released on May 24th, 2022. After 17 years, he went home to Minden. Seventeen years.
He was welcomed back with a neighborhood block party – giant blown-up pictures of his smiling face, live music, a twerking contest, people spilling out into the street, joy that was communal, shared. Not just his freedom, but everyone’s relief, everyone’s celebration. Within a few months, his girlfriend was pregnant. He found a good job in construction. His life started expanding outward again, quickly, instinctively.
Now he has a three-year-old son. And every time I see a picture of him – this tiny, bright new life – it feels like the clearest possible reminder of what was almost lost.
I think about how easily all of this could have remained invisible to me. And about how much has changed simply because people chose to act – sending $20, making a phone call, sharing a post, refusing to look away. None of it is enough to give back what was stolen – years, lives, futures – but it has been enough, at times, to interrupt the outcome. To create cracks where there weren’t any before. Now I understand how much can hinge on whether we choose to act.
The 2026 Louisiana legislative session ended on June 1st. There were two bills that could have provided long-awaited relief for the roughly one thousand people still illegally imprisoned by Jim Crow juries. The Promise of Justice Initiative worked hard to support them, and I spent months posting daily on @endjimcrowlouisiana – which has grown to nearly 5,500 followers – rallying people to contact their reps. Unfortunately, yet again, the State of Louisiana failed to take action to right this historical wrong.
If this experience has taught me anything, it’s that they’ll only act when we, the people, overwhelmingly demand it.
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