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On Thursday, June 2nd, Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt died at the age of 63 in a village in Tanzania. In 1970 Pratt was arrested and later convicted of murdering a Los Angeles woman. Pratt and his many supporters maintained he was innocent and the victim of FBI efforts to undermine the Black Panthers. At the time Pratt, a war veteran in his early 20?s, was a leader in the Black Panther party while it was the target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO. He spent 27 years in prison, including 8 in solitary confinement, all the while fighting to be exonerated. KPCC’s Frank Stoltz reports that a break in the case came years after Pratt’s conviction and NBC news learned that the prosecution’s main witness against Pratt was a former Black Panther turned FBI informant. This information had not been disclosed to the jury. Pratt’s murder conviction was overturned by an Orange County judge in 1997. He later sued for false imprisonment and received a settlement of 4.5 million dollars. Geronimo Pratt remained politically active throughout his life and today we share a short excerpt of a 1981 interview done by Sylvester Rivers with Pratt while in San Quentin prison.

Special thanks to the Pacifica Radio Archives for preserving this sound and making it available to us.