Shortly after former Black Panther Eddie Conway was released from prison, his friend Paul Coates organized a celebration. It was May 2014. Writer Susie Day, who had met Conway two years earlier when she visited him at the Jessup Correctional Institute in Maryland, was overjoyed to travel to Baltimore, where the party was taking place.
Conway’s release had been a long time coming.
In fact, by the time he walked free, he had served forty-four years—from 1970 to 2014—for the murder of Baltimore police officer Donald Sager and for the wounding of officer Stanley Sierakowski, crimes he denies committing.
That alone would be a fascinating story, but The Brother You Choose: Paul Coates and Eddie Conway Talk About Life, Politics, and The Revolution, released this month, tells a different but equally compelling one, a tale that centers on the meaning of friendship, loyalty, and commitment in the context of a progressive political struggle.
In the 1960s, both Conway and Coates had been members of the Black Panther Party. At that time, the two barely knew each other. As Coates tells it, after Conway’s arrest, he began to pay close attention to the unfolding legal machinations surrounding the case, and his fury escalated. That Conway’s conviction rested on the testimony of a known jailhouse snitch was especially enraging, and Coates vowed to visit Conway as often as possible throughout his incarceration; he often brought his children, including son Ta-Nehisi, with him.
It was a promise he kept.
“The day after the welcome home party, I sat down with Paul and Eddie and was blown away by how honestly and easily they talked to each other,” Day tells The Progressive. “They could discuss serious stuff, but there was also a great deal of laughter. They were phenomenal together, two very different men, two great conversationalists united by a desire to shape a new and better world.”
Day subsequently recorded hundreds of hours of conversations between the duo, and eventually edited those talks to create The Brother You Choose.
“The more I talked to Paul and Eddie, the more I saw the ways individual human interactions shape history,” Day explains. “I transcribed all of the interviews myself, and as I tried to condense their lives, I attempted to show the importance of individual relationships to history and to radical movements. I was amazed by their experiences, their courage. Going over the tapes again and again was kind of like going into a darkroom in the old days. You’d put the film into some chemicals and shapes and forms—things you did not see when you were taking the picture—would emerge. That’s what it was like hearing and rehearing the tapes.”
As the conversations unfolded, Day saw her task as documenting the men’s more-than-half-century of personal and political history. Among the topics covered: each man’s involvement in the Black Panther Party; fatherhood; Paul’s creation of Black Classic Press in 1978 to ensure that nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century books, pamphlets, and speeches written by Black liberation activists and theorists remain available to contemporary readers; and Eddie’s work inside prison as a mentor, advocate, and teacher.
But The Brother You Choose is not just a thoughtfully constructed political back-and-forth between like-minded allies. In fact, the men talk about pretty much everything, sharing stories about their upbringing, dishing about their romantic foibles, bragging about personal triumphs, and admitting to errors in judgment. A core topic is the men’s military service which, perhaps surprisingly, is credited with kick-starting their political awareness.
“We’re moving into a critical period of history, not just for poor and oppressed people, Black people, but for humanity itself. You need to engage. Do whatever little bit you can, but do something.”
“The army was the beginning of my consciousness,” Coates says. “I didn’t take the military to heart; I took commitment to heart. One of the main things I got back then—and it was reinforced when I got into the Black Panther Party—was a sense of mission . . . When you say you’re going to show up, you do it.”
Conway’s lessons involved something more tangible: Hands-on training to become a medic. In his retrospective account, he calls himself “a Black G.I. Joe working in emergency rooms,” and says that this position gave him, for the first time in his life, a chance to care for others. “I found happiness in that,” he recalls. “Later, I was doing that in the Panthers and teaching Panthers how to take care of injuries.”
Conway’s arrest and conviction derailed his medical career, but his unwavering compassion for those in need and his ironclad belief that progressive change is possible—even after decades in prison and even after the election of Donald Trump—has kept pessimism at bay. “As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “healing the neighborhood,” regardless of the era, is revolutionary. “If you can help make our neighborhoods whole, and make our children safe, that’s revolutionary in the middle of a collapsing, drug-induced, AIDS-infected society.”
“Eddie cares so much about his community,” Day tells me as we discuss the book. “Now that he’s out of jail, he’s working his guts out in the public housing projects of Baltimore, near where he and his wife live. He’s also working hard as an executive producer at The Real News Network. But I also love and respect Paul enormously. I love his stories and am sorry that The Brother You Choose only gives the Reader’s Digest version of him and his encyclopedic knowledge of Black press and publications.”
Throughout the six years Day recorded the pair’s conversations and debates, she was continually awed by the strength of their friendship. “Paul and Eddie have such a vibrant history. The significant thing for me is that their commitment to each other and to Black liberation endured even when they were not able to be side-by-side. Knowing that that other was present on the planet was incredibly stabilizing for each of them. It allowed Eddie to feel supported and it allowed Paul to develop his intellect and become an expert on Black writing and Black literature.”
That foundation continues to give Coates and Conway—both of whom are now seventy-four—the fortitude to keep fighting for social and racial justice. As Conway concludes, “We’re moving into a critical period of history, not just for poor and oppressed people, Black people, but for humanity itself. You need to engage. Do whatever little bit you can, but do something.”
The Brother You Choose: Paul Coates and Eddie Conway Talk About Life, Politics, and The Revolution, by Susie Day with an afterword by Ta-Nehisi Coates, will be released September 29.