Just as I sat down to write this review of former death row inmate Gary Tyler’s memoir, I noticed that its publication date is the fifty-first anniversary of the day that upended his life: October 7, 1974. This undoubtedly deliberate timing, like the book itself, serves to help close the circle around Tyler’s remarkable—at times, almost unbelievable—life journey.
That was the day Tyler, then a sixteen-year-old Black youth, was arrested for the shooting death of a thirteen-year-old white boy at their high school in Destrehan, Louisiana, about twenty-five miles from New Orleans. He was taken into custody and beaten so severely that he was left with permanent physical scars, as well as psychological ones. Police and prosecutors ignored and withheld evidence of his innocence, and suborned perjury by threatening witnesses. One witness, Natalie Blanks, was told she would be charged as an accessory to murder and miss out on her baby’s life if she didn’t falsely testify that she saw Tyler fire a gun from inside a bus.
Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance, and Hope in Angola Prison is, for much of its first half especially, an intensely bleak book. Written with help from activist and author Ellen Bravo, it tells how Tyler found himself up against a fire hose of injustice. The police who set him up were racist and sadistic. (“Eat your blood,” yelled one of the cops beating him. “Eat it, eat it.”) The defense attorney that Tyler’s parents hired to represent him was poorly prepared and made critical mistakes, including his failure to present exculpatory evidence. The all-white jury rendered its pre-ordained verdict: guilty. A week later, the judge announced his sentence: “You are to have a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause your death, pass through your body and be applied and continued until you are dead.”
Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance, and Hope in Angola Prison
By Gary Tyler with Ellen Bravo
One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, 288 pages
Publication date: October 7, 2025
Tyler was sent to Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, the state’s most notorious prison, to await this fate. Three days after he arrived, he was startled awake by “a horrifying scream” as an inmate was doused with gasoline and set on fire by another inmate. Tyler was seventeen years old. He was scared. But some of his fellow prisoners and even an occasional guard looked out for him.
Given the overwhelming evidence of his innocence, Tyler believed it was only a matter of time before the justice system realized its error and set him free. But as the days turned into years and years turned into decades, that is not what happened. As his appeals played out, the courts found that though mistakes were made in the criminal proceedings, there was no need to unmake them. Witnesses who provided the basis for Tyler’s conviction recanted, but the justice system didn’t consider this relevant. While court rulings removed the death penalty as an option in his case, the mandate that Tyler spend the rest of his life in prison remained.
The rankness of this injustice ate at his gut. At one point in the book, Tyler muses about two other Louisiana cases, both in the 1980s, in which white teenagers evaded justice for killing Black youths. In one case, the judge felt that a white seventeen-year-old who went home to get a gun after a dispute and who returned to shoot his Black victim in the back of his head should get community service and no jail time. The judge felt he was too young, calling the crime “an act of desperation from the undeveloped mind of a young man.”
Writes Tyler, “Here I was fighting to get out of prison for something I hadn’t done while these blatant crimes were being committed and the police and courts were whitewashing them. My cries were falling on deaf ears. Black lives didn’t matter at all. Those responsible for sending me to death row had no concerns about me being too young. . . .”
Over the decades, Gary Tyler’s case became a cause célèbre, embraced by prominent people including Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was himself falsely convicted of murder in 1967. “Free Gary Tyler” committees were formed and rallies were held throughout the nation. In 1976, Rosa Parks spoke at an event in support of Tyler. Gil Scott-Heron recorded a song about him. At his former high school, where the crime he had nothing to do with occurred, a multi-racial group of students formed the “Gary Tyler Freedom Fighters.” His case attracted attention from multiple media outlets, and in 1994, Amnesty International issued a blistering report calling for Tyler to get a new trial.
But the truly astonishing thing about Tyler’s story is that he found a way to avoid being corroded by the bitterness he had every reason to feel. He used his time in prison to educate himself, reading extensively and earning a GED. He drew strength from his supporters and emerged as a force for good within his prison environment, respected by fellow prisoners and prison staff alike.
One Signal Publishers/Atria Books
Tyler came to lead the prison drama club to acclaim in a series of stage productions. The club tackled serious prison issues, including the death penalty and inmate hopelessness and despair. As a result of his theatrical work, Tyler met the actors Susan Sarandon, George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, and Don Cheadle, among others. A documentary film, Cast the First Stone, was made in 2013 about one of Tyler’s prison stage productions, The Life of Jesus Christ.
Following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Tyler worked on emergency response crews staffed by prisoners. He became a lead volunteer in the prison’s hospice program, providing solace to inmates in their dying days. Per the book’s title, he also took up quilting, learning to produce stunning, one-of-a-kind creations. The proceeds from the sale of quilts made by Tyler and other Angola prisoners went to support the hospice program.
Tyler didn’t just make the best of his time at Angola; he made a life out of it. In 2000, he even managed to become a dad while in prison. A “free” woman who began visiting the prison as part of a research project asked him to father her child, and they found “an opportunity” to make it happen. He’s kept his son, Damaryos, in his life as much as possible. He tells how during one prison visit the boy, then just six years old, came to the defense of an inmate hospice volunteer he saw being falsely accused of inappropriate conduct. Notes Tyler with pride, “He wanted to do what was right, because he understood the concept of an unfair accusation.” Like father, like son.
Despite all the setbacks, Tyler never lost hope or stopped believing that, sooner or later, the justice system would be moved to care about this obvious injustice. And, just as he predicted, it was only a matter of time before this occurred. Unfortunately, the amount of time it took was forty-one-and-a-half years.
In 2013, a sympathetic district attorney, Joel Chaisson, proposed a deal that allowed Tyler to plead guilty to manslaughter, which had a much shorter maximum penalty than what he’d already served. He also had to agree not to sue the state for this additional time. Though it was not an exoneration, Tyler walked out of prison a free man on April 29, 2016.
Tyler, now sixty-seven, has used the years following his release to reorient to the world he left behind—kids, he discovered, were eager to teach him how to use a cell phone and computer—and keep trying to improve the one he’s in. He has continued his advocacy against the death penalty as well as his involvement with both drama and quilting.
Dorian Hill
Gary Tyler
In 2024, Tyler received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Some of his quilts are on display in spaces including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art—or will be, at least, until someone decides they’re too “woke.”
Stitching Freedom is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the idea that people can endure great hardship without being hardened by it. As Tyler writes toward the end of his book, “I also want people to know that despite what an individual’s been through, they can come out of a dreadful situation whole and not be broken or bitter—if they can find community, engage in meaningful activities, and stay focused on the truth, on what is just and right.”
That may be his most important lesson, especially in our nation’s present moment. Under the second coming of Donald J. Trump, injustice is rampant, as the President and his supporters revel in their capacity to inflict pain, even upon the innocent. Immigrants are being scooped up from workplaces, courthouses, and schools, and whisked off to detention camps, for possible deportation to places they have never lived. (Angola prison is now being used to detain those caught up in the administration’s often-indiscrimate dragnet.) Federal workers are being fired for reporting accurate information or questioning the dismantling of their agencies. Facism is afoot.
This is a moment of unparalleled peril to the nation’s democratic institutions as well as to its aspirations of being a beacon of liberty. There will be many battles. Some will lead to victories, some to defeats. And there will be people like Gary Tyler, who will find reasons to fight these battles with courage, purpose, and even joy in their hearts.