JANUARY 8, 2025 RALLY TO SHUT DOWN REMOTE RACIST VIRGINIA PRISONS! by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

There is a rally to shut down Virginia’s Red Onion and Wallens Ridge State Prisons set to take place in downtown Richmond, Virginia at the Bell Tower in Capitol Square on Jan 8, 2025 from 2-3pm.

This rally comes in response to racism and abuse that have plagued these two expensive and unneeded Virgina supermax prisons since they opened in 1998 and 1999 respectively in the remote mountains in the southwestern corner of the state.

Leading Virginia officials lied to the public denying that numerous Black prisoners set themselves on fire at Red Onion during latter 2024 in desperate efforts to get out of those conditions. After widespread media exposure of the abuses and state legislators confirming the self-immolations, the same prison administrators lied further claiming there was nothing to protest about conditions at the prisons and the prisoners were just being manipulative.

However, two state legislators who visited the prison found conditions there were “inhumane ” (Holly Seibold) and that racist abuses prevailed (Michael Jones). However, nothing is being done to end these conditions and the wasteful operations of these expensive rural prisons.

Worse still, after the visit of Virginia Delegate Michael Jones to Red Onion on December 30, 2024, during which he spoke with Ekong Eshiet, one of the men who set himself on fire, Red Onion officials immediately retaliated against Ekong by spreading false rumors among other prisoners that Ekong is a snitch and gave his family’s personal addresses to prisoners in efforts to incite violence against Ekong and his family. Ekong is also being held incommunicado, having his phone and secured email access cut by Red Onion officials.

Not only is this admitted racist abuse the known and intentional product of the ongoing concentration of a population of almost totally Black prisoners to these out-of-the-way prisons which employ near totally rural white staff, but these disenfranchised Blacks are concentrated in these prisons to shift resources, tax benefits and political apportionment away from their Black home districts and to rural white regions that aren’t legally entitled to them, because of their lack of a Black population. According to Chadwick Dotson, the prison system’s director, and the circle of white HQ administrators around him who like him come from these remote white-populated areas, these remote white communities are preferred as sites for high security prisons and the concentration of Blacks in them, whom he depicts as specially “dangerous,” because Black staff can’t be trusted to run high security prisons. This is a return to the days of Jim Crow segregation, and the overthrow of Southern Reconstruction, when Blacks were said to be too corrupt and mentally inferior to be trusted with government jobs across the South, including as cops and guards.

These prisons must be shut down and the present administration of Chadwick Dotson and A. David Robinson fired!

Again the rally will occur from 2-3pm at the Bell Tower in Richmond’s Capitol Square and followed by coffee and community from 3:30-4:30pm in St Paul’s Episcopal Church at 413 E. Grace St, next to Capitol Square.

Those interested in joining or supporting this rally text or call Defenders at 804-644-5834 or email: DefendersFJE@hotmail.com

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!