Geronimo Pratt

Elmer Gerard Pratt was born on the thirteenth of September 1947 at Morgan City, Louisiana, the youngest of seven children of John Pratt — a Black sharecropper and World War One veteran — and Eunice Petty Pratt, a domestic worker. The Pratt family was a long-established Morgan City household and his maternal grandfather had been one of the founders of the Morgan City NAACP branch in 1916. He was educated at the segregated Morgan City public schools through high school. He enlisted in the United States Army Special Forces at eighteen in 1966 and served two tours of duty in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968. He was decorated with the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and the Vietnam Service Medal with two bronze service stars. He completed his Army service at the rank of staff sergeant.

He enrolled at UCLA on the GI Bill in late 1968 and was recruited to the Southern California Black Panther Party by Bunchy Carter (placed in this archive) at the November 1968 UCLA campus organising meeting. He was appointed Deputy Minister of Defense of the Southern California BPP the same month and — following Carter's killing at Campbell Hall on the eighteenth of January 1969 — became at twenty-one the senior officer of the Los Angeles chapter.

On the eighteenth of December 1968 — twenty days before he met Carter and one month before he had joined the Party — Caroline Olsen had been killed and her husband Kenneth wounded in a robbery on a Santa Monica tennis court. In December 1970 the Los Angeles Police Department charged Pratt with the killing. He was tried in 1972 and convicted on the testimony of FBI Counterintelligence Program informant Julius Butler, despite FBI wiretap records placing Pratt at an Oakland BPP meeting at the time of the killing — records the FBI had withheld from the trial.

He served twenty-seven years in the California correctional system — eight at San Quentin, six in solitary confinement at Folsom, the remainder at Tehachapi and at Mule Creek. He filed nine successive habeas-corpus petitions across the period. The ninth petition — submitted by his attorney Stuart Hanlon in 1996 — produced from Judge Everett Dickey of the Orange County Superior Court the May 1997 ruling that vacated his conviction on grounds that the prosecution had concealed the Julius Butler FBI informant status from the original 1972 jury. He was released on bail of twenty-five thousand dollars in June 1997 and the charges were formally dismissed in 1999.

He received a federal civil-rights settlement of four and a half million dollars in 2000 from the City of Los Angeles and the FBI. He moved permanently to Tanzania in 2001 to live in the village of Imbaseni near Arusha.

He died of cardiac complications at Imbaseni on the second of June 2011, at sixty-three.

He is honored here as the longest-held American political prisoner of his generation.