Six years prior to the American Civil War, the United States Supreme Court in a ruling, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) 60 U.S. 393, noted, “They [Black race] had for more than a century before [creation of Constitution] been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
The American Civil War did not put the death nail into this white cultural sentiment. The whites in the South, with the acquiescence of Northerner politicians allowed the re-enslavement of Blacks through the Black Codes, racially neutral laws enforced discriminately against Blacks. The 21st century example of this sentiment is the enforcement of juvenile marijuana laws in the liberal State of Colorado, NPR, June 29, 2016, “As adults legally smoke pot in Colorado, more minority kids are arrested for it.”
The article noted, “A Colorado Health Department survey found there wasn’t a huge racial difference in who smokes pot. But the marijuana arrest rate for white 10- to 17-year-olds fell by nearly 10 percent from 2012 to 2014, while arrest rates for Latino and black youths respectively rose more than 20 percent and more than 50 percent.”
Convict leasing was the vehicle Southern whites used to rebuild itself through free labor. This time the labor would not be free slave labor, but forced prison labor, predominantly from Blacks through nonviolent technical violations, such as loitering or vagrancy. To pull this off, an entire race would have to be associated with crime, as crime was a prevailing sentiment for slave labor, U.S. Congress, March 6, 1820, Missouri Compromise, “Slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, shall be forever prohibited in all that part of the territory ceded by France, under the name of Louisiana.”
Prior to the American Civil War, multiple free U.S. states that did not permit slavery within their borders had slavery exception clauses related to crime. Capitalism’s voracious appetite for cheap labor, be it human or mechanical, knows no bounds. Where mechanized labor is not feasible, cheap human labor will win the day. In the 21st century, the immigrant has replaced the Black race in fulfilling the role of cheap human labor demands.
The year 1915 saw the theatrical release of D.W. Griffin’s “The Birth of a Nation,” an epic fictional tale of male Black criminality and violence towards white women. Her white male counterpart, rescuing the fragility of her whiteness, gave a resurgent birth to white allegiance and membership into the Ku Klux Klan. A phenomenon that would lead Malcolm X to declare decades later, “Jim Crow begins south of the Canadian border.” The revered Rosa Parks in her memoir expressed depression, from her disillusionment of the Jim Crowism of the north, when she moved to Detroit, Michigan. My Dad, who was born in 1937, and grew up in the non-slave State of California told many of stories of segregated public swimming pools. “The Great White Way,” the City of New York’s theatrical district, Broadway, did not permit Blacks to enter through the front door.
From 1619, when the first African slaves came on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, through 2000, nearly 400 years of the cultural degradation of the Black race has taken place in the United States of America. This cultural degradation of Blacks, the American Descendants Of Slavery (ADOS), did not dissolve itself with the coming of the 21st century.
At some point during the last decade, due to my disillusionment, I had retired from jailhouse lawyering. I had found this disillusionment best expressed in the early part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech on the National Mall in 1963, “America has given its Colored people a bad check, and it has come back insufficient funds.” This was my sentiment in reading all these law books that stated I had legal rights, but were never legally recognized in practice.
On the morning of January 1, 2025, after serving 28 years in prison on a wobbler conviction, and California’s Three Strikes law, I woke up knowing I had an elderly parole board hearing in June of 2026. Unbeknownst to me, on March 14th 2025, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) had created a legal document that stated I was a nonviolent indeterminately-sentenced offender, whose Nonviolent Parole Eligible Date (NEPD) is February 23, 2001. Also unbeknownst to me, on March 15th 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom created a legal document to state he was going to deny sending me to the parole board as a nonviolent offender.
I didn’t become aware of these documents, until April of 2025. At that time, I was informed I would be going to the parole board on September 4th 2025. I wasn’t troubled by these March legal documents, until later in the month of April, when I was unjustly awarded 10-years’ worth of work group credits in a 10-month period. In other words, in June of 2024, my Minimum Eligible Release Date (MERD) was May 1, 2028, but in April of 2025, my MERD was changed to May 18, 2025. This 1,000-days+ of manipulated work group credits had alerted me, there was more to these March 2025, legal documents that I knew about.
Suddenly, I wanted to know why the CDCR created fraudulent documents for my benefit? This curiosity had reawakened my dormant jailhouse lawyering skills. In the process, I would learn about a 2016, California voter initiative, Proposition 57. A near supermajority of Californians voted for the initiative to change the California constitution to guarantee nonviolent prisoners a constitutional right to a parole hearing, once they have completed their nonviolent sentence, Cal. Const. Art. I, sec 32(a). This provided an explanation as to why CDCR’s March 14, 2025, legal document stated my Nonviolent Parole Eligible Date (NEPD) was February 23, 2001, a quarter of a century ago.
Further jailhouse lawyering would discover a CDCR regulation that stated, beginning on January 1, 2019, all indeterminately-sentenced nonviolent offenders shall have a parole board hearing no later than December 31, 2021 (https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/bph/2021/08/25/introduction-definition-and-history-of-nonviolent-pareole-review/.) Wow! Why were they just now notifying me of this in 2025?
Now, I better understood why the CDCR fraudulently awarded me 1,000-days+ of work group credits, it was to change my MERD from May 1, 2028, to May 18, 2025. It was to send me to the parole board in September of 2025 under MERD. Under the manipulated MERD, the parole board hearing would be timely; however, under NEPD, the parole board hearing would have been 1,200-days+ past the deadline to take me to the board.
In my capacity as a jailhouse lawyer, I filed an administrative appeal demanding an end to this fraud, by demanding a reversal of Governor Newsom’s fraudulent March 15, 2025, denial to send me to the parole board as nonviolent. I further stated, if the Parole Board does not reverse itself on the nonviolent parole board denial, I would be boycotting that parole board hearing on September 4, 2025. CDCR’s administrative response never addressed the merits of my allegation, instead, they chose to state this was outside the jurisdiction of the CDCR.
I boycotted the parole board hearing on September 4, 2025. Then, my parole board appointed staff-attorney against my wishes, chastised the parole board for failing to provide me with the Comprehensive Risk Assessment (CRA), within the 60-day time limit prior to the hearing. As a result, the hearing was postponed with a new scam, take me to the parole board under the Elderly Parole grant. However, I wouldn’t actually become eligible for the Elderly Parole grant until December 13, 2025, when I would turn 60-years-old.
On September 21, 2025, I kicked off a two-week hunger strike, “Hunger Striking for True Freedom,” by artivist Min. King X Pyeface; while the date was inspired by the September 21, 1971, hunger strike at the Kansas State Prison Farm, Lansing, Kansas.
On December 30, 2025, the parole board tried to conduct another parole board hearing. After 3-hours, the hearing was postponed until April 15, 2026. The parole board needed their attorneys to look over my legal claim, that I am a nonviolent offender whose nonviolent parole eligibility date is February 23, 2001. Because that is my parole eligibility date, the Nonviolent Parole grant is the controlling jurisdiction in which to conduct my initial parole hearing.
I expect this fight to be recognized as nonviolent at the parole board hearing to be unlikely. This irrational resistance to being recognized in front of the parole board as nonviolent is reminiscent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recognition in Dred Scott, of the centuries long recognition, “Blacks had no rights to which the white man was bound to respect.”
For half of a millennium, white culture has portrayed the Black male as criminal and violent. To go before a parole board tribunal, whose duty is to determine if I am too violent to be released back into society, and to be recognized as nonviolent is huge. Especially in light of the 2023, Stanford University parole board study that found being Black was an external determinant in parole denials (Project Recon: A Computational Framework for and Analysis of the California Parole Hearing System, a 2023 PhD-thesis by Jenny Hong at Stanford University, Stanford NLP.)
To understand the parole system’s racial sickness, at the December 30th hearing, right after determining I had zero physical disabilities, the parole board slandered me, by stating I was classified as a prisoner who has mental health issues. I have never been a participant in the mental health program, and no such classification exists anywhere in my prison files.
The following is from “‘Up to No Good’: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Fear of Black Men in US Society,” from the book Historicizing Fear: “For example, early theories on black masculinity (fueled by what is now known as racist and flawed science) described black men as intellectually and morally inferior to white men. Black men were assumed to be uneducable yet physically superior or hyper-masculine, making them dangerous and needing to be controlled by white patriarchs. The overemphasis on the physicality of the black body and concomitant under-emphasis on intellectual capacities seems to serve the corporate interests of a white, capitalist class reliant on maintaining systems of worker exploitation (such as slavery, sharecropping, low-wage employment, and so forth).”
The parole board finds me to be an unacceptable parole candidate, because at the age of 60, I have zero physical nor mental impairments; and who is demanding of the parole board to be recognized as what the California Constitution has legally recognized me to be, a nonviolent offender. Half a millennium since Jamestown, Virginia, and the heartbeat of racism in progressive spaces beat as strong as ever.
Why can’t the parole board system, these whites created, see my Blackness as being nonviolent? — Donald “C-Note” Hooker
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