Biography
The Reverend Charles Koen was national chairman of the Black United Front of Cairo, Illinois, a hub of the long Black freedom struggle in that southern-Illinois town. His imprisonment stemmed from a September 1968 incident in which he and Brother Leon Dent were stopped over a defective brake light, arrested, and beaten by eight officers at the police station (Koen suffered head lacerations and broken bones in his hands); Koen was then charged with assault on a police officer and convicted. After his appeal was denied in 1971 he was sent to the St. Louis Workhouse to serve a six-month sentence, where he conducted a water fast in protest that left his weight down from 170 to 110 pounds before Judge David McMullan granted him parole. Documented in The Black Panther (September 25, 1971).