Biography
Ronald Ailsworth was one of the three organizers (with Steve Green and Harold Holmes) who established the National Committee to Combat Fascism — the New Orleans chapter of the Black Panther Party — in May 1970. He was among the New Orleans Panthers arrested and charged over the 1970 standoffs with police around the Desire housing project. (His name appears in some of The Black Panther's coverage rendered as "Donald Elsworth.")
He was acquitted with his codefendants on August 6, 1971, but remained subject to separate federal and New Haven matters, so the acquittal date does not mark his release and none is entered. Decades later he served an unrelated imprisonment at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola that ended on September 26, 2019, after approximately forty years, and he was interviewed after his release, in 2021.
