Biography
Wesley Robert Wells was a Black California prisoner who became a national symbol of racist injustice after he was sentenced to death in 1947 for throwing a cuspidor — a metal spittoon — at a prison guard who had taunted him. No one was injured, but because Wells was already serving a life term as a "habitual criminal," assaulting a guard carried a mandatory death sentence. The Civil Rights Congress took up his case in 1948, with the radical attorney Charles Garry (later counsel to the Black Panther Party), winning a string of stays. In March 1954, two weeks before his scheduled execution, Governor Goodwin Knight commuted the death sentence to life. Wells spent almost his entire life behind bars before his release in 1974, and died about a year and a half later.
Longtime Black California prison activist and client of attorney Charles Garry, cited in The Black Panther Vol. 17 no.17 (1977) among the era's political prisoners. [Source: The Black Panther (Black Panther Party newspaper), v17 no.17; digitized at marxists.org — https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/index.htm]
On July 1, 1974, at age 65, Wells was released on parole from the California Medical Facility at Vacaville after 47 years of confinement in California prisons, under the care of the Delancey Street Foundation. In a three-part interview with The Black Panther — whose attorney friend Charles Garry called him the original Panther — he described being sent to the STRESS psychiatric unit after 44 years inside, the 15-month parole denial that followed a clean bill of health, and his vow to keep struggling for prisoner rights (The Black Panther, August 10, 1974).
