Supporters Rally Behind Political Prisoners Who Stopped White Supremacist Attack

An upcoming clemency hearing will determine the near-term fate of Christopher “Naeem” Trotter, a political prisoner who has been held captive for over 40 years as punishment for a spontaneous act of community self-defense inside prison walls.

On February 1, 1985, Trotter and another incarcerated man — John “Balagoon” Cole — led a rebellion within the prison now known as Pendleton Correctional Facility to protect a fellow prisoner, Lincoln “Lokmar” Love, who was being attacked with nightsticks by Indiana Department of Corrections prison guards. As Hammer and Hope recounts:

According to Trotter and Cole, they fought several prison guards in self-defense and to protect Love from further beatings. To avoid being attacked themselves, they took two guards and a prison counselor hostage and negotiated with the prison. The hostages were released unharmed. No one died. Trotter was sentenced to an additional 142 years and Cole to an additional 84 years.

Trotter and Cole are now known as the “Pendleton 2,” and people nationwide have rallied in their defense.

Another prison guard later testified that the guards who attacked Love were members of the Sons of Light, an offshoot organization of the Ku Klux Klan. The fact that they continued to bring their truncheons down on Love’s head after having already subdued him is an undisputed fact of the case.

For people incarcerated alongside Love, the memories of the attack cut deep. The blood spilled that day has never really been stanched according to Rodney “Big R” Jones, who witnessed the prison guards’ attack from the cell across from Love’s.

Just days before our interview, Jones had a pacemaker implanted. Nonetheless, he exerted himself to share his memory of the 1985 attack and uprising, even though actively recalling those events takes its toll. He is no longer in prison, but the effects of witnessing the guards’ brutality against his neighbor, which are traumatic, are knitted with memory.

“Every time I talk about my life on that day, it’s like I’m looking at it,” Jones told Truthout. He said he saw the guards, whom he calls “soldiers,” rush Love with their “sticks,” and he recounted seeing the blood gushing out of Love’s head where they’d split his skull.

“I had tears in my eyes,” he said. “I was yelling at them to ‘give me some of that’ just to get them off of him. They had his hands behind his back. ‘Why you keep beating that man like that with your sticks, even if he moves a little bit?’ He was like Rodney King moving a little bit, trying to get out of the way of all those hits.”

In the ensuing years he’s spoken on the phone with Trotter and Cole a couple of times, the men he credits with saving Love’s life. “We took their kin back down there to visit them. But, no, no way, I never went back inside,” he said.

On June 1, 2025, dozens of people came to Anderson, Indiana, in defense of Trotter and Cole. Those who answered the rallying call to uplift the sacrifices of the Pendleton 2 came from Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, California, Illinois, and beyond. The out-of-towners joined with Jones and dozens of Indianans at the government center in Anderson, the county seat of Madison County, to demonstrate that eyes beyond the state line are trained on local prosecutors, judges, and the clemency process as a whole, in advance of the parole board’s meeting on June 10 to consider Trotter’s clemency application.

National awareness has been roused in part by the 2023 release of They Stood Up, a documentary film that tells the mortifying story of what befell the Pendleton 2 after rescuing Love. There were months of routine assaults, months of being fully fettered (shackled by both hands and feet) and decades somehow surviving in solitary confinement. Too Black, one of the documentary’s co-directors and a member of the Pendleton 2 Defense Committee that formed in 2022, told the crowd, “We’re here because we want to save two human lives that the state is hell-bent on ending and exterminating in a quiet hole all by themselves because of what they inspire in us. Because what they inspire in us is heroism.”

When the guards attacked Trotter and Cole, they fought back, which led to the hostage situation, Too Black recounted. “But no one died,” he said. “Yet still they got 200 years for it.”

The defense committee is pulling out all the stops ahead of the June 10 hearing, including most urgently asking for signatories to a letter of support.

Another defense committee member told Truthout they’re looking to American Indian Movement (AIM) political prisoner Leonard Peltier’s recent release as a paradigm for their campaign, which like Peltier’s has to overcome entrenched institutional vindictiveness.

Just weeks ago, the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd thrust renewed questions about bystanders intervening to stop acts of state violence while they’re in process into the zeitgeist. In the film, Cole speaks about the anguish of the eyewitnesses who were not prepared to disrupt Derek Chauvin’s slow suffocation of Floyd, a heartache he didn’t have to suffer. Trotter declared himself in They Stood Up: “If I can be convicted for standing up and saving a person’s life, then convict me. But I know it was morally the right thing to do. And I will continue to fight, and I ask that you fight with me.”

Given these confluences so alive in the moment and the imminence of the clemency hearing, the defense committee decided it was finally time to bring the fight to ground zero.

“This is the county where this happened, and I think that’s the part we really need to stress,” Too Black told the rally. “We’ve done actions in the capital, we’ve shown the documentary across the world, but we’ve never really brought it here. But we’ve got to bring it here, because this is the place where they’ll be released.”

Tamie Dixon-Tatum, an Anderson city employee, told Truthout she would have gone to the rally even if she weren’t the director of the municipality’s Civil and Human Rights Department.

Another prison guard later testified that the guards who attacked Love were members of the Sons of Light, an offshoot organization of the Ku Klux Klan.

“These gentlemen have been in prison for over 40 something years, and you know, they were trying to stand up to protect another gentleman, and that gentleman was being harmed in such a way. And so they literally put themselves, their lives on the line, to help someone else,” she said.

“Everybody in this picture is human,” Dixon-Tatum said. Yet she’s concerned that there are bad actors working as guards and wardens who remain part of the picture. “Some of them were punished and removed from the prison system. Some of them are probably still there,” she said. “So, yeah, it’s scary.”

Michelle Smith, executive director of Missouri Justice Coalition, told Truthout she travelled from St. Louis to stand with the Pendleton 2 because the reality for Black men behind bars in Missouri is also very scary. Since 2023, her organization has been supporting the family of Othel Moore in the aftermath of his death. Moore was a Black man in a Missouri Department of Corrections prison who was assaulted by guards in a secure location where no fellow incarcerated people could possibly come to his aid.

“Othel was beaten severely with billy clubs, and then they restrained him, and they maced him in the face,” Smith said. “So he was subdued, he was shackled, and then they put a spit hood over his head, and he suffocated to death. And that is very similar to what happened with the Pendleton 2 case, or would have happened, if Cole and Trotter hadn’t stopped the guards. Because of that they saved Love’s life.”

Indiana is very similar to Missouri, Smith said, in terms of how anti-Black racism operates inside and outside of its prisons.

“Indiana’s a Klan state. In Missouri, it’s Proud Boys and Oath Keepers,” she said. “Plenty of times I’ve been on the phone with men on the inside and heard the guards calling them the N-word. Are we tired of these injustices? Of course we are. So even from two states away, we’re going to keep on fighting and advocating for these two men to come home,” she said.

Representatives from the Atlanta-based National Black Food & Justice Alliance told Truthout that they came to the rally for the Pendleton 2 because both the food system and the legal system are designed to uphold white supremacy. Their organization’s analysis is that police brutality, police violence, and the criminal legal system are all inherently violent in the same ways that the food system is, arguing that they are designed to kill Black people.

Underscoring that reality, Love never received any grace from the system that had dehumanized and brutalized him. He died from COVID in 2020, still captive, 1 of 143 people to succumb to the virus in Indiana prisons that year. Incarcerated Indianans died at a rate even higher than the coronavirus-skewed national average, researchers found.

Erica Caines, from the Baltimore chapter of Black Alliance for Peace, told Truthout she’d traveled to Anderson, Indiana, as part of her organization’s commitment to freeing political prisoners because “of our understanding that resistance breeds repression.” She likened the Pendleton 2 to journalist Mumia Abu Jamal, Black Panther Party member Jamil Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown), and AIM member Leonard Peltier — all longtime captives of the state whose liberation Black Alliance for Peace has struggled for.

The defense committee is pulling out all the stops ahead of the June 10 hearing, including most urgently asking for signatories to a letter of support.

“In any war, you go and get your people back,” Caines said. “You negotiate for your people.”

There’s a discipline involved in being part of a Black anti-imperialist, internationalist organization whose focus is to bring back the Black radical peace perspective, she explained.

“What’s embodied by Balagoon and Naeem is the self-determination, the self- defense aspects we call for,” Caines told Truthout. “What does it mean to forge your own way with your back against the wall, when you know you can almost touch freedom, but you will risk it all for your person?”

At the time of the rebellion, Trotter only had three months remaining of his already onerous four-year sentence.

“That’s the emphasis for our being out here,” Caines said. “We thought it important to show Anderson that these men have our support.” And, she added, “We can bring more people back if need be.”

Anderson city employee Dixon-Tatum sees a chance for the Indiana Department of Corrections to repair past wrongs.

“I want to say that Madison County is a place where hope still lives,” she said. “There were some bad officers, and people like to say ‘allegedly,’ but it’s actually been proven at this point. This is about doing right.”