I tiptoed into that introductory call with Wali just after he’d been granted parole via compassionate release. A disarming heaviness lurks when you meet someone for the first time who you know is near death. Cancer had come for him, and won; yet, he still wanted to selflessly help me build something he would likely not be around to witness. He counseled my choices, critiqued the broader journalism landscape, and shared insights he had largely been unable to publish publicly while serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the San Quentin News for five years. I will be forever humbled and grateful to Marcus “Wali” Henderson for showing me the grace I likely would not have been capable of summoning were I in his shoes.
You see, I’d come for the San Quentin News as a whole, and Wali particularly, via my critique of the paper’s silence over San Quentin Prison’s slavery-laden history and the first warden’s orchestrated kidnapping of Black residents who were trafficked to the East Coast and sold into slavery on the auction blocks of New Orleans. I wrote about these shadowed historical facts in an article published on the Vanguard’s Witness platform, The Warden, His Slaver Business Partner, and the Kidnapped Inmates: Revisiting San Quentin Prison’s Racist Beginnings, and again for All Of Us Or None Newspaper, Dark Gardening: Deconstructing Independent Carceral Journalism Using Gwendolyn Brooks’ Poem ‘To Prisoners.’ I assailed Wali for ignoring this history during the tumult of the BLM, George Floyd, and Confederate statue reckonings moving through the country by implying he’d either sold out or was too censored to demand that the prison itself be torn down, owing to its own slavery-related history.
I never thought he’d opt to spend the precious time he had left on Earth talking to me, befriending me, and publicly aligning with me.
Wali agreed to speak to me after meeting Benjamin Frandsen on a Prison Journalism Project-sponsored Zoom call. He gave Ben his cell number and invited me to reach out. My intention was to apologize for my pieces, tell him I hoped he squeezed everything he could out of his final days, and interview him, but he refused to accept my apology.
“No sir,” he pushed back with his calm tenor. “You were right to interrogate our work, and I respect you for doing so; but I wasn’t in a position to write such a story. It never would’ve been approved,” he admitted. I took copious notes.
I pressed. “Did you ever try? Did you at least pitch it, so that the writer room at the Q could see you make the attempt, and observe the glass ceiling of autonomy in full bureaucratic action when they shut it down? Like, give your team an instructive teachable moment about the limits of the work?”
After a pause, he said, “No. I didn’t. I guess I should have. That would’ve hurt morale.” Candor. No cut. No dodging.
I pressed again. “You also presided over a paper that propagated colonial language like ‘inmate’ for four of your five years as the EIC, during a time when the Berkeley J-school profs from PJP were actually still on the masthead as advisors, which, to me, served as a blind-spot indictment upon all of you. How could you, as a Black man, condone that type of language framing when you know cats like George Jackson were snuffed out in that prison for pursuing the humanization of our plight? Why didn’t you endorse a lexiconic standard that enshrined ‘resident’ or ‘incarcerated people,’ instead of giving life to these base terms that are used by the carceral state intelligentsia to dehumanize us?”
He was quick this time. “I owned that, in print. I changed it on my watch. It came late, but I did it. Honestly, I think my health issues crowded out my broader perspective. I never endorsed ideas like ‘carceral state’ either; though, after reading your work, I think I should have.”
I was stunned by how congenial he was. Folks who know me too well will tell you I am brash, sharp-elbowed, and rough with the verbal body-checks, be you friend or foe alike. Wali was so smooth, patient, and laughing lightly in quiet confidence the whole time. I never saw him turn the table until it had already happened.
“What about you?” he asked. “Didn’t you hit Newsom for his position on servitude, but praise his administration for the programs he rolled out at VSP? We all have multiple masters to serve. What I envy is the freedom you have to write what you want—nobody censors you. There is a real power in that.”
We chopped it up weekly about politics, abolition, reform, recidivism, higher ed, state media, carceral journalism, censorship, and all the nonprofit orgs morphing in pursuit of grant dollars to occupy space where we live. He publicly supported our Guild as an advisor and graciously gave us a personalized video for our YouTube channel @VCJGWitness. For me, his endorsement meant more than some of the lettered alphas who stand with us, because he could have felt threatened by our existence—he didn’t. He embraced us.
In preparing this piece, I consulted my fellow writers Dominick J. Porter and Matthew Fletcher, who told me about a certain factoid I’d not been aware of. Now, when residents of San Quentin Prison phone out, the GTL operator prompt announcing the call refers to the caller as a “resident” of San Quentin. Wali’s belated move away from “inmate” and the implementation of the term “resident”—which I’d urged him to incorporate via multiple Letters to the Editor submissions over time—left a legacy that can be heard by everyone who now gets a call from there.
Our last chat involved Wali giving me props for both the profile of our work by Bob Sillick in the April edition of Editor and Publisher magazine, and his constructive feedback on my practitioner paper published in the Journal of Prison Education Research, deconstructing our Barz Behind Bars: Hope & Mic poetry workshop curriculum. He probed me about the forthcoming and long-overdue Rebirth of Sound recording studio training set to launch at Valley State Prison, being delivered by Grammy and Oscar-winning rapper-actor-activist Common’s Free To Dream organization.
Ironically, while I was sitting in the room with Marcel and Syrup from Rebirth being interviewed for the program, text messages were landing on my GTL thread from multiple people informing me Wali was gone. The pep in my step disappeared when I returned to my pod to read the news. I never got to call Wali and tell him about the interview. I spent an hour playing back his advisor bio screen-recorded video on my tablet, and several more later that night journaling about our relationship. I texted Vanguard’s publisher and told him Wali was gone and we needed to honor him.
It matters that our collective writer pool—be we here or there, working from within a state-controlled media center, or publishing on digital platforms beyond the fence line—organize to braid our respective lived experiences so that our media serves as brain food for our peers. Our factionalized and segregated carceral media communities are force-fielded from one another by artificial barriers we actively duck, swim around, and leap over in order to do this work. Wali’s alliance speaks to that collaborative ethos.
CSU Fresno Debate Team’s Jennifer Fletcher, one of our Guild writers housed at Central California Women’s Facility, who recently debated the CTF Toastmasters Club and was quoted in the March edition of CCWF Paper Trail, said, “We need to pollinate our stories everywhere and elevate others, just like Wali did.”
After recently transferring to Soledad, 2024 Guild fellow The Mundo Press, who recently interviewed former UFC champ Cain Velasquez, expressed his condolences to Wali’s family. “Wali didn’t need to support us, but he did. He took time to stand with us. A lot of nonprofits wanted to leverage him for their grant-chase objectives, and he chose to look into his phone, record a video endorsing us, and share himself with us to make us better at our craft. He pulled the curtain back on stuff most folks won’t talk about in prison journalism—stuff we will publish at a later date. For now, please let everybody know that we lost a real one. Wali was an inquisitive journalist, mentor, and a genuine soul. He will be missed.”
The San Quentin News culture isn’t the same without Wali. Certain voids just can’t be filled. I’m thankful Wali got to spend his last days in the sun and near the water without a fence between him and it. We all know just how exceptionally rare securing a compassionate release from prison is in California. Most die slowly in a prison OHU hospice wing quietly. Thankfully, Wali wasn’t forced to fade like that. He was afforded a rare dignity we all wish was attainable, but goes against the normative grain. Governor Newsom deserves a hearty humanitarian salute from those of us who know intimately about the structural violence of prison, its dehumanizing logic, and the principles of isolation it relies upon to affirm that logic. He didn’t need to give Wali a respite—but he did. Respects.
Marcus “Wali” Henderson will remain a fixture in memoriam within our writing community. To his family, friends, and colleagues, thank you for sharing Wali with us. I will never forget his mellow voice, and can only hope to one day muster his generous poise.
Farewell, my friend.
