Last summer, five months after being released from prison, Albert Woodfox went to Harlem. It was there, in 1969, during his last week of freedom, that he met members of the Black Panther Party for the first time. He had been mesmerized by the way they talked and moved. “I had always sensed, even among the most confident black people, that their fear was right there at the top, ready to overwhelm them,” he told me. “It was the first time I’d ever seen black folk who were not afraid.”

Woodfox had intended to go to a meeting of the New York chapter of the Party that week, but he was arrested for a robbery before he could. Instead, he founded a chapter of the Party at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, in Angola, where he was held in solitary confinement for more than forty years—longer than any prisoner in American history. He and two other Black Panthers, who were in solitary confinement for a total of more than a hundred years, became known as the Angola 3.

Woodfox, who is sixty-nine, strolled along Malcolm X Boulevard with three former Panthers: his best friend, Robert King, one of the Angola 3, as well as Atno Smith and B. J. Johnson, members of local chapters of the Party. He had never met Smith or Johnson before, and the conversation was halting and restrained; they spoke of gentrification, Jackie Wilson, and the type of diabetes they had. Woodfox is reserved, humble, and temperamentally averse to drama. When he talked about himself, his tone became flat. He was scheduled to speak at a panel on solitary confinement the next day, and he felt exhausted by the prospect. “I get apprehensive when somebody asks me something I can’t answer, like ‘What does it feel like to be free?’ ” he said. “How do you want me to know how it feels to be free?” He’d developed a stock answer to the question: “Ask me in twenty years.”

They reached the Apollo Theatre, and Johnson told the others to stand under the marquee for a photograph. They all looked soberly at the camera and raised their arms in a black-power salute. There were pouches under Woodfox’s eyes, and a thick crease between his eyebrows. His Afro was straggly and gray.

On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, they browsed souvenirs, T-shirts, and jewelry arrayed on tables along the sidewalk. “Black Lives Matter!” one vender shouted. “We got the shirts—ten dollars!”

Woodfox walked by, paused, then turned around. “Give me one of those,” he said. He handed the man a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll wear it tomorrow,” he told the others.

Suddenly, the men’s mood became lighter. Now they all wanted to buy something. Johnson sampled musks and decided on a three-dollar glassine of “Bleue Nile,” while King and Smith contemplated buying their own “Black Lives Matter” shirts.

Then Johnson led the men four blocks south, to the original headquarters of the New York City chapter of the Party, now a bodega called Jenny’s Food Corp. Several elderly men sat smoking at a card table in front of the shop.

“We’ve got original Panthers here,” Johnson told the men at the card table.

“Originals?” one man said, putting out his cigarette and standing up.

“All right, all right,” Woodfox said, deflecting attention.

“Can I take a picture?” another man asked.

The four Panthers posed in front of the store, next to a sandwich board advertising hot oatmeal. Woodfox held his new T-shirt in a plastic bag and raised his other fist. The men from the card table stood behind him, clenching their fists.

“This is Brother Albert Woodfox,” Johnson said. “Longest man in solitary confinement in the history of America!”

One of the men said that he’d been in solitary, too. “I thought I was in the box a long time,” he said. “But I’ll just put my troubles in my pocket.”

“Look, one day in the box is enough,” King said.

When Woodfox was a child in New Orleans, he made money by stealing flowers from gravestones and selling them to mourners. The oldest of six siblings, he grew up in the Tremé, one of the first neighborhoods in the South to house freed slaves. He remembers standing at a bus stop with his mother when he was twelve and trying to figure out why, when a police car passed, she pulled him behind her, as if to hide him. “She was so scared of white folks,” he said. “We all knew they had absolute power over us.”

In 1962, when Woodfox was fifteen, he was arrested for a car-parking scheme: he and his friends charged drivers to protect their cars. Two years later, he went to jail for riding in a stolen car. That year, he got his girlfriend pregnant. He paid little attention to his newborn daughter, Brenda. He took pride in being a good crook. “They used to call me Fox,” he said. “You didn’t mess with Fox.”

When Woodfox was eighteen, he was arrested for robbing a bar and sentenced to fifty years in prison. After the sentencing, he overpowered two sheriff’s deputies in the basement of the courthouse and fled to Manhattan. He had been in the city for only a few days—he had just met Panthers in Harlem, and was angling to date some of the female Party members, who seemed more self-possessed than any women he’d ever met—when a bookie accused him of trying to rob him. “I remember thinking, What’s wrong with you—you can’t stay out of jail,” he said. “I thought it was just me, that something was wrong with me.”

Woodfox said that his tattoo was done by Charles Neville, of the Neville Brothers, while he was being held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Houston, Texas; October, 2016. Photograph by Mark Hartman for The New Yorker

He was extradited to New Orleans and placed on the Panther Tier at the Orleans Parish Prison. Eighteen members of the Black Panther Party, waiting to be tried for shoot-outs with the police, held classes on politics, economics, sociology, and the history of slavery. Steel plates had been affixed to their windows so that they couldn’t communicate with prisoners on other tiers. Malik Rahim, the defense minister of the New Orleans chapter of the Party, told me, “They thought they were separating us, but everywhere we went that infectious disease called organizing was taking hold.” They ripped apart Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” and divided it into sections, so that each inmate could study a chapter and teach the others what he’d learned.

Formed a year after the assassination of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party was disillusioned by the incremental approach of the civil-rights movement. Huey Newton, the Party’s co-founder, said that black people were tired of singing “We Shall Overcome.” He said, “The only way you’re going to overcome is to apply righteous power.” The Panthers saw a direct link between the country’s armed interventions abroad—in Vietnam, Latin America, and Africa—and what Eldridge Cleaver, a Party leader, called the “bondage of the Negro at home.” Black people, he said, lived in a “colony in the mother country,” shunted into inferior housing, jobs, and schools. The Panthers followed the police, whom they saw as occupying troops, through the ghetto. If an officer questioned a black person, the Panthers got out of their car and monitored the encounter, drawing loaded guns.