There Is Nowhere For A Black Man To Run
Photo by Lawrence Crayton on Unsplash

There Is Nowhere For A Black Man To Run

I was not upset that the New Orleans 10 were captured — I was angry that there is no place in America for a black man to blend in.

I watched the news coverage of Derrick Groves being pulled from that crawl space in Atlanta, shirtless and shackled, blowing a kiss at the cameras like this was all some elaborate joke. The last of ten men who escaped from Orleans Parish Justice Center in May, finally caught after five months on the run. They found him hiding beneath a house like an animal, after pumping gas into the residence for hours, after a K-9 unit tracked him down like prey.

The news anchors celebrated. Another dangerous criminal off the streets. Justice served. Case closed.

But I wasn’t celebrating. I was depressed.

Not because these men had been captured— some of them were convicted murderers, awaiting sentencing for serious violent crimes that they committed on members of their own community. Not because they had violated the public trust or endangered communities during their time as fugitives. I was depressed because watching their capture reminded me of a truth that sits in my chest like a stone: In America, there is nowhere for a Black man to run.

Unless you’re running toward revolution.

Let me tell you how they got caught, and then let me tell you about the ones who got away.

The Geography of Criminal Capture

Facial recognition cameras in the French Quarter spotted two of them within hours, walking down Bourbon Street with their heads down, trying to avoid detection. But all it takes is one second of looking up, and the algorithm has you. The technology didn’t care about their desperation — it simply saw faces and matched them to a database.

Antoine Massey lasted six weeks before a citizen’s tip led police to an Airbnb in New Orleans’ Third District. He tried to hide in plain sight, even posted videos on social media pleading to rappers and Donald Trump for help. The city closed in around him like quicksand.

Jermaine Donald and Leo Tate made it to Walker County, Texas — almost 200 miles from New Orleans — before a high-speed chase ended in a crash. Even in the vast expanse of rural Texas, two Black men in a stolen vehicle drew attention like a neon sign.

And Derrick Groves — the most dangerous of them all, convicted of four murders — lasted five months before a Crimestoppers tip led federal marshals to that Atlanta house. Five months. In a nation of 330 million people, across 3.8 million square miles of territory, this man could hide for exactly 147 days.

That’s the geography of being Black in America when you’re running from justice: 147 days of freedom in a country built on the premise of liberty.

The Geography of Political Escape

But let me tell you that same story again.

In 1970, George Wright escaped from a New Jersey prison where he was serving time for murder. Like the New Orleans 10, he was a Black man on the run from American justice. But George Wright didn’t hide in crawl spaces or homeless encampments. He joined the Black Liberation Army, dressed himself as a priest, hollowed out a Bible to conceal a handgun, and hijacked Delta Flight 841 to Algeria.

Algeria didn’t send him back.

They granted him political asylum.

Wright lived openly in Algeria, then France, then Guinea-Bissau, then Portugal for forty-one years. He married a Portuguese woman, became a Portuguese citizen under the name José Luis Jorge dos Santos, raised children, and lived in the same village for two decades before being discovered — not by facial recognition technology or K-9 units, but by a routine fingerprint check on his Portuguese ID card.

Assata Shakur, also a member of the Black Liberation Army, escaped from a New Jersey women’s prison in 1979. Her associates, disguised as visitors, stormed the facility, took guards hostage, and freed her in broad daylight. She didn’t hide under houses or rob drug dealers in back alleys.

She fled to Cuba.

Fidel Castro granted her political asylum.

Shakur lived openly in Havana for forty-six years until her death in 2025. She wrote books, gave interviews, and became an icon of revolutionary resistance. The FBI put a $2 million bounty on her head. Cuba refused to turn her over.

Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver fled to Algeria in 1969, where they established the International Section of the Black Panther Party. The Algerian government gave them diplomatic status, an embassy building, monthly stipends, and the freedom to coordinate with liberation movements worldwide.

Pete and Charlotte O’Neal have lived in Tanzania since 1972 — fifty-three years — after Pete was targeted for his activities as chairman of the Kansas City Black Panthers. They run a community center, raised children, and become pillars of their adopted community.

These weren’t criminals hiding from justice. These were political refugees fleeing American oppression.

The Difference Revolution Makes

The difference between the New Orleans 10 and the Black Liberation Army isn’t moral character or the severity of their crimes. Both groups included people convicted of serious violent offenses. The difference is political consciousness and international solidarity.

The Black Liberation Army understood their struggle as part of a global anti-imperialist movement. They connected their resistance to the Vietnamese fighting American soldiers, the Algerians who had defeated French colonialism, the Cubans who had overthrown American-backed dictatorship. They didn’t see themselves as criminals; they saw themselves as freedom fighters.

And crucially, other nations agreed.

Algeria in the 1960s and ’70s was the center of the Third World revolutionary movement. The Algerian government, having defeated French colonialism, offered sanctuary to liberation movements worldwide — Vietnamese, Palestinians, African National Congress, and yes, Black American revolutionaries. They operated on the principle that anyone fighting American imperialism deserved protection.

Cuba, still defying American economic warfare fifty years after their revolution, extended the same solidarity to Black American political prisoners. Castro’s government understood that racism in America was part of the same imperial system they had overthrown.

These countries didn’t see Wright, Shakur, and the Cleavers as criminals. They saw them as political prisoners who had escaped a racist criminal justice system.

The Machinery of Revolutionary Escape

When you’re running toward revolution instead of away from consequences, the geography changes completely.

International networks replace local hideouts. Instead of drug dealers who won’t call police, you have governments that won’t honor extradition requests.

Diplomatic immunity replaces criminal anonymity. Instead of crawling under houses, you live openly under state protection.

Ideological sanctuary replaces geographical hiding. Instead of constantly looking over your shoulder, you join movements with the resources and commitment to protect their own.

Historical legitimacy replaces criminal desperation. Your story becomes part of a larger narrative of resistance that transcends national boundaries.

The Black Liberation Army had what the New Orleans 10 didn’t: a political analysis that connected their individual circumstances to global liberation struggles, and international allies willing to risk American displeasure to provide sanctuary.

But even political refugees aren’t immune to the machinery of American pursuit.

Project N.O.L.A. operates 5,000 cameras throughout New Orleans today, including 200 with facial recognition capabilities. But in 1972, when Wright hijacked that plane, there were no computers scanning faces in airports. No social media to monitor. No digital footprints to track.

U.S. Marshals eventually caught Wright in 2011, but it took forty-one years and the development of computerized fingerprint databases. They caught Shakur never — she died free in Cuba.

This is what revolutionary politics provided: time. Time to build new identities, establish new lives, become citizens of countries that didn’t recognize American jurisdiction over political refugees.

The New Orleans 10 were caught within months because they were operating within the same system they were trying to escape. They had no international analysis, no foreign allies, no political framework that could transform them from criminals into freedom fighters.

The Historical Echo — Revised

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 created a national network of surveillance and capture that made every free state a potential site of recapture. But even then, some enslaved people found political sanctuary. Canada refused to honor American slave laws. The British Empire, having abolished slavery, would not return escapees.

My daughter asks me sometimes about the Underground Railroad, about Harriet Tubman and the brave conductors who helped enslaved people escape to freedom. I tell her about the networks of safe houses, the coded songs, the North Star that guided travelers through darkness.

But here’s what I don’t tell her — until now. Even then, most people who attempted escape were caught and returned to bondage. And under the Thirteenth Amendment, that same fate awaits these men. Those words we have been taught to celebrate — “except as punishment for a crime” — mean that slavery never ended; it simply evolved.

That is why most of these men will eventually end up in Angola Prison, an abomination and a provocation to people of good will. Angola is a former slave plantation that still functions as a factory of misery and oppression, where hope goes to die and cruelty resides. It sits on 18,000 acres of soil first cultivated by enslaved Africans, and today, Black inmates pick vegetables and harvest cotton under armed guard on that same land.

We would never tolerate any concentration camp being turned into a prison where most of the inmates were Jewish. Yet that is exactly what we are expected to tolerate here in America: a living monument to white supremacy operated under the banner of justice.

So when I saw those men escape — when I watched Derrick Groves crawl beneath that house in Atlanta — it wasn’t just desperation I saw. It was a futile run from the plantation reborn. If I faced that same fate, if my sentence ended with me working those cotton fields under the same sun that burned my ancestors’ backs, I might try to escape too.

The difference is this: the Black Liberation Army understood that individual escape isn’t enough. You have to escape the system, not just the sentence. You have to transform yourself from a criminal into a revolutionary, from a fugitive into a political refugee, from an American problem into an international cause.

But here’s the tragedy: that window closed.

The Cold War created space for Black revolutionaries because America had geopolitical rivals willing to embarrass the U.S. by sheltering its political refugees. Algeria needed allies against Western imperialism. Cuba needed solidarity against American economic warfare. The Soviet Union needed propaganda victories in the global battle for influence.

Today, that international revolutionary infrastructure no longer exists. Algeria is aligned with American economic interests. Cuba is isolated and struggling. Russia and China have no interest in Black American liberation movements. The radical governments that once offered sanctuary have either fallen or accommodated themselves to American power.

There is nowhere left to run toward.

The New Orleans 10 weren’t just running from justice — they were running in a world where political escape has become impossible. Where the only geography available to Black fugitives is the old geography: homeless encampments, drug dealers, crawl spaces, and the inevitable capture that follows.

This is what the death of international revolutionary solidarity looks like: 10 Black men squeezed through a hole behind a toilet, with nowhere to go but back to the plantation.

The Privilege of Political Revolution

If I were Latino today, I could still disappear into construction sites and farms, sustained by networks of economic survival that transcend national boundaries.

If I were white, I could still vanish into the anonymity that whiteness provides in every corner of America.

If I were Black in 1972, I could have joined a revolutionary movement with international connections, political analysis, and foreign allies willing to provide sanctuary.

But I am Black in 2025.

The revolutionary movements are gone. The international solidarity is dead. The political analysis that once transformed criminals into freedom fighters has been replaced by the individualized desperation that sent Derrick Groves crawling under a house in Atlanta.

We live in a post-revolutionary moment, where the only escape from American injustice is to become so invisible that surveillance technology can’t find you, so anonymous that citizen informants can’t spot you, so isolated that social networks can’t track you.

And for Black people in America, such invisibility is impossible.

The Weight of Understanding

I understand why these men ran. I understand the desperation that drove them through that hole behind the toilet. I understand the impossible mathematics of Black life in America, where even our successes feel like failures, where even our freedom feels like captivity, where even our victories feel like defeats.

But I also understand the tragedy of their capture: they were running in the wrong century.

They were trying to escape in an era when escape has become impossible, when political consciousness has been replaced by criminal justice, when international solidarity has been replaced by global surveillance, when revolution has been replaced by incarceration.

The crawl space where they found Derrick Groves wasn’t just a hiding place — it was a metaphor for the shrinking geography of Black freedom in America. A space so small you have to crawl on your belly. A space beneath someone else’s house. A space that can be filled with gas until you can no longer breathe.

This is what’s left of the Underground Railroad in 2025: a crawl space in Atlanta, surrounded by federal marshals, pumped full of tear gas, with K-9 units waiting outside.

I’m not advocating for these men. I’m not romanticizing their crimes or celebrating their escapes. But I am mourning what their capture represents: the final collapse of any geography of freedom for Black people in America.

We live in a nation of 3.8 million square miles, and for Black men, every single mile is surveilled, monitored, and controlled. There are no more Algerias offering sanctuary. No more Cubas providing asylum. No more revolutionary movements with the international connections to transform criminals into freedom fighters.

There is nowhere for a Black man to run.

But there was once. And remembering that difference — remembering when political consciousness could open doors that individual desperation could never unlock — might be the first step toward creating new geographies of freedom.

My daughter will inherit this America of crawl spaces and facial recognition cameras. But she will also inherit the memory of George Wright living forty-one years in freedom, of Assata Shakur writing books in Cuban sunshine, of Pete and Charlotte O’Neal building community centers in Tanzanian villages.

She will inherit the knowledge that escape was once possible — not just from sentences, but from systems. Not just from consequences, but from the entire apparatus of American racial oppression.

And maybe, in her generation, that knowledge will become geography again.

Remember: you are loved, you are worthy of love, you are beautiful, and you are enough — even in a country that has eliminated every exit except revolution, and then eliminated revolution itself.

Especially then.

My name is Garrick McFadden, I am the founder of GAMESQ, PLC, a black-owned Phoenix car accident law firm. This allows me the ability to write essays like this, because my clients feel empowered when I fight for them in the courtroom or on Medium — both require me to use my words. This is a freedom few have and if there is something you want me to write about go to my website and leave a message.

This post originally appeared on Medium and is republished with author's permission. Read more of Garrick McFadden's work on Medium.