Ari Sesu Merretazon
In April of 1968, when Ari Sesu Merretazon first came home from Vietnam, he returned to a nation on fire in the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ari Sesu Merretazon, formerly known as Haywood Thomas Kirkland, is a Vietnam War veteran from Washington, D.C. He currently resides in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, and is the Chief of Staff at Pointman Soldiers Heart Ministry. Ari is most known for his work as an activist for racial justice and reparations to the descendants of enslaved people in the United States, including Black veterans.
In 1966, Merretazon was drafted under Project 100,000 during the Vietnam War in 1966 as a recon infantry soldier. This program lowered draft eligibility standards to meet the demands of the escalating war in Vietnam. President Johnson and Robert McNamara argued that the program would uplift poor, semi-literate Black men out of poverty, but in reality it funneled poor, semi-literate Black men from the South into combat. During the first years of the war, Black men were twice as likely to die in combat compared to whites.
The realities of violence and experiences of racism in the military radicalized many Black soldiers and Merretazon found solidarity with other "Bloods" in the field. Counting down the days of their tours in Vietnam like prison sentences, Black soldiers would often daydream about what they would do if they made it back to the "world." Merretazon planned to continue the fight for civil rights in his community.
Life after Vietnam
After the war, he returned home to Washington, D.C., where he was later arrested and incarcerated for an armed robbery of armored vehicle transporting more than $300,000 in cash to be incinerated by the Treasury Department. Merretazon served five-and-a-half years at Lorton Reformatory, a federal prison with a 99% Black population. While incarcerated, he organized a group of incarcerated veterans and launched the first VA office inside a prison staffed entirely by incarcerated veterans, called the Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organization. A self-help program, the IVAO helped veterans in prison file for disability rights.
These efforts drew national attention when the Washington Post published a news article in 1975. While still incarcerated, Ari Merretazon was invited to the White House to meet with then-President Jimmy Carter, who issued an executive directive to the Department of Justice to collect data on incarcerated veterans.
Advocating for Incarcerated Veterans
Once released from prison, Merretazon began visiting prisons across the United States and recreating the Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organizations in facilities. He also enjoyed key support from Congressman Ronald V. Dellums-- vocal critic of the Vietnam War, civil rights activist, member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the first African American to serve on the Armed Services Committee. “We were able to move in and out of prisons,” said Merretazon. “People from the president's office came down to visit us. That gave us a lot more protection and freedom to move around within the administrative processes and procedures of the prisons.”
With support at the highest levels of political office, Merretazon began building a network of incarcerated veterans across the United States and gathering evidence that he would present to Congress in 1979. During that time, they discovered at “almost every prison in the United States, they had like 20-25 percent Vietnam veterans.” Merretazon engaged with prison administrators at other institutions and attempted to replicate the model first established at Lorton Reformatory with VA offices staffed entirely by incarcerated veterans. He would advocate for this model before Congress as a way to redress the inadequate VA outreach efforts to prisons at the time.
In July 1979, Congress held hearings on incarcerated Vietnam veterans before the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, highlighting key issues and structural barriers they faced.
The complete lack of information and reliable estimates on the actual number of incarcerated veterans seriously limited any efforts to provide VA services to veterans in prison. Based on GAO studies, VA records, and direct access to prisons, Ari Sesu Merretazon estimated, “We got over 500,000 Vietnam era veterans in prison, jail, on parole, or awaiting sentence . . . Over half of them are Black.” A GAO report estimated that 60,000 veterans were incarcerated in federal and state prisons, and that 50 percent incarcerated in federal prison were convicted of armed robbery or drug-related offenses. Chairman of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Alan Cranston noted that “educationally disadvantaged veterans constitute a large segment of the incarcerated prison population.” Many veterans also believed they automatically lost disability benefits in prison. An estimated 40 percent were ineligible due to less than honorable discharge status. According to the Government Accounting Office, 44,000 incarcerated veterans were denied disability benefits in 1975. By 1978, another study found that over half of incarcerated veterans had received less-than-honorable discharges, and half of them were Black Vietnam veterans.
After testifying before Congress, Merretazon moved to Little Rock, Arkansas to help start a Vet Center. He earned a law degree from Antioch School of Law in 1980 and decided to take his knowledge where it would be more useful. He explained, “I didn't want to stay in the major cities because they have so much more resources. I felt that based on my experience inside of prisons . . . that the worst conditions for veterans to exist was in the Southern prisons: Angola, Arkansas State Prison, and Parchman Farm in Mississippi.” But he came into conflict with a psychiatrist at the Little Rock Vet Center. Merretazon lamented, “I went there with expectations that I could continue to work with veterans in prison. . . He refused to allow me to go into the prisons and assist veterans.”
In 1984, he helped revitalize the Arkansas State Press, a historically Black newspaper that had not published an issue since 1959. At the newspaper, he worked with Daisy Bates, a long-time serving President of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP, who helped integrate Little Rock Central High. JET magazine ran a featured story on Merretazon and Daisy Bates in April 1984. Throughout his life, Merretazon has continued to be an advocate for incarcerated veterans, for education, and for reparations. His organizing undoubtedly played a pivotal role in incarcerated veterans becoming a priority for national veterans organizations. Beginning in the summer of 1979, the Vietnam Veterans of America, a national organization made up of and dedicated to the needs of Vietnam veterans, would take the lead on raising awareness to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and in 1983, it established a legal services program for veterans in the criminal justice system.
Today, Ari Sesu Merretazon is advocate for justice, for veterans in his community, and an activist for reparations. Most recently, he filed a lawsuit against the City of Philadelphia because, although it is required by state law, there was no director of Veterans Affairs for the city of Philadelphia. His story has been told in Bloods, an oral history collection of Black Vietnam veterans, by Wallace Terry, and the tale of his armed robbery was imaginatively adapted in the 1995 film Dead Presidents. But these accounts only tell a partial story.
Merretazon is perhaps the single most influential advocate for incarcerated veterans in American history.
This page has paths:
- Ari Sesu Merretazon Part 2: After War Jason Higgins
- Navigating Racism in the US and in the Military Jason Higgins
- Drawing Connections Jason Higgins