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• 1 media/Ari S. Merretazon mic set up.jpeg media/Bloods.jpg media/Ari Sesu Merretazon photo.jpeg 2023-01-19T15:43:46+00:00 Ari Sesu Merretazon 135 Incarcerated Veterans in American History image_header 139 2026-01-26T01:38:05+00:00

  Introducing Ari Sesu Merretazon

  Existing in the margins of American history, he has been known by many names — Haywood Thomas Kirkland, the namesake of his parents; nicknamed “The Kid” in Wallace Terry’s iconic oral history collection, Bloods; and perhaps most famously as Anthony Curtis, a character portrayed by Larenz Tate, in the 1995 film, Dead Presidents. Rejecting the name enslavers imposed upon his ancestors, he chose the name: Ari Sesu Merretazon. He is a Vietnam veteran, prison organizer, minister, advocate for justice, and activist for reparations.

  In 1966, Merretazon was drafted under Project 100,000 and served in Vietnam 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 believed that the program would uplift poor, semi-literate Black men out of poverty, but in actuality, it created a funnel from Jim Crow classrooms to combat. As historian Christian Appy writes, Project 100,000 sent “many poor, terribly confused, and woefully uneducated boys to risk death in Vietnam.”1 During the first years of the war, Black men were twice as likely to die in combat compared to whites.2 
  
  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.3 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. 

  Nation on Fire

  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. 

  "It was traumatic because when I came home, D.C. was on fire, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, May 1968, and that's the month I came home. I couldn't handle it, to tell you the truth. I said 'look, Mom, look, Dad. Y’all are going to have to hole me up in here for another 30 days because I cannot deal with what I'm seeing out there. . . I need a place of peace. . . . Ever since I came home from Vietnam, I've been involved with Veterans Affairs. I've been an advocate for Veterans Affairs, a frontline advocate, and the record shows that I was there in terms of rights of Vietnam veterans, patients in terms of PTSD. That name wasn't even in the diagnostic manual [DSM] when I came home."

  
  
  From Prison to the White House

  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 95% Black population.4 While incarcerated, he organized a group of incarcerated veterans and launched the first Veterans Affairs 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. 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.5
  

  Advocating for Incarcerated Veterans

   "Bill Lawson . . . understood what veterans was facing, incarcerated veterans, I mean, that just piqued his interest. He started ... trying to get the recognition of my work in prison. . . He saw that what we was doing inside of prisons for veterans had never been done before, and it had such a great impact on families and communities and stuff of that nature. The individual veterans, who happened to be in prison, they finally got some resources. . . I think it was Bill Lawson out of President Carter's office that really understood the moment. . . and I think he may have facilitated that article that came out in the Washington Post. . . I really salute him even to this day. I think he's the one that did it all for me in terms of the White House. . . I was actually getting acknowledged by the president himself, over a handshake. In a very public environment event that they had at the White House for veterans. And so that's how it all started."

  
  Once released on parole, Merretazon began visiting prisons across the United States and recreating the Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organizations in facilities. He enjoyed key support from Congressman Ronald V. Dellums — a Korean War veteran, 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.6 “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.7

  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 Government Accountability Office (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.”8 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 GAO, 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.9  

  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 advocated tirelessly 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, began to raise awareness to PTSD, and in 1983, it established a legal services program for veterans in the criminal justice system. 

  Legacies

  Today, Merretazon is an advocate for justice, for veterans in his community, and for reparations. 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. 

  Dive more deeply into Merretazon's story or view the full, 4-part series of oral history interviews below, or navigate to the next page on Richard Brookshire and the Black Veterans Project. 

   

   

• 1 media/Bloods.jpg media/Air Merretazon and Jimmy Carter.jpeg 2023-07-19T16:28:49+00:00 Justice for Veterans 37 Ari Sesu Merretazon part 3 image_header 139 2026-01-25T23:07:41+00:00

  Part 3

  The third interview with Merretazon dives more deeply into his advocacy for incarcerated veterans and explores his work with the Vietnam Veterans of America after his release from prison. He earned a certificate from the Antioch School of Law as a legal technician. With his background and connections to Congressman Ron Dellums, Merretazon investigated the significant number of incarcerated veterans without disability benefits and set up programs for veterans in prisons across the United States. In the 1980s, he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas and worked with Daisy Bates, Arkansas chapter president of the NAACP, and relaunched the historic African American newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. But in the 1980s, Ari faced many obstacles to providing services to incarcerated veterans in the South.
  
  The interview also discusses how Ari’s traumatic brain injury occurred and how it has impacted different aspects of his life. Then, Ari reflects on his relationship with his children. A central topic of the interview is reparations. Ari discusses many challenges he faced with organizations like N’COBRA, the IBW 21st century group. Ari then discusses the differences between reconciliation and reparations. The interview concludes with Ari’s connection to his culture and how he remains connected to his African roots.
   

  Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organization

  Higgins: I'm really curious about this moment because, as you know, I've written a book about the history of incarcerated veterans,1 and what you're talking about is really the first time incarcerated veterans organized together, and forced the VA to recognize disability benefits for incarcerated veterans that had not been done before you, and this other group. . . . How did that happen? How did you reach out to the VA? Was there a representative who visited the prison? Tell me about the process.
  
  Merretazon: It's a process. Lorton Reformatory had this thing. We developed this thing about inmates' self-care programs. It's part of rehab. And a lot of people's going out of the prison for singing songs as inmate choirs, and would have gone out, there's a group called Inner Voices I think, maybe do all these type of plays . . . If they don't go in and out of the prison, we definitely should go in and out of prison. We ended up using the leverage of our veteran status to bring in, where everybody could participate, the Federal City College. We set up a basic campus at Lorton Reformatory where anybody could participate and enroll in the college. We did that based on the fact that the law said that, if I have benefits, that becomes your property, and that as a veteran, you're entitled to all of these things which is free education, and stuff like that. It was on us veterans to make the contact with those higher education institutions, those apprenticeship training programs, those work release programs, and develop a relationship where we could do through engaging in education, and in a better frame of mind, and be back into our communities as a contributor instead of a predator. Let me put it that way.
  
  Higgins: Sure. Just to get the specific dates. What years were you incarcerated?
  
  Merretazon: From 1969-1976.

  Incarcerated Veterans Organizing for Disability Rights

  Higgins: This is at the same time that the Department of Justice does its first study trying to identify how many incarcerated veterans are imprisoned.
  
  Merretazon: What year was that you found? 
  
  Higgins: They started the study in 1979 and then they published it in 1981.
  
  Merretazon: That was because of the work we was doing in Lorton Reformatory. We raised a lot of hell. We got a lot of coverage in the Washington Post newspaper before we actually begin to make that happen for better than in prison.2 Once we were able to get apprenticeship training programs inside the institutions, higher education inside the institutions, then we had the foundation to apply for our benefits. That was the first thing first: develop the relationship with the higher education institutions and the various types of apprenticeship programs that was out there and apply for our benefits for that type of training.
  
  Higgins: It was unprecedented. Whenever you actually got your disability benefits, was it full 100 percent or was it a reduced amount out of that total? I think today it's 10 percent.
  
  Merretazon: Let me tell you how it happened. I didn't apply for my veteran benefits until 2010. That was long after I was out of prison, long after I've been in the parole, long after I finished walking down 25 years on unsupervised parole. When I came out of prison, I was part of the staff of the Vietnam Veterans of America. I think we had offices over on 18th and K Street somewhere. I was handling the incarcerated veterans part because that's the resources I connected with on the inside . . . I had US Congressmen as my outside coordinators. Ron Dellums and Bill Lawson who was part of the President's staff. The president at that time was Jimmy Carter. Bill Lawson, the President's staff came to visit me in prison because he thought it was such a unique thing to be involved in, and he wanted to make sure it gets as much exposure as possible through his responsibilities at the White House. We made it happen that way. It's just my conceptualizing that concept of inside, outside. The inmates going to deal with the issues on the inside. Our community and representatives going to deal with and make sure it happened from the outside in terms of setting up the structure for veterans to receive their benefits, and we were successful in that.

  Invitation to the White House

  That effort carried my work to the White House of Jimmy Carter. I was acknowledged at the White House by Jimmy Carter and Bill Lawson. I hope Bill Lawson has opportunity to see this video because he was my outside corner. He was a major piece. I don't think we could have done it without some real good, strong outside resources and that was happening. He was working in Jimmy Carter's White House and Ronald Dellums, United States Congressman from Berkeley, California.
  
  Higgins: You met Carter while you were incarcerated?
  
  Merretazon: Yes. Exactly.
  
  Higgins: Can you talk about that. What was that day like? Like how long did you interact with the president?
  
  Merretazon: News got out that veterans were organizing in Lorton Reformatory. That hit the Washington Post. . . Those who was concerned or had some responsibilities for veterans in terms of resource access, they made contact with us from that point. They'd come down and visit and want to talk to us because veterans were going in and out of prison as well . . . to see the college. We had a satellite campus inside the prison. We had laid the foundation. Men who wanted to do other types of things, your programs and whatnot that serve the community, they would come to us and say, 'how do you develop the program? Can you help us out?' I lay it out for them. They go get approval from the administration and then they got their program going out and like Inner Voices [choir] and that was a very notable group. They did all types of skits and stuff like that about men in prison, so they became very popular in D.C. I'm glad I had the opportunity in being involved with them and setting the foundation of how to engage the system based on our willingness to give back to the system even while incarcerated,

  Locating Incarcerated Veterans

  Higgins: Do you recall much about testifying before the Senate. . .
  
  Merretazon: Well, at first, we had to convince the Senate that the issue was worthy of a hearing to be held. We did our work around the demographics of veterans in prison. We had a relationship with the Congress Ron Dellums. He was our outside coordinator, believe that. We had a Congress person who understood what was going on, who was committed to assisting Blacks in prison. . . . US Congressman Ronald Dellums from Berkeley and I think he's from Berkeley, California, or Oakland, one of the two. Through his law and just of being a US congressman and a very popular one at that, we were able to move in and out of prison pretty good. People from the President's office came down to visit us. That gave us a lot more protection and freedom around to move within the administrative processes and procedures of the prison.
  
  Higgins: You were on the ground actually doing the research and finding out how many incarcerated veterans were in person? . . . How long did that take?
  
  Merretazon: Well, first, I started with the prison I was in. I was incarcerated. All we had to do is get the data on that. Then push that. As it's pushing that forward, we found out that almost every prison in the United States, they had like 20-25 percent Vietnam veterans. That talks about the readjustment issues from coming home from war back to society. When Senator Alan Cranston called the Hearing on Readjustment Problems with Vietnam veterans, I was in the forefront of testifying for the issues of the incarcerated veterans.
  After that, the federal government put in place what we call the Vietnam Vet Centers so that veterans can go and talk to each other and share their experiences of readjustment experience with each other. I think there's about 14 was put online around that time, 1980. That shows the farthest city I could find. I've bounced South. I chose Little Rock, Arkansas out of all the options of cities that the veterans would be established. I chose Little Rock, Arkansas. I didn't want to go to D.C. I didn't want to stay in D.C. I didn't want to stay in Philadelphia. I didn't want to stay into the major cities because they have so much more resources. I felt that based on my experience inside of prison with veterans and being a veteran, that the worst conditions of veteran exist in the Southern prison, Angola, Arkansas State Prison, Parchman, in Mississippi, Prison Farm.
  
  We used the administration of the Lorton Reformatory to engage administrators of those institutions. Instead of set it up as an example of what they could do was debated in their prison. We went that route, and we were very successful. In fact, even here in Philadelphia. The veterans out at — I can't think of the name of this prison out in Philadelphia. [Eastern State Penitentiary] I set up the Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organization there.

  Experiences at the Little Rock Vet Center

  Higgins: Talk about your experiences and your time in Little Rock, Arkansas. Were you also involved with veterans and education at the time?
  
  Merretazon: Yes, absolutely, because I went to Little Rock initially in 1987, the Vietnam Vets Center. There, with announcing the opening of the Vet Center, all the veterans came out of the neighborhoods and trying to get help that they knew they didn't have opportunity to receive, and so we had a nice clientele there in Little Rock. Of course, we serving the central part of the state. In fact, any veteran could come to Little Rock, to the Vet Center [despite discharge status], and receive services. All that person had to do was be a resident of the state of Arkansas.
  
  Higgins: What was that like for you working with the Vet Center?
  
  Merretazon: It was rough because the first 90 days were very, very rough because I had a team leader who happened to be a psychiatrist. That's all, he did it while he was in the Army, and I didn't see any real understanding or appreciation for combat soldiers, but nevertheless, he looked at them as dependents as opposed to we all being veterans and helping each other.
  
  I made my name serving veterans in prison, incarcerated veterans. I went there with expectations that I could continue to work with veterans in prison. He would not allow me to do it, and we struggled. He refused to allow me to go into the prisons and assist veterans, in which I had made a very significant name and reputation of doing, and brought the whole issue of incarcerated veterans to the national spotlight. He refused to allow me to deal with veterans in prison. That didn't go too well, so I ended up challenging that, and he terminated me, and subsequently engaged some legal matters, and we settled that matter. But then I went back to legal services.

  
  Full Interview Part 3