Introduction
Leon Benson’s first book, Letters of Gratitude: i Am because We Are, was recently reviewed by Stephen Lane II. The review was published on March 25, 2026 in the academic journal, Postdigital Science and Education, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Springer.
You can purchase your own autographed copy of the book by contacting Leon here. It is also available through the publisher, Iskra Books, and at all major online booksellers. We encourage you to purchase the powerful yet affordably-priced book directly from Leon.
Review of Leon Benson (2024). Letters of Gratitude: I Am because We Are. Madison, WI: Iskra Brooks. 78 pp. ISBN 9798869199270 (Paperback)
When We Bet on Each Other, Everybody Wins
It was in November 2023 when I answered a call from an unknown number on the hotline of the Indianapolis Liberation Center. The grand opening of the Center occurred just a month earlier, on 5 October. It was exciting but nerve-wracking; we were starting a bet. The Center began when a few dozen organizers with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, Arte Mexicano en Indiana, and a political direct-aid group named Hope Packages decided to take the financial risk of creating a space where the city’s oppressed and exploited could unite in a collaborative hub and unite our fights. It was a risk because we could only afford the first month or two of rent when we signed the lease. But we had faith that the community shared our belief and recognized the need for such a space. Marinating our political independence requires financial independence. As a result, we don’t take corporate foundation money or grants. In fact, I pay to volunteer there (Indianapolis Liberation Center Steering Committee 2025).
When we started, I was volunteering as the Community Relations Director. Tasked with answering the phone, my faith in our people was immediately confirmed when I heard the voice on the other end of the line. To my surprise, it was Leon Benson—someone I had never met before, at least not in person. Back in 2021, I remember attending a rally organized by a prison abolitionist group outside of the prison he was held captive in. We were demanding his full release and exoneration. In 1999, at the age of only 22, Benson was convicted for the 1998 murder of Kasey Schoen during an armed robbery in downtown Indianapolis. Schoen was a gay, white man whose life meant very little to the state that rushed to convict Benson for his murder. The police rushed to find the closest Black men to the scene of the crime to quickly close the case.
He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, living daily with the thought that he might not make it out of prison until he was 82—if he survived that long. Yet on 9 March 2023, Benson walked out of the notorious Pendleton Correctional Facility a free man, completely exonerated on all charges. He was the first person exonerated after the formation of the Marion County Conviction Integrity Unit. As he walked to greet his family and supporters, he led his famous chant/mantra: ‘The truth never dies!’ (TheKingTrill 2024). It was a beautiful moment that nothing the state made him endure could taint: not even the 11 harrowing years he spent in solitary confinement. All the same, Benson was 44 years old when he was liberated, decades of moments he wasn’t able to spend with his children, friends, or loved ones. As you read Letters of Gratitude: i Am because We Are (Benson 2024), you’ll feel deprived of those decades, too.
Now, not even a year out of prison, Benson was calling from his hometown of Detroit. He said that he was thankful for the different Center groups working so consistently for his freedom and wanted to give back. He’d seen us on the news and social media keeping up the fight for the wrongfully incarcerated and many others. What better place, he suggested, to stage his first return to Indianapolis since his exoneration than the Liberation Center? For me and my comrades, it was a truly sublime moment.
We started preparing for an event on the anniversary of his exoneration that he titled ‘Common Unity: The Re-Birth of Leon Benson’. The first night was initially supposed to be a panel and celebration [1]. As we started organizing and getting to know him, however, we came to find out this humble, erudite, and hilarious human that nearly 25 years of state repression didn’t break, wrote books and songs from behind bars. During the total of 11 years he spent in solitary confinement, he wrote a series of letters that would rapidly become the book, Letters of Gratitude: i Am because We Are (Benson 2024).
The Truth Never Dies!
How does one spend so much time alone and not lose their mind? How does one write about gratitude while enduring so much injustice? As Benson (2024: 10) stated about his life behind bars: ‘i came out from the other end of the wash (so to speak) stronger than when i was pushed in’. Benson’s fight for his innocence meant building up his support within and outside prisons. Uplifted by his friends and family promoting his innocence on the outside, Benson starts the book explaining why he does not capitalize the pronoun ‘i’ when referring to himself yet opts to capitalize ‘We’, ‘Us’, and ‘Ours’. For Benson, the collective community is stronger than the individual. Benson makes it clear that the support network he built outside of the prison walls was an important key factor to bringing attention to his case and building the pressure needed to get the state to act to reopen his case and give him the full exoneration he deserved.
Benson writes these letters of gratitude in his final weeks in prison, thanking everyone from his family, legal support, and ultimately the judge who signed off to give Benson what he was seeking all along—his freedom. Most letters ‘were written in a span of two weeks, emailed through the GTL systems to be copied, pasted, and saved for after my exoneration’ (Benson 2024: 5). The Global Tel Link (GTL) tablet is a dinosaur of a technology; notoriously unreliable, expensive, and prone to crashing without the capability of saving work, akin to a larger version of the first computer tablets, like the PalmPilot. Benson was locked up before there was YouTube, social networking sites like MySpace, let alone wireless Internet. Letters of Gratitude (Benson 2024) was nonetheless quickly compiled and printed mostly through email and phone exchanges with one of our organizers. As Derek Ford (2024: xiii) states in the Foreword: ‘All working and oppressed people are capable and creative, if only we lived in a social system that nourished that fact instead of repressed it.’
What the State Can Never Break
In November 2024, Benson is on my couch as I wake up in the morning after our first annual fundraiser for the Liberation Center, which Benson emceed. He starts telling me about his plans, while also showing me videos of a concert that he put on with prisoners for other inmates. Throughout they give thanks to the Creator Yahweh [2].
Benson’s life is opening up in many ways during his first full year on the outside. He still thinks about all the others who are still behind bars, still supporting them, still fighting for their freedom as well. He says he’s fighting for all of our freedom and that ‘tearing down the prison walls’ means ridding the world of the oppression, exploitation, and division that keep us enclosed. Refusing to let the state break him, he says he turned his solitary cell into a Shakespearean theatre, a chemistry lab, a gym, and more. If anyone has the creativity and perseverance to lead the fight in tearing down those walls, it’s Benson.
Notes
[1] See Indianapolis Liberation Center. (2024). Leon Benson is reborn: Watch a celebration of the people’s victory! Indianapolis Liberator, accessed 12 December 2025, available here.
[2] While Yahweh has many meanings, here it refers to ‘God’. As an Israelite, Benson believes Yahweh is present in each of us.
References
- Benson, L. (2024). Letters of gratitude: i Am because We Are. Madison, WI: Iskra Books.
- Ford, D. R. (2024). Foreword: Groundings of gratitude. In L. Benson, Letters of gratitude: i Am because We Are (pp. vii-xv). Madison, WI: Iskra Books.
- Indianapolis Liberation Center Steering Committee. (2025). Mission and vision. Indianapolis Liberator, accessed 13 December 2025 (available here).
- TheKingTrill. (2024). The truth never dies! Watch Leon Benson’s liberation from prison. Indianapolis Liberator, accessed 13 December 2025 (available here).