"They Are Killing Me"

The silver-haired old man, tall but slightly stoop-shouldered, rocked back and forth in an ancient chair at the center of the stage. His desk near by was piled high with printer's galleys and papers. He was finishing a dreamlike trip through his childhood, the final moment in a two-hour monologue on slavery, war and American history. From a packed audience at New York's Town Hall, a voice asked, "Mr. Douglass, what do we do? What do we do now?"

The aged figure of Abolitionist Douglass struggled out of the chair. "Agitate!" he cried. "Agitate! Agitate!" Blackout. A single spotlight cut through the darkness, focusing on the old rocking chair--now empty, still swaying back and forth. The audience rose to its feet for a thunderous ovation.

Arthur Burghardt, 25, who wrote and starred in the Douglass drama, got up the next morning, drank a bottle of champagne and then went to Manhattan's federal courthouse and gave himself up to start a five-year prison term for rejecting induction into the Army.

Burghardt, the estranged son of an educator who is now president of a community college in Hartford, Conn., went to Deerfield Academy, then Rutgers, began acting in Shakespeare, later taught in the drama department at Antioch. His draft troubles began in 1966 when he applied for a conscientious-objector classification. His claim was rejected on grounds of insufficient "credibility and sincerity." The next year he was sentenced to five years (the average term is two years), but various appeals kept him out of prison until November 1971.

Burghardt was sent to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Conn., where he became friendly with another prisoner, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan. The two jogged together and discussed the theater and Viet Nam. In Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes, Berrigan wrote about Burghardt: "This young black resister...had been an actor and TV personality...He came in like a Roman candle, with all his talents exploding around us."

It was precisely the image of Burghardt as a "Roman candle" that worried friends when he first went to Danbury. "His presence just demands a reaction," observes Denise Spalding, a Manhattan social worker who is now raising funds for Burghardt's defense. "There is no way Arthur can walk into a room and not be noticed." Burghardt is in fact 6 ft. 6 in., weighs 250 Ibs., and he has a deep, booming voice. "The moment he went into prison," says his chief defense attorney, William Kunstler, "he was doomed."

Explosive. Within three months, Burghardt helped to lead a strike against inmate working conditions, and was thrown into solitary for five months. Cited for "poor" and "explosive" attitudes, he was then transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Ind., a maximum-security prison filled with racial hostilities. Last August, Burghardt's second month there, a fight broke out in the prison yard between two inmates, one black and one white. When the prison guards broke up the fight, they led only the black inmate away to be disciplined. A crowd of 200 blacks gathered to protest, Burghardt among them. Later that evening he was summoned to the warden's office and refused to go. Guards used chemical spray and rubber truncheons to subdue him, then took him to solitary. Three guards were injured in the fight. Two of these "assaults" were handled administratively; for the third, Burghardt now faces another trial, probably in April or May, and a possible additional sentence of three years.

Federal officials express surprise at the attention Burghardt's case is receiving. He was "identified as a ringleader," says Norman Carlson, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, "and when the officers attempted to place him in segregation, he attempted to agitate other inmates in his behalf."

Ironically, while one arm of the Federal Government has Burghardt locked up, another, the National Endowment for the Arts, has granted him $7,000 to work on a movie on Frederick Douglass. Burghardt is trying to write the screenplay in prison. But as Burghardt himself said to one of his defense attorneys, "They are killing me."

One of his ardent backers is Philip Langner, president of the New York Theatre Guild. "It's a crime that such a great talent has to languish in jail," Langner says. "You only have so many years in your life, but Arthur is never going to say 'O.K., you win.' He could be there forever."

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