Robert Hillary King was the opening speaker for the inaugural TEDx Alcatraz. In this talk, "Alone," King takes us inside the mind of someone wrongly convicted of a crime, the consequence of which was an unfathomable 29 years of solitary confinement in Louisiana's Angola State Prison. Arrested as a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960's, he quietly reflects, "I was going to be in prison, but wasn't going to let prison be in me." In this talk, King shares parallels between modern prison and African-American slavery of centuries before. Upon his release, he vowed that while he is free from Angola, Angola will never be free of him. Robert King has been featured in numerous print, media and film articles and interviews worldwide including CNN, National Public Radio, NBC and the BBC, as well as two films, Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation and Land of the Free. TEDxAlcatraz kicked off in a nightclub in downtown San Francisco on December 1, 2010. The evening began at 8PM after a three course dinner, and went until nearly 1AM, as an evening some described as an intellectual rave, or as "TEDx after-hours". TEDxAlcatraz Curator Gregory Miller and Co-curator David Gurman introduced the evening's theme, "A Suspension of Disbelief" to an invited audience of 180 optimistic & big thinkers of the nocturnal kind. That night, Alcatraz was part of the theme, and we sought a set design and look & feel of being out on the Island. Atypical of the Silicon Valley, we ...