The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
By Heather Ann Thompson
Illustrated. 724 pp. Pantheon Books. $35.
By Heather Ann Thompson
Illustrated. 724 pp. Pantheon Books. $35.
Attica.
The name itself has long signified resistance to prison abuse and state
violence. In the 1975 film “Dog Day Afternoon,” Al Pacino, playing a
bank robber, leads a crowd confronting the police in a chant of “Attica,
Attica.” The rapper Nas, in his classic “If I Ruled the World,”
promises to “open every cell in Attica, send ’em to Africa.” And Attica
posters were once commonplace in the homes of black nationalists. The
one in my family’s apartment in the 1970s featured a grainy
black-and-white picture of Attica’s protesting prisoners, underneath the
words “We are not beasts.”
But
memories of the 1971 uprising at Attica prison have grown hazy. I
recently mentioned the word to a politically active Yale College
student, who responded: “I know it’s a prison where something important
happened. But I’m not sure of the details.”
Heather
Ann Thompson, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, has
the details. Thompson spent more than a decade poring over trial
transcripts, issuing countless requests for hidden government documents,
and interviewing dozens of survivors and witnesses. The result is
“Blood in the Water,” a masterly account of the Attica prison uprising,
its aftermath and the decades-long legal battles for justice and
accountability. This is not an easy book to read — the countless
episodes of inhumanity on these pages are heartbreaking. But it is an
essential one.
Isolated
in the far western corner of New York State (Attica is closer to
Detroit than to New York City, where almost half of its prisoners come
from), the prison in 1971 housed nearly 2,300 men who were permitted
only one shower a week and provided a single roll of toilet paper each
month (“one sheet per day,” went the saying). Men regularly went to bed
hungry, as the state spent just 63 cents per prisoner per day for food.
Puerto Rican prisoners suffered special discrimination; prisoner mail
was censored, and since corrections officers couldn’t read Spanish, they
simply tossed those letters in the trash. Black prisoners had it worst
of all, as they were relegated to the lowest-paid jobs and racially
harassed by the prison’s almost all-white staff.
Drawing
strength from the civil rights activism of the era, Attica’s prisoners
lobbied to improve their living conditions. But all they got were vague,
unfulfilled promises. After months of mounting tensions, on Sept. 9,
1971, a group of prisoners saw a chance to overpower an officer. The
Attica riot was underway.
Among
the riot’s first casualties was Correction Officer William Quinn, who
was beaten so badly that he was almost unrecognizable to a paramedic who
had known him for years. (Quinn would die days later.) But after a few
hours of bloody chaos, a group of inmate leaders emerged to restore
order. One of their first public statements came from L.D. Barkley,
whose plain-spoken claim to humanity would inspire posters like the one
in our apartment. “We are men,” Barkley said. “We are not beasts, and
we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”
Continue reading the main story
Prison
leaders quickly sought to negotiate with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and
other state officials, conditioning their surrender on the granting of
33 demands. These included better education, less mail censorship, more
religious freedom, fairer disciplinary and parole processes and, most
controversially, amnesty for crimes committed in the course of the riot
itself.
Negotiations
were led by a group of journalists, politicians and prison reformers,
including the radical civil rights attorney William Kunstler and the New
York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Shuttling between prisoners in the
yard and state authorities gathered outside, the negotiators worked
heroically toward a settlement. But Rockefeller was uncompromising, and
after refusing to go to Attica to join the negotiations himself, he
abandoned talks and ordered state troopers to “retake” the prison.
I
wouldn’t have thought that Rockefeller — the sponsor of reviled
mandatory drug sentences bearing his name — could suffer any more damage
to his reputation on criminal justice matters. But Thompson
methodically shreds him, depicting a craven politician thoroughly
uninterested in the human consequences of his decisions.
The
savagery that followed the decision to retake the prison was both
predictable and avoidable. The prisoners had no guns themselves, yet the
troopers — untrained, unsupervised and out for vengeance — began
shooting wildly upon entering. Among the first to die were corrections
officers held as hostages, as well as the prisoners who had been
guarding them. Thirty-nine people — 29 prisoners and 10 hostages — would
be killed.
The
most sadistic crimes took place after state officials had full control
of the prison. Prisoners were forced to strip naked and run through a
gantlet of 30 to 40 corrections officers who took turns beating them
with batons. One National Guardsman described seeing a gravely injured
black man being attacked by a corrections officer. “They forced him to
his knees, and at that point, the correction sergeant backed up a short
distance and then ran forward and kicked the man in the face. . . . He
immediately went limp and his head was hanging down, he was bleeding.”
Another Guardsman recalled watching medical staff join in the abuse. He
saw a doctor “speaking to the inmates and saying: ‘You say you’re hurt?
You’re not hurt. We’ll see if you’re hurt.’ ” Instead of attending to
their wounds, the doctor began kicking and hitting them.
There
are dozens more harrowing tales like these. And then there are the
photographs, some depicting naked and abused prisoners, marched for
sport before sullen, leering guards. Eventually I had to put the book
down. To breathe. To wipe the tears. I couldn’t stop thinking of slave
narratives. Or of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s claim that “in America, it is
traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
Thompson
dwells on these stories because she wants us to learn, and then never
forget, what the state of New York tried to hide. The truth of what
happened in that prison yard 45 years ago has been suppressed by
flagrant lies (including Rockefeller’s claim that the prisoners, not his
own troopers, had killed the hostages), unwarranted secrecy (the state
still refuses to release thousands of boxes of crucial records), and
cover-ups (when a prosecutor got close to indicting some of the state
troopers for their role in the killings, his superiors stopped him from
going forward).
“Blood
in the Water” comes out at an important time. Criminal justice reform
is having something of a moment. But Thompson’s tale is a cautionary
reminder that we’ve been here before. The Attica uprising took place in
the midst of an earlier period of activism, and had the potential to be a
turning point toward better prison conditions. When these mostly black
and brown men took over the yard and asked for things like better
education, the state could have recognized the legitimacy of their
demands. Instead they were slaughtered, the crime was concealed, and in
the decades since, America has shown little regard for prisoner welfare.
But
Attica’s tragic outcome doesn’t undermine the significance of the
resistance. As Thompson argues: “The Attica uprising of 1971 happened
because ordinary men, poor men, disenfranchised men, and men of color
had simply had enough of being treated as less than human. That desire,
and their fight, is by far Attica’s most important legacy.” Just so, and
“Blood in the Water” restores their struggle to its rightful place in
our collective memory.
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