The Background

 One can’t understand Attica, and all that happened there in 1971, without remembering what had been taking place in the nation as whole—on the streets as well as in prisons--throughout the previous decade. From states like California, New York, and Mississippi; and cites like Chicago, Newark and Detroit; and in prisons as far flung as Angola and Auburn, as well as in urban jails like Wayne County, Cook County, and LA County, people from across the country had been mobilizing to fight oppression, injustice, and inequality. Time and again, however, these determined grassroots demands to end this country’s most racist and sexist practices and policies were met with a most violent response from state officials. Be it in Selma in 1965, or Chicago in 1968, or Orangeburg in 1969, or at Jackson State and Kent State in 1970, those with power in this country made clear to anyone who might dare to change this nation for the better, that doing so might well mean risking your life.

For those locked in Attica in 1970, there seemed little choice but to take that risk.

The State of New York had been spending only .63 cents a day feeding these men, giving them a single roll of toilet paper a month, and forcing them to work for mere pennies an hour. The medical care in this prison was also barbaric, the racial abuse was rampant, and the cell HBZ unit and cell lockdowns were capricious and lengthy. Those inside of Attica resisted these conditions in any way they could. Inspired to speak out by the grim situation in this prison, as well as by the fact that protests had recently been carried out in other NY facilities such as the Tombs and Auburn. Some of those men recently had been transferred to Attica. The men wrote letters to state officials, they organized politically, and they engaged in direct action, including carrying out a major strike in Attica’s metal shop in July, 1970.

But initial concessions were often followed by more repression.  

As frustrations grew, a group of prisoners calling itself the Attica Liberation Faction decided to issue a Manifesto of Demands to the Commissioner of Corrections, Russell Oswald. But he also did little to address what was clearly a growing crisis in this facility.  Then, on August 21, 1971 news broke that California prison activist George Jackson had been murdered by guards in San Quentin. This, for so many at Attica, this changed everything.

The next morning one could have heard a pin drop in Attica as men walked to breakfast in complete silence, sat down, and refused to eat.

Two weeks after this dramatic statement of solidarity and mourning in honor of George Jackson, on the evening of September 8, 1971 a prisoner tired of all-too-common harassment from a CO, fought back in Attica’s A Yard. His unprecedented actions, as well as the fact that other men rushed in to support him and cheer him on, greatly unnerved prison officials. By night’s end, one man from A Block had been locked down in his cell, two men had been hauled off to the dreaded HBZ unit (where the rest of the men in A Block feared they were being beaten, if not killed), and no one knew what repression lay in store for them, still.

September 9-12, 1971

The next morning, September 9, 1971, as the men from A Block were coming back from breakfast, these men had every reason to believe that the dreaded repression they had been fearing, was about to be meted out in particularly brutal fashion.

As was routine coming back from the mess hall every morning, the men stood in A tunnel waiting to be let out into A Yard for a short time of needed recreation before heading off to their jobs. Today, though, that door was locked. And so were the gates at either end of the tunnel. This had never happened before. Unbeknownst to them, Attica’s warden had decided not to let any of the men have their few cherished hours of fresh air that day. And yet, he had failed to tell even the COs accompanying these men of this last minute penalty. And so, when the COs found the doors to A Yard locked, they also had no idea what was happening, and began panicking. The prisoners immediately saw their fear, and it literally terrified them. Certain that they were about to be set upon, beaten, and severely harmed, every man in this tunnel began backing up, desperate to flee the crowded tunnel, and sheer pandemonium ensued. In the midst of this, as men desperately began pushing and pushing at the main gate to the nerve center of the prison, Times Square, suddenly, unbelievably, it gave way. Men rushed into Times Square, grabbed the keys to unlock the other gates in order to escape that narrow space, and soon every other man who had been coming back from breakfast from every one of Attica’s other housing blocks was seeking a way out of the crowded underground tunnels to safety.

Thanks to the capricious and ill-fated decision of prison officials, within mere minutes, Attica had descended into utter chaos. No one was in charge, no one was safe, no one knew what was happening, and no one knew what would happen.

The chaos was, however, short-lived. The men in Attica quickly realized the importance of standing together, and of using this moment as an opportunity to bring the public’s attention to the need for meaningful change in this prison, and others.

The Attica Rebellion had begun.

As these nearly 1300 Brothers made the decision to move together into Attica’s D Yard, a large, open exercise field surrounded by 35-foot walls and overlooked by gun towers, they began one of the most dramatic protests for human rights in U.S. and world history. The men elected representatives to speak for each cell block. They set up a medical tent, a food distribution system, and a central negotiating table where all speeches could be broadcast on a loudspeaker and translated into Spanish for all to hear and understand them. Having taken guards hostage in the hope that state officials would then not enter the prison violently, and thus negotiate a productive and peaceful resolution to this event, Attica’s men also set about making sure these guards had medical care and were protected from harm. And finally, to ensure that negotiations with state officials would proceed in good faith they called for the media and a group of outside observers to bear witness.

Negotiations began almost immediately and went on, almost around the clock, for four long days. Ultimately the men focused on 33 demands, including important remedies to Attica’s inadequate medical care, slave wages, lack of religious freedom, censorship, harsh and capricious administrative segregation measures, and the broken parole system. Another critical demand, clear to everyone who had seen what had happened to the men who had dared to protest at other institutions in NY such as the Tombs or Auburn, was that the men in Attica be granted amnesty, and be guaranteed protection from all criminal and physical reprisals, once this protest was over.

September 13, 1971

By all accounts, the negotiations were a tremendous success. The Attica Brothers’ demands were reasonable and even the hostages, whom the media asked, and in the process confirmed were well cared for, were vocal in their support of state officials coming to an agreement with the men in D Yard.  As documents uncovered in 2016 made clear, however, the Governor of New York, along with the members of law enforcement, had together been mobilizing to retake Attica with brutal and ugly force since day one of the uprising. As soon as they had the opportunity to do so, they did just that.

On the cold, rainy, morning of September 13, 1971, and after first dropping canisters of CN and CS gas that literally mowed the men in D Yard down as it caused them to choke and stumble blindly with tears streaming from their eyes, the State of New York then sent many hundreds of NY State Troopers, as well as corrections officers and other heavily-armed members of law enforcement, into Attica with their guns blazing. Within 15 minutes, the buckshot and bullets from their rifles, handguns, personal weapons, as well as countless state issues weapons—some of it intended for big game and some actually outlawed by the Geneva Convention--had felled 128 men, and had killed 39 of them. The State of New York, rather than negotiate a peaceful settlement at Attica had shot and killed scores of men—prisoners and hostages alike.

Stunningly, state officials then stepped outside of the prison walls and told the throngs of people assembled there, including media outlets from all over the country, that something entirely different had just taken place. The prisoners, they said, had just killed, the hostages. They had not only slit their throats, but they had also brutally castrated one of them. This outright, and utterly uncorroborated lie was printed as the factual account of what had taken place at Attica on the front page of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and most tragically, it is the story that went on the AP wire, which meant that it is the story that landed on the headlines of smaller newspapers in other cities and small towns across America.

Immediate Aftermath

This horrific lie told by the State of New York, would not only, in that moment and thereafter, turn countless Americans against the idea of that prisoners should have basic rights in this country, but it would also unleash what a later judge would call “an orgy of brutality” against the wounded, terrified, men inside of Attica--men who now were at the complete mercy of troopers and corrections officers eager to make them pay for ever having dared to rebel in the first place.

In the days, weeks, and months after state officials had retaken full control of Attica, the torture of the men inside continued, a sophisticated and far-reaching cover up of the murders, woundings, and these very acts of torture, was in fully in motion, myriad investigations of what had just happened at Attica were in process, and activists as well as lawyers from across the country were doing everything in their power to make sure that the men inside were getting the medical care and legal representation they desperately needed.

Although there was an official State of New York Investigation into why the Attica uprising had happened and, most pressingly to the public, why so many people had been shot, wounded, harmed, and killed, it has later become clear that this investigation compromised from the very beginning. From the fact that the first investigators were from the ranks of the New York State Police—the same body, and in some instances, the very same troopers—who had shot and killed people on the day of Attica’s retaking, to the fact that evidence of trooper and correction officer shootings was never collected, was “lost,” was tampered with, and even burned, there was little chance that real justice would be done. Indeed, despite the fact that every single death at Attica on September 13, 1971 was at the hands of a law enforcement bullet, rather than a single trooper of CO every stand trial, fifteen months after the massacre, the state, to disguise its villainy, charged 62 Attica Brothers, in 42 indictments, with 1300 crimes.

Fighting the Indictments

But the history of Attica is a history of resistance, and thus, the story did not end here. Indeed, even from their cells in segregation, the indicted Attica Brothers fought their charges. From the moment the indictments were handed down, young lawyers and law students from around the country descended on upstate New York to form one of the most important grassroots legal defense efforts in American history alongside them, and community activists from around the county, and world, mobilized to support their effort as well. Thanks to this herculean and collective effort, the Brothers ultimately prevented the State of New York from railroading them in the criminal trials. Thanks as well as to the bravery of a whistleblower inside of the Attica Investigation willing to point to the coverup at its core, in 1976, Governor Hugh Carey, was forced to vacate the remaining criminal indictments, disband the Attica grand juries, and even to grant pardons and commutations.

Holding the State Accountable

At that point, the State of New York would have liked nothing better than for the Attica Brothers simply to have gone away. To be sure, no trooper would ever be indicted now that the “book on Attica” would be “closed,” according to Governor Carey. But since no prisoner faced indictment anymore either, he hoped, perhaps bygones could be bygones. But for the men at Attica who had experienced a trauma of the degree they had—not just having been shot, some of them 6 and 7 times, but then stripped, assaulted, forced to run gauntlets, to endure Russian Roulette, burns, torture, and then being indicted--to have all of that trauma denied? That was asking far too much.

In fact, the surviving Attica Brothers and next of kin of the dead had already commenced a federal civil rights class action lawsuit against Rockefeller and state prison officials back on September 13, 1974.  Although they had been forced to wait to proceed with that suit until the criminal cases filed against them were resolved, proceed they eventually were determined to do. It would take a full 29 years-- decades of state attempts to silence them, hide documents, obfuscate what really had happened and who was responsible, and to protect prison and police officials from the most egregious of the actions they had carried out against fellow human beings. Eventually, however, the Attica Brothers were able to tell the court what had happened to each and every one of them at the hands of the State of New York, and the State of New York was forced to pay damages for the orgy of brutality it had unleashed against them.

Attica
The Next ChapteR

Today the Attica State Correctional Facility remains open. Attica is still a maximum security prison. Attica is still a horrific and brutal place.  Given the overcrowding of today’s mass incarceration moment, given the increased length of sentences people now serve compared to back in 1971, and given the restrictions that have been placed on prisoners’ ability to challenge the terrible conditions they endure (because of terrible pieces of legislation such as the Prison Litigation Reform Act ), some would even say that conditions there are worse there now than they were back in 1971.  

Either way, Attica is a trauma site. Attica is a site of torture.  Attica is no place for human beings now, any more than it was in 1971.

And, so, today, 50 years after the uprising at Attica we call for the immediate closing of this institution.

ATTICA MEANS FIGHT BACK!