Attica Prison Uprising,1971 and its legacy

From Sept, 9 to Sept 13, 1971 ,people watched riveted as nearly 1,300 men stood together in America's most dramatic prison uprising, for better conditions at the Attica Correctional  Facility in upstate New York. The men were fed on little to nothing, were given only one roll of toilet paper a month, endured beatings, racial epithets, and barbaric medical treatment, and suffered th trauma of being thrown into a cell and kept there for days, naked, as punishment. 

The Attica uprising was historic because these men spoke directly to the public, and by doing so, they powerfully sent out a message that serving time did not make someone less of a human being.

The uprising  took  place less than two weeks after the killing of imprisoned black revolutionary  and Black Panther Party  George Jackson  on Aug. 21, 1971. The  inmates at Attica Prison, had tried to get their concerns addressed through proper and official channels, their frustration, after being ignored on a number of issues ranging from substantial medical care, inadequate food and clothing, insufferable heat and the abusive and racially discriminatory treatment they received from their guards.

They had written to at least one state senator and sent numerous letters to the Department of Corrections, and despite the peaceful nature and relatively tame demands to improve conditions in the prison, the final straw for the men at Attica was the brutalization of two prisoners after an altercation between them and correctional officers on Sept. 8, 1971. 

The two men were taken to Housing Block Z (HBZ), an area of the prison where people were routinely assaulted by guards. The next day, the uprising began. prisoners united  and revolted and took over the prison, taking a number of hostages at the time.

Four people, one guard and three prisoners, were killed in the early hours of the uprising. Then, for the next four days, a group of leaders  emerged out of the initial chaos to try and attempt to negotiate a peaceful surrender with state officials, while demanding amnesty for actions conducted during the uprising, as well as access to classes, religious freedom, and fairer disciplinary practices. 

Members from the ALF drafted a list of five demands to be met as preconditions for ending the occupation of the prison. The five demands were as follows:  

1.We want complete amnesty, meaning freedom from all and any physical, mental and legal reprisals.

2.We want immediate speedy and safe transportation out of confinement to a non-imperialistic country. 

3.We demand that the Federal Government intervene, so that we will be under direct Federal Jurisdiction. 

4.We want the Governor and the Judiciary, namely Constance B. Motley, to guarantee that there will be no reprisals and we want all factions of the media to articulate this. 

5,We urgently demand immediate negotiations through William M. Kunstler, Attorney at Law, 588 9th Avenue, New York, New York; Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve of Buffalo; the Prisoner Solidarity Committee of New York; Minister Farrakan of the Muslims. 

We want Huey P. Newton from the Black Panther Party and we want the Chairman of the Young Lords Party. We want Clarence B. Jones of the Amsterdam News. We want Tom Wicker of the New York Times. We want Richard Roth from the Courier Express. We want the Fortune Society; Dave Anderson of the Urban League of Rochester; Brine Eva Barnes; We want Jim Hendling of the Democratic Late Chronicle of Detroit, Michigan. We guarantee the safe passage of all people to and from this institution. We invite all the people to come here and witness this degradation so that they can better know how to bring this degradation to an end. This is what we want. 

These five demands were expanded into “15 practical proposals” to be negotiated by various parties including the men inside, representatives for the governor, state prison officials and outside observers. Over the next few days, the demands were heard and dismissed by Gov. Rockefeller. A 28-point plan was negotiated with Commissioner Oswald and rejected by uprising participants. 

Soon after, Black Panther Bobby Seale arrived, with many close to the situation hoping he could persuade those inside to accept the 28-point agreement. Seale said he would support all decisions made by prisoners and that he would not tell them what they should do. After the rejection of the agreement, Gov. Rockefeller refused to negotiate further, ignoring pleas of desperate hostages. 

A day later, on 13 September, 1971,  on what is known as Bloody Monday, Rockefeller ordered thousands of National Guardsmen to swarm the prison,  tear gas was dropped into the yard and New York State  troopers randomly opened fire non-stop for two minutes into the smoke.Less than an a quarter of an hour after the assault on Attica had begun, the prison was bathed in blood. 

At the time of the uprising, there were 2,400 inmates living in a facility built for 1,600. Though over 60 percent of inmates were Black and Latino the prison was completely run by white guards and employees, many of whom were openly racist. Attica on many accounts was a hellhole. The largest industry in a forsaken and impoverished upstate town, it was a place where urban blacks were locked up in bathroom-size cells only to be allowed one shower per week and one roll of toilet paper each month. Their mail was heavily censored to cut out anything involving prisons and prisoners’ rights. The medical neglect within the facility was criminal. Guards often pitted inmates against each other to incite racial violence. Inmates also labored for 40 cents a day, assembling mattresses, shoes and license plates.

Thirty-nine people were killed in the disastrous assault, including 29 prisoners and 10 prison guards, with hundreds  left maimed and wounded and the prisoners  that  were  left were subjected to extreme brutality and torture. 

Those who were considered leaders, the prisoner negotiators, spokesmen and security men, were singled out for prolonged abuse. The example of the Attica prisoners uniting and standing up for their rights and dignity in the face of such intense repression inspired and electrified  people around the world.

The Attica prison uprising was by no means an isolated or spontaneous clash. It came as a revolutionary mood swept through Black and Latino communities and other progressive sectors of the population in the United States. By September 1971, the Civil Rights movement had transformed itself into a movement for national liberation among the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano populations. 

Starting in 1964, rebellions swept urban areas throughout the United States. Major insurrections took place in Rochester, Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and other cities. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in 1968 more than 120 cities went up in flames as young people battled police, National Guard units and state troopers. Revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party and Young Lords Party were militantly organizing in urban communities. Millions of people were protesting the Vietnam War and joining the women’s and LGBT liberation movements.
This revolutionary mood in the community sank deep roots within the prisoner population too. The Attica prisoners were reading revolutionary newspapers. They were studying Marx and Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, and Franz Fanon and reading socialist, communist and revolutionary nationalist newspapers. Prisoners were staging uprisings all over the country, not just in Attica, New York. The rebellions were extensions of the national liberation struggles happening all over the United States.
In the aftermath of the bloody raid authorities said that the inmates had killed the slain hostages by slitting their throats. However, autopsies later revealed this to be false, and in fact all 10 hostages had been shot dead by police. In the bloody aftermath ,it turned into a manhunt: the enraged correction officers and troopers sought out those whom they thought of as ringleaders and executed them. Several of the dead among the leaders were seen alive well after the prison had been retaken. Some were shot as many as twelve times, at close range.

Even the thirty-nine dead did not end the violence, as the guards forced the inmates to strip naked and then tortured them for most of the rest of the day and night. Any prisoner who troopers or CO’s considered to be a leader was chalked across the back with a large white X. As each one was made to run a gantlet of clubs, the officers would call out, “You want your amnesty? Well, come and get it.” 

The vengeful officers played Russian roulette with the inmates, and then forced them to drink the guards’ urine. One inmate, Frank (Big Black) Smith, who had been visible in the uprising, lay wounded on a table for many hours, made to clutch a football beneath his chin, and warned that if it dropped he would be killed. When he was released, he collapsed and the guards battered him repeatedly in the groin and anal region as he pleaded for mercy.

In the week after its conclusion, police engaged in brutal reprisals against the prisoners, forcing them to run a gauntlet of nightsticks and crawl naked across broken glass, among other tortures. The many injured inmates received substandard medical treatment, if any.

The fallout after the 1971 Attica uprising was considerable. The Weather Underground, a group of left-wing militants, set off a bomb at the New York Department of Corrections offices. Under political and public pressure, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had ordered the massacre in the first place, responded to it by creating the New York State Special Commission on Attica, which found there was plenty of official blame to go around.
However  the attempted cover-up increased public condemnation of the raid and prompted a Congressional investigation. In January 2000, New York State settled a 26-year-old class-action lawsuit filed by the Attica inmates against prison and state officials. For their suffering during the raid and the weeks following, the former and current inmates accepted $8 million.
The post Attic uprising years instead of leading to reform led to an even more punitive justice policy which has had very real social, political and economic consequences. Decades of policy failures, including a culture of impunity for  correctional officers, have eroded many of the gains that the Attica  uprising’s incarcerated leaders fought and died to secure. First of all, tougher laws put in place led to extraordinarily high rates of incarcernation since 1971. Back then there were several hundred thousand in prison, today there are now well over  two million behind bars.

Not only does the US have the world’s largest incarcerated population  it also harbours at state level some of the harshest felony disenfranchisement laws in the world. Prisoners  have also stated  that under the 13th Amendment which abolished racial slavery, at the same time it allowed human beings to be worked for free or next to nothing as long as they were prisoners. Prisoners see the current system of prison slavery to thus be a continuation of racial slavery, which is a system that generates billions of dollars in profits each year for major corporations in key industries such as fossil fuels, fast food, banking, and the US military.
One would think that slavery should not be legal under any circumstances and prisons should be staffed well-enough to ensure that inmates are not killed and sexually violated on a regular basis, surely these should not be controversial sentiments in the 21st-century.

At the present time 1 in 100 American adults  are locked behind bars, and many more are on probation, parole, house arrest, or in immigrant detention facilities. While African-Americans, Native, Latino, and poor whites make up the bulk of the prison population, black, brown, and red convicts make up much a higher percentage of inmates than their white counter-parts. 

For instance, there are currently more African-American people locked within the prison industrial complex than were held in racialized slavery prior to the American civil war in the 1860s. It is in this climate in the footsteps of their predecessors at Attica that today's prison rebels have organized themselves to carry out the strike.

The cruel mass incarceration system in the USA  that  is still inherently merciless and immoral must continue to be exposed. And  a radical vision for change behind bars is still urgently needed, which  was powerfully captured in the Manifesto of Demands read out by LD Barkley, one of the leaders of the Attica rebellion who was killed along with the 38 others when the prison was violently re-taken:

We are men! We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States.
What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed...We call upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens not only our lives, but each and every citizen as well.

In popular culture, the legacy of Attica is invoked by a chant (“Attica! Attica!”) to signal that excessive force and brutalization by police is imminent. The uprising ignited a new awareness around prison conditions. Thanks to the work of historians and political educators, we now know more about the unnecessary and extreme violence law enforcement enacted against the people who took part.

Attica Blues - Archie Shepp