REMEMBERING ATTICA: prison history

Thursday, September 08, 2011

REMEMBERING ATTICA

By Dennis Cunningham, Michael Deutsch, & Elizabeth Fink

Prison Legal News

This year, September 9th will mark the 40th
anniversary of the rebellion at Attica State
Prison in upstate New York. As one of the
prisoner leaders, L.D. Barkley, announced to the
world, the rebellion was "but the sound before
the fury of those who are oppressed." The sound
of Attica was heard cloud and clear, but the fury
at the time was reserved to the assault force:
several hundred violently angry white state
police and prison guards, who carried out the
massacre that ended the rebellion on September
13, 1971, with 43 men dead. The fury of the
oppressed themselves has been a work in progress since that time.

L.D. was one of many politically aware prisoners
in New York and elsewhere who identified with the
struggle for liberation world-wide, with
consciousness growing out the civil rights
movement, the urban uprisings of the 60's, and
the ideology and practice of Malcolm X and the
Black Panther Party. Much of it was given voice
in the writings of George Jackson and Eldridge
Cleaver, especially "Soledad Brother" and "Soul
on Ice", whose searing indictment of injustice,
racism, and cruelty in the prisons in California
echoed across the country, and inspired
resistance. A Manifesto demanding reform and
urging resistance had come out of California's
Folsom Prison in 1970 and made its way around the
Country and into Attica, and the prisoners there
had delivered one of their own to NYS
authorities, which was ignored, several months
before the rebellion. George Jackson was
assassinated at San Quentin on August 21, 1971; a
few days later the prisoners at Attica staged a
surprise protest at breakfast, during which
nobody ate and nobody talked. The guards were
stunned at the unanimity of it, and unnerved.

A number of the prisoners had been involved in
previous, smaller rebellions in the Tombs jail in
New York City and at the state prison at
Auburn,. Various chapters of political groups on
the outside had formed inside, including the BPP
and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the Black
Muslims had large, organized contingent at
Attica, as in all the prisons in the state at
that time. Political literature flowed freely,
and the groups were often able to gather in the
exercise yards and various work and other locales
in the institution. Grievances against the
guards, the administration and the system were
many, and widely shared, especially on the part
of the Black and Latino prisoners, who came
mainly from New York City, and almost all the
rest from other big city environments like
Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester. The entire staff
at Attica at the time was white except for one
Puerto Rican officer, who worked in a watchtower
and had no contact with prisoners; and the
surrounding rural area of Western New York State
which they came from was mostly what some call
"up South", to denote the level of racial
antipathy and outright bigotry endemic in the
local population, and thus the prison work force.

At the same time, there was a strong and growing
belief among the prisoners that they had
clear-cut rights under the Constitution, that
guaranteed fair and decent treatment, and freedom
from discrimination; that, despite years of
peaceful petition and advocacy, their rights were
largely ignored by the prison administration; and
that many kinds of nastiness and brutality they
experienced from the white guards were a matter
of policy. Many prisoners had come to feel that something had to be done.

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