September 9, 1971: Attica prison rebellion

What was behind ’71 Attica prison revolt?

The following article, “The Attica Rebellion,” by Derrick Morrison, a staff writer for the Militant in the early 1970s, was written at the time of the events described below. Morrison was a reporter for the Militant in Attica, New York, during the prison revolt. We are publishing this article because it graphically depicts conditions that have been, and remain today, prevalent throughout the U.S. prison system. Interest in this question is now wider as a result of the revelations of the systematic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military and intelligence officers in U.S.-run jails in Iraq, which mirror U.S. prisons. The article below, dated Nov. 14, 1971, was compiled from reports published in the Militant. It appeared in the Pathfinder Press pamphlet Attica: Why Prisoners Are Rebelling, which is now out of print. It is copyright © Pathfinder Press 1972 and is reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY DERRICK MORRISON

“Officials of Attica state prison knew that real trouble was brewing on the morning of Aug. 22, [1971] just a few days after the killing at San Quentin of Black Panther George Jackson and just a few short weeks before the rebellion at Attica itself.

“The prisoners arrived at the mess hall at the usual time that day, about quarter past seven. But there was a huge difference, as Correction Officer Sgt. Jack English recalls: ‘It was the weirdest thing. They all walked in as usual, divided into two lines and walked through the serving area. But nobody picked up a tray or a spoon, and nobody took any food. They just walked through the line and went to their seats and they sat down. They looked straight ahead and nobody made a sound. You could have heard your wristwatch ticking. It was eerie.

“‘Then we noticed that almost all had some black on them. Some had black cloth armbands, some had black shoelaces tied around their arms, others had little pieces of black cloth or paper pinned on them.

“‘It scared us because a thing like that takes a lot of organization, a lot of solidarity, and we had no idea they were so well organized.’”

This guard’s statement, quoted in the October 5, 1971, New York Daily News, gives us an incisive glimpse of the forces that were to erupt into open view in the Attica prison rebellion on September 9.

Close to 1,500 inmates participated in the September events. They seized one of the four cellblocks and its adjoining yard and took forty-odd guards and civilian workers as hostages. About 85 percent of the rebels were Black and Puerto Rican.

The inmates set up an executive council. Among its members were Brothers Richard Clark, Herbert X. Blyden, Charles “Flip” Crowley, Roger Champen, Elliot Barkley (also known as “L. D.”), and Jerry Rosenberg. The council, with the consent of all the inmates, elaborated a list of thirty demands for changing the conditions inside the prison.

The rebellion lasted until the morning of September 13, when a thousand-man assault force composed of state troopers, prison guards, and National Guardsmen burst into the prison area held by the inmates. Firing indiscriminately, the assault force murdered twenty-nine inmates and nine guard hostages—according to official figures—and wounded over 300 other inmates.

Chain of events that led to the revolt
The chain of events leading to September 9 began in early July when a group known as the Attica Liberation Faction sent an eight-page manifesto to the new state corrections commissioner, Russell G. Oswald.

Oswald styles himself a liberal. After being appointed to his position on January 1, 1971, he repeatedly talked about the need for prison reform. What prompted the manifesto was a directive by Oswald allowing the inmates to send confidential letters to prison authorities, elected officials, or their attorneys without being subject to any reprisals.

The manifesto was mild in tone: “These demands are being presented to you. There is no strike of any kind to protest these demands. We are trying to do this in a democratic fashion. We feel there is no need to dramatize our demands.” Yet Oswald was unresponsive.

Later, in August, when a reporter who had gained entrance to the prison asked Oswald about the manifesto he was told it was under study. The reporter, Richard J. Roth of the Buffalo Courier-Express, said at the time that the inmates he talked with felt shortchanged and slighted by Oswald. They felt that his performance hadn’t matched his rhetoric.

Justice of prisoners’ demands
The demands submitted by the inmates during the September rebellion were essentially the same as those that had been drawn up in July. The inmates wanted to be allowed more than one shower a week. They asked that the bugs be washed off the lettuce and flies be kept off the food. Since many of them were Muslims, they demanded that less pork or no pork at all be served. Because of the suppression of the Islamic faith, they wanted freedom of religion.

Inmates were being paid slave wages of 25 cents to $1 a day. They demanded that all work done in the prison come under the New York State minimum wage law. To allow for ongoing discussion of grievances with prison authorities, they called for the organization of an inmate council. As a step toward humanizing the prison, the inmates wanted the guards to cease banging and clanging on the steel bars with pieces of wood, which the guards dubbed “nigger sticks.” Such was the language employed by an all-white guard force in a prison of close to 2,300, of which—according to the State Corrections Department—54.9 percent were Black and 6.9 percent were Puerto Rican.

These demands were obviously reasonable. But it was only after the San Quentin assassination of George Jackson and the demonstration of inmate solidarity at the August 22 breakfast that Oswald decided to come to Attica. In a tape-recorded broadcast on September 3, he demanded for himself that which the inmates had already had enough of—time.

The inmates sensed that if the impetus for prison reform was not going to come from the top, if the “prison reformers” could not even respond to the submission of a concrete set of demands, then some action had to be taken by those on the bottom.

A spark was all that was needed
Given the charged atmosphere, a spark was all that was needed to set off the conflagration. This was provided by a routine case of guard brutality on Wednesday night, September 8. The news circulated, and on the very next day the whole country heard about Attica. It was to become the most important prison revolt in the history of the United States.

Oswald and the authorities had no sense of the determination of the prisoners. They thought that after a sufficient amount of “talk” and “reasoning together” the inmates would go meekly back to their cells and release the forty-odd hostages they had taken. However, this turned out not to be the case.

The inmates demanded complete amnesty, convocation of a group of prominent individuals to serve as a committee of observers, and the entry of the press to relay their demands for prison reform to the public. Among the individuals they listed to form the observer committee were William Kunstler, the civil liberties lawyer; Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party; Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Harlem Muslim Mosque; Tom Wicker, an associate editor of the New York Times; and Jim Ingram, a columnist for the Michigan Chronicle, a Black weekly published in Detroit.

Two people to whom Oswald had to give recognition during the first stages of negotiation with the inmates were Herman Schwartz, a professor at the law school of the University of Buffalo and persistent critic of the penal system, and Arthur O. Eve, a Black state assemblyman from Buffalo who had agitated for prison reform. These two helped assemble and became part of the observer committee. They also were instrumental in getting a court order early Friday morning giving amnesty to the inmates for any damage done to prison property. But the inmates tore it up because it was valid only for September 9, Thursday.

Oswald, who said he could agree with twenty-eight of the inmates’ thirty demands, declared unacceptable the demands for amnesty and for the removal of the prison warden, Vincent Mancusi. The amnesty demand became crucial. Many of the inmates had taken part in rebellions in other prisons of the state or in the New York City jails, and they knew that heavy reprisals followed every one of these actions. So they stood fast for complete amnesty from any criminal prosecution.

The observer committee of about twenty people met with the inmates for the first time on Friday night, September 10. They were to meet twice more—on Saturday and Sunday—before the Monday morning massacre.

Typical of how the observers felt before and after meeting with the inmates was the reaction of William Gaiter, head of a Black organization called BUILD (Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, Dignity) in Buffalo. He told The Militant: “Prior to going down, we had been told by Oswald that he would not go into the yard again. I understand that he had been down a couple times Thursday, and he was quite shaken. He decided that he would not go down again. The man was just scared to death.

“But after being down in the block awhile, my apprehension and tension were relieved. I began to feel related to the people there. They made it very clear to us that they did not intend for us to negotiate their demands, but simply to relay the demands, interpret them, and to make provisions for negotiations between them and the prison authorities.”

Tom Wicker, a native of North Carolina, related his impressions in an article in the September 15 New York Times. “Late Sunday [September 12] afternoon…a Black prisoner seized the microphone. ‘To oppressed people all over the world,’ he shouted, ‘We got the solution! The solution is unity!’ The Black inmate’s impassioned cry also suggests several other aspects of that strange society—its strikingly effective organization, its fierce political radicalism, its submergence of racial animosity in class solidarity….”

As the rebellion persisted, Oswald’s use of the carrot began to wear thin in the eyes of state officials. So they began to make preparations for the use of the stick. It had gone on too long, and it was damaging the government’s image as many discovered for the first time the abominable reality behind the prison walls.

As Oswald prepared the assault force—in collaboration with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was in turn consulting with President Richard Nixon—he engaged in a game of duplicity with the observer committee, the only medium of contact the inmates had with state officials.

The brutal assault
And on Monday morning, September 13, instead of continuing promised negotiations, Oswald issued an ultimatum to the inmates, followed up at 9:45 a.m. by the assault. Just before the invasion, two CH-34 Army helicopters lifted off the ground to drop their cargo of CS gas on the inmate-held section of the prison. This was followed by the massive, military-style assault—just as in Vietnam.

After it was all over, prison officials and police told bloodcurdling stories of how the inmates had slit the throats of the hostages and castrated some of them. Police reported they shot only those inmates who resisted.

But in a matter of twenty-four hours, what the capitalist news media had accepted and purveyed to the public as holy writ became pure bunk. Autopsies on the bodies of the dead guards showed that no throats had been slit and that nobody had been castrated. All had died of gunshot wounds, and state officials had to admit that only the assault force had had guns.

These facts prove that the police gunfire was indiscriminate, since the guards held hostage surely had no reason to offer resistance. Furthermore, since a simple examination would reveal whether genitals had been removed, the statements issued by Oswald and his subordinates were not the result of indiscretion or carelessness, but products of design and calculation.

While the state and prison officials have easy access to the press and communications media, the Attica inmates are not allowed to speak out. Information that has trickled out of the prison by way of visiting relatives and lawyers suggests a reign of terror prevailing at Attica after the rebellion. Inmates’ glasses, legal papers, and other personal possessions were smashed and destroyed by rampaging state police and guards. This destruction was not just visited upon the rebelling inmates but upon the total prison population.

Lawyers from the Legal Aid Society and American Civil Liberties Union who were allowed into the prison reported and documented cases of brutality, including situations where guards resorted to torture by applying lighted cigars and cigarettes to the bodies of the inmates.

Accompanying this sadism were round-the-clock interrogations by a state investigating committee. This committee, headed by Deputy State Attorney General Robert E. Fischer, can in theory indict either inmates or police. But in all likelihood, the inmates will bear the brunt of any prosecution. Police officers directly involved in the assault are included on the committee, so any investigation it conducts will be a farce. The criminal cannot investigate the criminal.

Moreover, after crushing the Attica rebellion in blood, Oswald declared his previous acceptance of twenty-eight of the inmates’ demands null and void.

These are only bits and pieces of the circumstances at Attica.

As yet, no ongoing campaign—despite the rash of demonstrations and protest meetings—has been organized to defend the victims and enable them to get their side of the story out. And no independent investigating committee has yet been convened by Black and Puerto Rican community leaders to educate the masses about Attica.

Nevertheless, the Attica rebellion has left its mark—on the prison system and on the consciousness of millions of Americans. The courageous stand of the Attica inmates proves that no layer of U.S. society is too oppressed or too brutalized to assert its humanity, to fight to be treated like human beings.

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