Revolt at Attica

On September 9, 1971, as we contemplated how we could assist the special prosecutor, twelve hundred prisoners seized control of one quarter of New York’s Attica Correctional Facility. The prisoners took thirty-nine guards hostage and demanded to meet with Commissioner Russell Oswald and that Warden Mancusi be fired. For over a year the prisoners had put forth a list of demands for humane treatment including decent food and medical care, educational and occupational programs, and an end to overcrowding and guard brutality. George Jackson’s death in San Quentin the month before accelerated their demand to meet with the head of the Department of Corrections. Their pleas had been ignored, but with the takeover of the prison, they were finally being heard.

Observers were called in: New York Times reporter Tom Wicker, New York assemblyman Arthur Eve, and New York congressman Herman Badillo. Bill Kunstler came to Attica after the prisoners requested he represent them. I watched the confrontation on television, moved by the bravery of the mostly black and Latino prisoners and by the reasonableness of what they sought. I had visited enough Illinois prisons to know that the conditions they protested were endemic to the entire prison system.

Over the next four days, negotiators and observers were televised entering and leaving the prison gates. For a moment it seemed negotiations might succeed, but they then reached an impasse. While the prison administration said it would comply with some of the demands, they were adamant about no amnesty for the rebellious prisoners. The prisoners who led the takeover would be criminally prosecuted.

A deadlock loomed. Tensions grew. The prisoners asked for Governor Nelson Rockefeller to come to Attica and meet with them. He refused. Instead, he ordered hundreds of state police to surround the prison.

On September 12, Bill Kunstler, the chief lawyer at the Conspiracy Seven trial, who had decried Fred’s killing as “murder,” came out of Attica begging for more time. “I fear the worst,” he said. His passionate plea went unanswered.

The next morning a light rain fell at Attica. I watched on TV as hundreds of state police wearing yellow raincoats and armed with rifles entered the front gate. A few minutes later the television crews picked up muffled sounds of gunfire. Cold-blooded murder, I thought. The prisoners have no way to defend themselves.

A couple of hours later the media reported twenty-nine prisoners shot dead and ten hostages killed; scores of other prisoners were wounded. The prison had been retaken, but it took a massacre to do it.

There was an immediate lockdown. No one was allowed in the prison except employees. A spokesperson for Warden Mancusi reported that the dead hostages’ throats had been cut and many had been castrated. It sounded terrible, but then I wondered if their reports were true.

That night, as the National Lawyers Guild in New York was calling for lawyers to go to Attica to interview and assist the prisoners, we held a meeting at Dennis’s house. I’d come to the meeting prepared to argue that since Attica was near Buffalo, lawyers from New York should be the ones to go. But Dennis, always the visionary, spoke most eloquently.

“Attica was about rebellion, black rebellion,” he argued. “Those men were murdered and somebody has to tell their story. We have to go there. We told the Hampton story and we have to go there to be the witnesses to tell this one.”

He was right. I was too cautious. It was a time for action.

Perhaps it was as arbitrary as who had the lighter court schedule the next week, but I was selected to drive to Attica and interview the prisoners along with Mzizi Woodson, an outgoing and enthusiastic twenty-one-year-old African American woman working at PLO as a legal worker. She sported a big Afro and a warm smile. As soon as we decided that PLO would send someone to Attica, she volunteered.

“Let me go,” she said. “I can leave tomorrow.” I knew seeing Mzizi would be a welcome sight for the men inside. They were calling themselves the Attica Brothers.

Mzizi and I left Chicago on September 15, two days after the assault. We drove all night. The next morning we met Dan Pachoda and Eliot Wilk, National Lawyers Guild lawyers from New York City, at the entrance gate of the huge concrete-walled prison. The administration had just begun to allow lawyers inside the day before. Pachoda and Wilk had the list of those who led the rebellion. These were the prisoners most in danger of reprisals by the guards. We divided up the list so that between us we could see all the leaders in the next two days. I also copied down the names of the prisoners killed, knowing the people we visited would want to know who died.

“We’re here to see Frank Smith,” I told the guard at the front desk. His name came from the top of our list. Frank had been in charge of security during the takeover. I was afraid they wouldn’t let Mzizi enter, but I explained she was a paralegal and she was admitted.

We were led to the interview room, where a glass barrier two feet high ran across the middle of the table, separating visitors from prisoners. We sat down in the hard plastic chairs on our side and waited. I could hear guards’ voices echoing from outside, the clang of gates slamming shut. The room was dingy and smelled of sweat.

An hour later the guards brought in a huge bear of a man. He was just over six feet tall with broad shoulders and a huge chest and belly. His neck was thick like the rest of him, his face round, and his head was shaved. He was wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt. As soon as the guards unshackled his hands, he stuck one out in our direction around the glass.

“I’m Big Black,” he said, in a deep, rumbling voice, looking us directly in the eye. He was indeed big and very dark skinned. There was something disarming in his straightforwardness.

After the guards left, I explained that we came from a movement law office in Chicago at the urging of the National Lawyers Guild to help the Attica Brothers. He looked at both of us: I had an Afro, the Jewish, curly kind. It was a little shorter than Mzizi’s.

“Y’all came all the way from Chicago for us? Ain’t that something!” He shook his head in disbelief. He looked at Mzizi. “Are you a lawyer, too?”

“No, but I work with them. We’re here to help you if we can.” Her simple words seemed to relax him.

Big Black began his story. He sat back and gave us some background. Because of his size and the fact that he got along with everyone, including the Black Muslims, he had been chosen as head of security for the yard. He oversaw the protection of the hostages. “The hostages got the same food and water as everybody else, and we didn’t let anyone bother them. No one got near them without my permission. We even shared our blankets with them.” He said the guards/hostages wanted the administration to work out the demands “as much as we did.”

He went on to describe the siege. When the state troopers appeared above them on the walls with rifles, Frank ordered the hostages be taken to different parts of the yard and the catwalk. He told the men leading them to stand close by. “I figured the police wouldn’t fire at the brothers, for fear of hitting the guards. The hostages were blindfolded and clearly identified.”

“First came the tear gas,” he said. “People looked for something to cover their face. When I first heard shots, I thought they were blanks. Then the people around me in the yard started dropping. I realized they were real bullets, and everyone ducked and ran for cover.

“L. D. Barkley [a main inmates spokesperson who’d declared, ‘We are men, not beasts, and we will not be driven and beaten as such’] was one of the first persons I saw go down, like he had been targeted.

“When I looked up on the catwalks,” he went on, “I saw the hostages lying on the ground next to the men guarding them. Some weren’t moving and I saw blood around them.”

I asked Frank, “What about the stories that the hostages had been castrated?”

“That’s total bullshit and they know it. The hostages were shot down like dogs, like the rest of us. The troopers had all the guns. It was a slaughter and they didn’t care who they hit.”

As with Hampton, the official version was a cover-up to hide deliberate killing.

“I’m sorry about the underwear,” Frank said to Mzizi. “It’s the best I could do.”

“Where are your clothes?” she asked.

“The guards stripped us naked after the shooting. Then they made us crawl naked in the mud through a gauntlet where they beat us. They’ve only given us back underwear and T-shirts.”

“It’s been three days,” I said. “You should have some pants and a shirt by now. Maybe I can do something about this.”

“Well, you see what clothes I got,” he said. “Some men don’t even have T-shirts yet.” Leaving them in underwear looked like retaliation by the prison administration.

Frank went on to describe how all the prisoners were made to lie on the ground. Some of them had an X drawn on their back and were marched off in a different direction. He wanted to know what had happened to them. I said I didn’t know but would try to find out when we interviewed more prisoners.

Frank tried to continue. Then his powerful, booming voice stopped. Tears came. Mzizi’s and my eyes met, searching for something to say. Frank’s tone turned quieter, almost pleading.

“They took me out of the line. They made me lie on a table naked on my back and put a football under my chin. They put their burning cigarettes out on me. Some dropped them from the catwalk above and were laughing. They told me if I moved and the football hit the ground I was dead. I tried not to move. I was sure they were going to kill me. They knew that I was in charge of security and used me as an example to scare everybody else, because nobody else got this treatment.”

Frank raised his shirt and showed us the reddish, blistered burn marks on his stomach, shoulders, and arms. There were a lot of them. He lowered his shirt, his eyes full of tears. I reached around the glass and put my hand on his broad shoulder. Mzizi was also crying. She leaned over and hugged the part of his upper body she could reach.

I felt an immediate bond with Big Black. He reminded me of Walter, with his broad shoulders and warm manner. There was an openness in Frank, a willingness to share his life and his feelings. Later on, I realized what it was. Frank trusted me, trusted us.

Before we left, Frank described what it was like in the yard during the four days when the prisoners were in control. “We set up our own government,” he said. “We voted on things: what the demands would be, who would negotiate, and how to divide the food and water we got. Everybody was treated equally and the guards got as much as everyone else, including food, water, and blankets. When the troopers pointed their guns and opened fire, the guards were just as scared and were crying like the rest of us.”

Our time was up. We had been allowed nearly two hours with Frank, and wanted to see other prisoners. We stepped to the side of the table. I put my arms around Frank and he hugged me back. I’d never done that with a prisoner. He and Mzizi exchanged a longer hug. “We will tell the story of you and the Attica Brothers,” she vowed, as he was shackled and led away.

We came out of the prison late in the afternoon, charged up after seeing more prisoners who gave us similar accounts of what happened in the yard. “We’ve just got to tell what happened,” Mzizi said. “What the state troopers did was nothing but a cold-blooded massacre.”

“Rockefeller ordered them to do it,” I said. “He should be held responsible.”

That night Mzizi and I went to a meeting at the home of Herman Schwartz, an ACLU lawyer and professor at the University of Buffalo Law School. All the lawyers who had been inside that day were there, along with Schwartz and some of his law students. He had a reputation as an expert in prisoner rights and ran a clinic at the law school.

For the meeting, he arranged the chairs in his living room in rows facing a large cushioned chair where he would sit. Before the meeting started we proposed putting the chairs in a circle so that we faced each other. We were used to the more equal arrangement from our collective’s meetings. One of the law students, Mara Siegel, agreed with us. Professor Schwartz seemed reluctant but agreed and we rearranged the chairs; the meeting began.

Mzizi and I were adamant about going to the press right away. Schwartz wanted to keep a tight rein over what was said and avoid anything too inflammatory, or too political. “Let’s be careful about what we say,” he said. “So far, everything’s been cleared through me.” It reminded me of the lawyer meetings after the Panther raid, when some of the lawyers urged too much caution.

We’d learned from the Hampton case that the battle for the public’s mind was critical; most people formed their opinions based on the early reports. Rockefeller’s office and the prison administration were trying to justify the orders to fire based on the supposed threats to the hostages, but they had discarded the castration and throat-cutting stories after the coroner reported they all died of gunshot wounds. None of the lawyers who had visited the prisoners after the assault had talked to the press about the gauntlet or prisoners being singled out for more beatings with an X placed on their back or even the lack of proper clothes.

At the meeting we obtained a consensus that the prisoners’ stories had to be told, and soon. Schwartz agreed to hold a press conference. One of the New York lawyers who’d been inside and heard accounts similar to ours would tell what happened.

After the meeting Mzizi, Mara Siegel, and I went to the local motel/restaurant for a drink.

“So what do you do in Chicago?” Mara asked. She had huge brown eyes, long, straight, dark hair, and a contagious laugh. She spoke with excitement. The more we told her about the history of the People’s Law Office, the more interested she became.

I was explaining how it was that we came to Attica, when I noticed five or six guys crowded around the table next to us. They were noisy, a little drunk, and appeared to be celebrating, with their glasses of beer raised high as if in a salute to something. I leaned over to hear what they were saying.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” one of them said.

“Yeah, I know I got a few of them,” the guy next to him responded. “You should have seen them running, trying to get away.” They all laughed.

It took me a moment to realize what they were talking about. These were the state police, now in civilian clothes. Seventy-two hours earlier they’d come into the prison firing their assault rifles. I listened to see if I could pick up any more of the details of what they were saying.

They saw me looking at them and lowered their voices. When I told Mzizi and Mara what I’d heard they didn’t believe it. Then they did. Shocked, we paid our check and got out of there. I’m pretty sure I heard Mara say “killers” under her breath as we walked past them to leave. We should have said it out loud.

Mzizi and I spent two more days interviewing the Attica prisoners, returning once to see Big Black who was still in his underwear. It was like visiting an old friend. We communicated greetings to him from other prisoners and told him what we had learned. He asked us when we were coming back and I said somebody from our office would return soon.

“Don’t forget me and what we did,” he said.

I never have.

I returned from Attica ready to pass on the powerful but tragic stories told to me by the men inside. I spoke at a rally outside of Cook County Jail from the back of a pick-up truck. My message—in reality their message—was a call to prisoners, and indeed to all of us, to stand up and rebel against brutality and inhumane conditions, and to people on the outside to support prisoner demands for humane treatment.

“Who is Attica?” I asked, after recounting the stories of Big Black and the other Attica Brothers.

“Attica is all of us!” The crowd responded enthusiastically (I’ve never had a more receptive audience). The conditions at Attica were no worse than the conditions in Illinois prisons or the Cook County Jail, and many in the audience had friends or relatives inside.

Everyone at PLO agreed we should continue representing the Attica Brothers. In the short term this meant working to improve the conditions for the men in the prison, which was on lockdown. On the not-too-distant horizon, it meant criminal defense. It was a certainty that the leaders of the rebellion who had survived would face criminal charges including murder. The administration was blaming the prisoners for the guards’ deaths, rather than the state troopers who shot them.

For the next five years, we and many other Guild attorneys, including Bill Kunstler, who had been an observer during the takeover, worked for the Attica Brothers defense. Liz Fink and Danny Meyers from New York eventually made representation of the Attica Brothers their full-time work along with Dennis and Michael from PLO.

I returned to Attica several times, but eventually my major responsibility shifted to the Hampton case. I was building a private practice in Chicago to support the office financially, and also became more involved in the local issues of urban renewal, police brutality, and prison conditions in Illinois. And, I confess, Michael and Dennis were more willing to travel than I was. They put the fate of the Attica Brothers ahead of everything else.

There was plenty to do in Chicago. In addition to the Hampton and Clark cases and our regular criminal cases, the People’s Law Office represented the antiwar movement, Weatherman fugitives, grand jury resisters, Puerto Rican political prisoners, the Young Lords Organization, and prisoners who challenged the poor conditions in Illinois and federal prisons in court. We could not have taken all this on without being a collective, sharing both a common political commitment as well as work and money. I could pull back on representing the Attica Brothers because Michael and Dennis took over. Dennis could stop working on the Hampton case when he moved to Buffalo because Flint and I made it our priority.