The Lessons of Attica

For many, the prison riots 20 years ago at New York's Attica State Correctional Facility fit into the tapestry of the times: the church bombing in Birmingham, the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, the gunning down of student protesters at Kent State (and the less often remembered Jackson State). All of these incidents pointed to an unpleasant reality: how the institutions of this country were willing to treat those deemed problematic.

And whereas these atrocities forced most Americans to ask questions about themselves, the riots at Attica prison gave most white Americans the opportunity to ask questions about others (read "black people"). Though Attica should have raised questions about racism in the American penal justice system (as well as society at large), it mostly raised to a conscious level people's deepest fears, creating a vacuum for the tough-on-crime, law-and-order rhetoric of President Richard Nixon -- rhetoric that still echoes through the halls of this country's most powerful institutions.

For me, Attica was another piece of the quilt; for African Americans and other people of color, Attica was a tutorial on their future in America. It was a formative and life-changing experience by which their lenses became all-too-clear, the future no longer in doubt.

This September 13, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Attica tragedy, I sought to examine the lessons our nation learned from it -- not an easy task, as in my quick glance I discovered no mention of the anniversary in The Washington Post, The New York Times, or The Minneapolis Star Tribune. The story's absence became a lesson in itself.

ATTICA PRISON in 1971 had 2,245 prisoners, 85 percent of whom were African American or Puerto Rican, while the prison guards were virtually all white. At 9 a.m. on September 9, 1971, 1,200 prisoners rioted, having on several earlier occasions presented demands -- for better food, improved recreational facilities, the ending of physical abuse -- to prison officials, but the grievances had gone mostly unheeded. When the rioting broke out, 39 hostages were taken, 28 guards and 11 civilian prison employees.

For four days negotiations took place between prison officials and riot leaders, mostly through a group of well-known intermediaries. After some initial hopeful signs, it became obvious that Governor (and soon-to-be vice president) Nelson Rockefeller and prison officials would not acquiesce to prisoner demands and would retake the prison. For Rockefeller, the difference between winning and losing was more important than the difference between right and wrong.

Just moments after the deadline for release of the hostages, state troopers moved in to regain control of the prison. In the short melee that followed, 39 people were killed. All nine hostages who died, despite early reports by prison officials that they had been stabbed by their captors, were killed by bullets from the guns of their "liberators." Two hundred prisoners were injured, many having been beaten by patrolmen and guards.

Rev. Eugene Rivers, pastor of an inner-city church in Dorchester, Massachusetts, saw dire implications in the violent suppression of the riot. "Attica was a test tube, an experiment for the people in charge of penology," Rivers told me. "They wanted to see America's reaction to the destruction of a bunch of black men, most of whom were viewed as deserving of what they got ... When they saw the reaction, they realized that a policy of eradicating black males was possible."

If anything, the conditions that led to the disturbance have deteriorated even more, and the turbulence that rocked Attica could well happen in other prisons. The carnage rained down in Attica continues on the streets of our inner cities, and the response of most people is still either numbed silence or support for "taking care of the problem."

Unfortunately, it would seem that few people have learned the lessons of Attica. It is tempting to be seduced by amnesia around these difficult memories. But healing never comes through forgetfulness. Only through remembering, confessing, and struggling together will we really learn what history has to teach. Only then will the future that we envision be clear.

Bob Hulteen was Under Review editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.