Attica is all of us

Another September anniversary just came and went-less noticed, and perhaps harder to talk about, than the famous one. The uprising at Attica Correctional Facility, a New York State maximum-security prison between Buffalo and Rochester, happened forty years ago. Disturbances in A Block began on September 8th, spread through three other blocks on the ninth, and ended on the thirteenth, when state troopers, guards, and others stormed the prison and tear-gassed and shot prisoners and their hostages. Thirty-two prisoners and eleven hostages (all of them prison employees) died. Dozens more were wounded or injured. Subdued by the police, prisoners then suffered beatings and torture.

Many of those who survived the events are now old men. On a mild evening when the setting sun lit the white, multi-steepled main tower of Riverside Church, a panel of seven former Attica prisoners sat on a row of chairs before the altar and talked about the uprising. The huge uptown church was packed; on a weekend of September 11th remembrances, two thousand or more came to this memorial, called "Attica Is All of Us." In the bright lights, each panelist's face shone a different shade of brown, and in the pews, where the overhead chandeliers had been dimmed, audience members who rose to applaud stood out as silhouettes. Jama Joseph, a film professor at Columbia, who presided, tried to get the panelists to talk about Attica as a "people's victory," but they described it as more spontaneous and chaotic-"a ball of confusion," one said.

One panelist's voice was high and soft, like Michael Jackson's, another's was raspy, another's was brisk and deep and confident. "After the one guard, Quinn, was stomped down, I knew they was gonna kill a lot of people, and they did"; ''There was no plan, no plot, no scheme"; "A number of correction officers locked themselves inside a cell block-I walked by, and it was like a different transference of identity"; "People was breakin' into the pharmacy, doin' unbecoming things"; "The Black Panthers and other groups wanted to kill the hostages, but we Muslims was the most disciplined group in the prison, and we took the hostages and protected them with our lives"; 'When the helicopters came in, they started shootin', and this one man I saw, they shot his head off. His head went one way and his body went the other." A panelist who wore a Peruvian-type hat with earflaps took the microphone and then could barely speak. The seconds went by. A weighted silence rose to the church's vaulted ceiling.

After the prisoners' panel, Amiri Baraka, the poet, who lives in Newark, recited the poem that had caused New Jersey to abolish the post of poet laureate out from under him. The poem asks which race has caused the greatest amount of human misery and consists of repeated sentences beginning with "Who." It touched on subjects from the destruction of native peoples, to the "4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers" who were told to "stay home" on September 11th, to the origin of AIDS, to the deaths of Lenin and Princess Diana. It ended with a long, shouted, window-shaking ''Who-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o?"

During a second panel, the Princeton professor Cornel West gave a short oration. He was wearing a three-piece suit with a watch chain across the vest and gleaming white cuffs. As he gestured, the right cuff made emphatic calligraphy in the air: "The Attica brothers who spoke here tonight consecrated this evening! ... America has been niggerized by September 11th, and we have become willing to consent to our own domination! ... Back in '71, the Attica brothers told the truth, but they weren't the only ones, you had a whole cacophony of voices! ... Today that kind of courage is in short supply! ... You better keep love in your heart for the people! ... A new wave of truthtelling! A new wave of witness-bearing! We might get crushed, too! ... But then you go down swinging, like Ella Fitzgerald and Muhammad Ali!"

Earlier, the Reverend Stephen H. Phelps, the interim senior minister at Riverside Church, asked all the members of the audience who had any past or present Attica connection to stand. Then he asked those who knew someone who had been in any prison to stand. Many hundreds of people-perhaps two-thirds of the assembly-were on their feet. Then he said, "Attica is all of us," and asked everybody to stand.

by Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, 26 Sept 2011, p56