Learning from the slaughter in Attica
AUGUST 29, 2016
By Adam Gopnik
... What happened at Attica in September, 1971? A series of accidents in a creakingly worn-out prison turned a modest petition for decency into a full-fledged takeover—one as surprising to the inmates as to anyone else—that, after four days, ended in a reprisal riot by guards and state police that left thirty-nine people dead. Attica was a hellhole. The largest industry in a forsaken and impoverished upstate town, it was a place where urban blacks were locked up in bathroom-size cells to be guarded by rural whites. Although Attica was a high-security prison, predating the great incarceration crisis of the next decades, the population was the usual mixture of small-time thieves and mid-level drug dealers, mixed in with a handful of violent offenders and some imports from earlier prison riots ...
... on the morning of September 9th, a company of prisoners, being led back to their cells, sleepless and uneasy over a rumor that a prisoner had been killed by guards the night before, found themselves locked in one of the tunnels that connected their cell block to “Times Square,” the bleak central yard. Attica’s security depended on an aging, easily overwhelmed set of mechanical locks and levers, of a kind that one sees in Alcatraz movies. Thinking they had been deliberately trapped in the crowded tunnel so that the guards—the “goon squad”—would be free to retaliate against some of their number, the prisoners quickly found that the gate keeping them out of the yard could be broken with a homemade battering ram. It was an act propelled more by panic than by premeditation. Within minutes, a chain reaction of improvised insurrections and parallel mishaps—the antiquated phones made it impossible for the overwhelmed guards to make more than one call at a time; other inmates came into possession of a set of master keys to the other cell blocks—allowed about twelve hundred inmates to take possession of Times Square and the D cell block and yard. The prisoners armed themselves with knives and clubs and, within an hour, were in control of the prison in which they had been confined in fear the night before ...
Thompson’s book demonstrates one thing for certain: no matter how badly you think of Richard Nixon, you have not thought badly enough. Here is the President of the United States, on the released tapes, muttering alcohol-fuelled racial imprecations to his yes-men. “You see, it’s the black business,” he says of Attica. And then, after the bloody end, confides, “I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots. . . . Just like Kent State”—where four protesting students were gunned down by the National Guard a year earlier—“had a hell of a salutary effect.” What got passed from White House to statehouse to the Big House was the Nixon Administration’s conviction that an insurgency was afoot, and that the Attica takeover was part of a large, well-organized movement toward armed rebellion. Why, given that the great majority of Americans were not merely hostile but vengeful toward the militants, Nixon and his followers came to believe that the country was on the brink of chaos is one of the mysteries of the period ...
There are sins of omission but there are also virtues of patience. Many of the wisest things we do, in life and in politics, are the things we don’t. Affairs not started, advice not given, distant lands left uninvaded—the null class of non-events is often more blessed than the enumerated class of actions, though less dramatic. One of the things that the Obama Administration gets too little credit for not doing is not intervening when militia types occupied a federal building in Oregon—even though it was a clear case of the government ceding to violent seditionists. It looked weak. But the powerful waited out the powerless, and the affair ended with minimal violence. Time, in such cases, is almost always on the side of the state. Avoiding Atticas and Wacos is not that hard when you are more worried about losing lives than about losing face ...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/learning-from-the-slaughter-in-attica
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I wasn't there in 1971 (we had already moved by then), but I did attend Owasco Elementary, and my older brothers attended St. Mary's and Mount Carmel HS.
I was @ Central Elementary (which was Central High a few years previously) from 70 until 75.