September 13, 1971: Bloody Monday. Rockefeller orders thousands of National Guardsmen, State Troopers and Corrections Guards to attack the prisoners. Hundreds of prisoners are shot. The State’s forces also shoot and kill nine of the hostages. The prisoners have no guns. Many of the alleged leaders of the rebellion are selectively marked and assassinated by the State’s forces. 39 men (prisoners and hostages) die in the retaking of the prison. The Corrections Department says the hostages’ throats were slashed by the prisoners (a lie). Guards torture and beat prisoners.

Here’s how Carl Jones-EL recalls the events of September 13th:

“The thirteenth, everyone was in the yard and there was a lot of tension, because you could see that these people were getting ready to come in. They was going to use force. Now from where I was, I’m in the middle of the yard, so to speak, near the trench. Next thing I knowed there’s this big helicopter flying over us and tear gas coming from everyone, and there’s a whole lot of shooting and carrying on. So naturally, everyone is running for cover. So I’m next to the wall and I note that around me everyone is hiding his face and guys spitting in rags and putting it to their nose. But what I know was troopers start coming from everywhere, then I start seeing different people fall, you know, they was shot. Guys was losing their hands and shot in the head and the neck. Like it’s been stated about indiscriminate firing. I don’t see it as indiscriminate firing because the people that were shot, and the people that were killed, they were selected, man. How you going to call this indiscriminate? You take the troopers that came in, they wasn’t hurt. Now if it was indiscriminate, why didn’t some of them get hurt? You see, why was it just inmates and hostages that got shot, that got killed? At the same time the helicopter was flying overhead, the helicopter was telling everyone to surrender and they wouldn’t be hurt. A lot of people were doing this and they were still getting shot. They were putting their hands up and this helicopter just kept flying around talking about surrendering and nobody would get hurt. So after everyone seen what was happening, they didn’t come out. It was a slaughter like, man, the people were defenseless. They had sticks and homemade weapons to defend themselves, but this doesn’t compare, man, with magnums and carbines. This is ridiculous, you know .”

Below is an excerpt from a forthcoming film about the Attica prison uprising titled “Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica.”

“A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.” – Steven Biko

My father was the first person to talk with me about Steven Biko. He’s taught me the most about African revolutionaries: Lumumba, Toure, Cabral, and so many more. My dad knew many of these men (and yes, growing up all revolutionaries that I encountered through my dad’s stories were men). Biko he didn’t know personally but he admired him greatly. Dad gave me a bunch of pamphlets that included speeches and writing by Biko and others. I read them voraciously.

I was a teenager when the film “Cry Freedom” was released. I remember almost nothing about it except for the police interrogation and torture scenes. Those left their mark on my psyche. I’d of course heard the whispers about my own uncle’s interrogations, torture, and imprisonment as a kid. But the visual representations in “Cry Freedom” made that vague concept real. It’s strange writing these words because it now makes so much sense that I would became obsessed with organizing against policing and violence.

Desmond Tutu recounts the story of South African minister of police Jimmy Krueger who upon hearing of the torture and killing of Steve Biko in prison is reported to have said that his death “leaves me cold.” Tutu writes of this: “You have to ask what has happened to the humanity – the ubuntu — of someone who could speak so callously about the suffering and death of a fellow human being.”

Our capacity to dehumanize each other is seemingly boundless. And yet, we are also capable of demonstrating great compassion toward one another too. This, it seems, is the central paradox of humans. The persistent question is which part of ourselves will we feed.

The police officers who tortured and killed Steven Biko on this day in 1977 chose to feed their inhumanity. [Read the harrowing sequence of events that led up to his death here]. They thought to bury Biko’s ideas (which they found so threatening) along with his body. They failed because some of us still remember the potency of his philosophy. He was the one who said: “It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.”

Were he alive today, Biko would surely be dismayed at the fact that white supremacy & domination persist in his beloved South Africa even though its leaders have black skin. He would remind us that blackness is about more than skin color. Now more than ever, we need to re-animate Biko’s ideas and apply them to our current challenges.

So today, please do me a favor, read something that Biko actually wrote himself. Not an article about him or someone else’s testimony of who the man was. Not an out of context quote that you find on the internet. Read his original writing. Let’s recover his voice.

by Jesus Barraza (Dignidad Rebelde)

You can listen to Biko talk about the Black Consciousness Movement below:

Attica Reflections
By Hersey Boyer

It isn’t strange to awake in the silence
Of midnights,
To hear MEN weeping, in harsh and gravelly voices
That turn away your lies,
They have witnessed the slaughter
And heard your songs of merriment
As you filled your cups with blood.
Anoint yourselves in madness,
Dance with Hitler’s ghost.

Born: August 19, 1941. Education: 9th grade Junior High School. Birthplace: New York City, Harlem. Time: Life. Desire in life: to be a man wherever I am!

You can access several resources about the Attica Uprising (including a primer and zine that I co-wrote) here.

September 10, 1971: Uprising continues. 33 observers assemble at Attica and pay a brief visit to D yard.

A SCENE FROM INSIDE ATTICA PRISON…September 10, 1971

From A Time to Die by Tom Wicker (1975) P.96-98

But Wicker’s impatience vanished as Brother Flip took the microphone and began to speak, even though Flip’s was the same message that had been spoken so often already – men in prison were still men entitled to be treated by other men like men, not as animals or numbers. But the conditions of prison life, of Attica, made it impossible for them to be treated as human beings. That was what the uprising was about, Flip said, that was what the world should understand.

The same message, but different. Wicker could feel, as could the other observers, its gathering power as Flip talked on almost conversationally. He was different from any of the speakers who had preceded him – soft-spoken where most of them had been ranting, persuasive as against their brute force, eloquent in a more learned and sophisticated way. Brother Flip seemed an educated man with a high sense of drama. Wicker speculated that he might have been an actor on the outside; where else could he have found the style to wrap himself in a blanket as if it were the toga of a Roman senator? He had a thin, sensitive face adorned with an elegantly trimmed mustache. His head was quite bald in the glaring lights. When he gestured, his long, expressive fingers underlined his relatively quiet words.

Flip moved toward a peroration as expertly as any politician Wicker had heard on the stump – better than most. D-yard was silent, listening; the bonfires flickered on the walkways. Beyond the linked men of the security chain, the mass of the brothers surrounding the dark circle of hostages were still upon the ground or in their makeshift tents.

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From Attica Prison Uprising 101: A Short Primer written by me with contributions from Lewis Wallace and illustrations by Katy Groves:

September 8, 1971:
There was an altercation between correctional officers and two prisoners. Later that day, correctional officers led two prisoners whom they believed to be responsible to Housing Block Z (HBZ), the disciplinary housing unit where inmates were locked down for twenty-three hours per day. Ray Lamorie, one of the two, had not been involved in the altercation. Observers saw officers strike Leroy Dewer, the other prisoner, while taking him to HBZ. Prisoners believed that HBZ was a site of routine, brutal beatings by correctional officers.

September 9, 1971:
The revolt begins. Prisoners subdue Lieutenant Robert Curtiss in a tunnel that divided the prison yard into quarters. A group of fifteen to twenty-five prisoners eventually overpowered four guards and locked them in cells. The uprising quickly spread to the other cell blocks, with more than 1200 prisoners congregating in Cell Block D. Although members of the Attica Liberation Front did not participate in the initial rioting, they quickly joined in to move the prisoners toward more explicit demands for reform. The prisoners create a committee to negotiate with Commissioner Oswald and demand that outside observers be present.

Once the inmates of Attica Prison took over the facility on Thursday, September 9, 1971, a committee of inmates drew up five demands as preconditions to end the takeover. These five demands would be broadened into “15 practical proposals” that would form the basis for the attempted negotiations among the prisoners, the committee of outside observers, state prison officials, and representatives from the governor’s office.

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Last night, I spoke at an event keynoted by Dr. Angela Davis. The event titled “If You Want Peace, Fight for Justice” addressed gun violence, social justice activism, and the work we must do to build a path forward.

Each panelist had 3 minutes to offer comments after Dr. Davis spoke. These are mine as written. The comments that I delivered varied a little from my original text.

My comments tonight center on the insidious & (for too many) invisible violence deployed under the pretext of ending gun and other forms of violence and crime in our city.

I’ve lived in Chicago since 1995 and I’ve never experienced a summer like this one.

For us, in my community, the summer kicked off with intense, relentless, and surely illegal police harassment of young people and specifically of young black men.

Young people riding their bikes on sidewalks instead of being ticketed were hauled into police lockups where they were accused of resisting arrest and then funneled into Cook County jail where preparations began in April to make room for such egregious arrests.

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In Defense of Inez Garcia
by Susan Grathwohl

On October 27, 1974, Inez Garcia was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing the man who helped rape her.

You don’t go back to your place
for three days— the sperm
stains on the velvet sofa
soak in; black smudges around
the light switches stick
to grease and sweat, incomplete
whorls, no fingerprints.

You flip through pictures
at the precinct.
You look for someone who followed you
from the subway station so
quietly you thought it was
your imagination
and decided it was stupid
to get so uptight
about someone following you.

You feel
pressure against your ribs
on the left side, a voice saying it has a gun.
You are told, at gunpoint,
to put it inside you.
The next night you wonder
if the gun was real.

You remember your astrologist saying,
“Geminis survive.”
He needs your key to get out.
You refuse to walk him to the door.

You would have preferred
a mad rapist yelling “honky bitch”
to this calm, collected man
who says he’s from Bed-Stuy
and apologizes
for having done this to you.
He takes your TV and a suitcase
of summer clothes.
When the door clicks,
you call your boyfriend on the phone.

Precinct cops spread black dust
they tell you how to clean.
The detective from the Sex Crimes Unit
takes the description.
A month later he calls you at midnight
on Saturday night saying a lab report
confirms sperm stains on your underpants.
A few days later, you ask him
not to call you at home anymore.
A sergeant leaves his name for you at work.
He wants to talk about the case
for a course he’s taking.
The detective says you can
file a complaint with the
Review Board about the sergeant.

At the end of the month,
they drop the case.
You think you see the rapist on the subway.
Day after day, down at the station,
you wait in the dark mezzanine.

For those interested, I have written about Inez Garcia and her case here.

Below is a guest post from my friend Frank Edwards. Frank is a former advisor to AREA Chicago, a collaborator of mine at Project NIA and is currently a sociology graduate student at the University of Washington.

by Frank Edwards

The American Child Welfare System is characterized by significant and durable patterns of racial disparity. While the character of these disparities has changed over time, African American and First Nations families in particular still experience dramatically higher rates of intervention than do white families. While there isn’t enough research that has examined the impact that these disparities have on communities, theoretical analyses suggest that the child welfare system may be exacerbating already existing inequalities through inflicting group-based harm similar to the effects that the criminal justice system has in not only reflecting, but driving racial inequalities .

Both the quality and quantity of child welfare intervention were directly structured by racial concerns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Social work developed as a coherent profession and social scientific discipline through attempts to aid and reform Eastern and Southern European immigrants in major urban areas of the American Northeast and Midwest. Contemporaneously, private and public organizations engaged in a massive project of child removal and forced assimilation in First Nations’ communities. As these developments proceeded, African American families were largely ignored by state officials – what few services and interventions occurred largely did so through segregated and generally inferior private organizations. This pattern of exclusion held fast until the 1920s, and continued to some degree through the middle of the century.

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I’ve written about Willie McGee and his case here.

Willie McGee in his cell at Hinds County Jail, Jackson, Mississippi. (ca. late 1940s) – Civil Rights Congress photograph collection. / Photographs (NYPL)