Speaking with 'Attica Prison Revolt' Author Heather Ann Thompson

Recently published in paperback by Vintage Books, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy is the result of 13 years’ work by University of Michigan Professor of History Heather Ann Thompson. Last year Blood in the Water was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer Board lauded Thompson “for a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States” and “[f]or a narrative history that sets high standards for scholarly judgment and tenacity of inquiry in seeking the truth about the 1971 Attica prison riots.”

With detailed accounts of state-sanctioned abuse, torture and murder, Blood in the Water can be read as an indictment of complicity in organized, state-sanctioned crime and/or an existential treatise on human cruelty. It also may be read as a handbook for the pursuit of justice and/or a manifesto on the quality of mercy. It serves as a substantial biography of more than a dozen subjects. Blood in the Water also explains the cultural and political forces—particularly the media-assisted dissemination of outrageous lies—that gave birth to the modern prison industry and propelled the political ascent of Joe Arpaio, David Clarke and Donald Trump.

In 1971, traffic tickets could have led—and did lead at least one prisoner—to confinement in Attica Correctional Facility, a New York State prison run by notoriously violent corrections officers and a medical staff given to experimenting on its patients by injecting them with debilitating disease. On Sept. 9 of that year, the Attica staff deliberately locked prisoners and officers in a corridor without notifying the officers, and the prisoners panicked, killing officer William Quinn. The panic spread, with 1,281 prisoners taking 42 hostages and taking refuge in a prison yard. The prisoners issued written demands for amnesty and specific, immediate prison reform. Five days of negotiations involving outside observers followed. Hostages were shown preferential treatment, including mattresses specially obtained for them by prisoners who chose to sleep on the ground.

On Sept. 13, the state retook the prison by dropping a debilitating mixture of gases that immobilized the prisoners and hostages, none of whom had firearms. A stomach-turning orgy of ballistic violence followed, with the approval of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Richard Nixon. Within hours, 29 prisoners and nine hostages were dead, all murdered by officers of various ranks and municipalities. The ensuing torture of prisoners by Attica staff that followed would make the living envy the dead.

At the root of the massacre was personal and institutional racism. Thompson culled the Nixon tapes to find the president stating that the massacre was justified because it involved “a black business … the Angela Davis crowd … the negroes.” Chronicled, debated, protested, studied and litigated up to the present day, the Attica revolt became for some a symbol of white hate, and for others a laudable response to black savagery.

On Monday, Nov. 6 at 7:00 pm, the Frank P. Zeidler Memorial Lecture Series will present Heather Ann Thompson in a discussion of Blood in the Water at Turner Hall (1034 North Fourth St.), co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Turners. The Shepherd Express recently spoke with the author via telephone.

What led you to study Attica in the first place?

I’m a civil rights historian by training, and I had always known that there had been this amazing civil rights protest behind bars. I had decided that it’s important that we write a history about it. I didn’t know, really, anything about prisons. I really had not—like most Americans—thought much about prison. That was 14 years ago. A research odyssey later, I came to see that it was one of the most important stories, not just in civilrights history but in American history. I didn’t even begin to appreciate how complicated it was, so I started out very naïvely.

The way historians write books is that they tend to go to archives and they look at collections of documents about a certain subject, and then they reconstruct what happened. In my case, no sooner did I get the contract to write the book than it became clear to me that the State of New York was making it impossible to see the records related to this event.

Law enforcement had killed people, tortured people, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder. There’s no limit to the extent to which these acts could have repercussions today. So the State of New York has pretty much shut down all access to these records.

I wanted to know what happened. What was the mystery, and how had there been such a cover-up? And how was I going to tell the story when there was no obvious archive of documents? It took 13 years to finally be able to tell that story.

Is there a statute of limitations on torture?

I’m not a lawyer, but I think that there is always a possibility of a civil rights case. It just depends on how it’s filed and how it’s framed. So think, for example, about cases from the South, like the killing of Medgar Evers or the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church … where, 40 years later, people stood trial.

Were you surprised by the number of people involved in the Attica uprising who were willing to talk to you?

Initially I was, but what became clear to me was that the prisoners who had suffered so much and the guard/hostages who had suffered so much had been talking for decades. They kept being ignored. The prisoners had been saying, “We’ve been tortured.” People had post-traumatic stress. People are still seriously wounded and victimized from this, but no one believes them. They’ve [been told], “Oh, nothing happened to you; you’re a liar.”

So, when I was willing to listen and track down their stories and honor their stories, I think that they were glad. I think that they were eager to talk about it.

In 1971, at Attica, were there any African American, Asian or Latino corrections officers?

No. I believe there was one Spanish-speaking guard who refused to speak Spanish to the Latino inmates.

Besides the state removal of documents, what was frustrating about gathering the information?

Well, this is a state prison, and the residents of the State of New York have paid enormous amounts of money, and taxpayers [have] put an enormous amount of faith in a system that it works, and yet we have no access to what really goes on behind bars. I repeatedly found that frustrating, and I’ve subsequently written a lot of popular pieces, including one a few weeks ago in The Washington Post, about the importance of listening to prisoners and seeing what goes on inside, and one [published in Newsweek] last spring about the need for transparency in prisons, so that was the thing that frustrated me the most.

Probably more importantly, it was a very, very humbling experience to write this book, because I was repeatedly reminded that these are real lives, people that still suffer from what happened 45 years ago. There were ripple effects of this: because of the lies told at Attica, families were destroyed. Frankly, we as a nation were lied to, and so we embarked on this punitive tough-on-crime path that’s been devastating to the nation, really.

What were the most rewarding parts of the research and writing process?

One of them was when I, completely by happenstance, came upon a cache of records that the State of New York clearly did not know were there, that finally allowed me to identify the scope of the cover-up and who was responsible for the trauma.

Were those the files that vanished from the Erie County Courthouse?

Exactly. That was a moment that will, undoubtedly, never happen again in my life, where I was enormously lucky. Because of that luck, I think, now at least Americans will know at least what I was able to find out. So that was very gratifying.

And the other: in the last year I have talked about this book all over the country. To have survivors tell me that they finally know more about what happened to a loved one or they finally learned some more accurate information about what had happened in the subsequent years of that rebellion. That was very gratifying because it’s people’s lives, and to be able to kind of rescue a part of their history was really humbling but also moving for me.

Have you or anyone else tried to make a list of the lost opportunities for a non-fatal retaking of Attica, or are there just too many to count, much less itemize?

There was no reason why this facility was retaken the way that it was. No justification for sending in men who were armed to the teeth, who were angry, who had not been trained in riot control, to retake a prison filled with unarmed men, hostages and prisoners alike. There is no theory under which that retaking made sense, and there were multiple opportunities to have resolved it peacefully, starting with the governor coming to Attica and standing outside of that prison and guaranteeing the safety of the prisoners if they surrendered, which he was asked to do and which he refused to do.

So everything done thereafter, by that fatal decision, is too numerous to account for all that went wrong. But the key point is: there’s no theory under which that could have gone right.

Were any Attica survivors able to keep from making their trauma the defining aspect of their lives?

I think so. People went on to have wives and families and jobs. Certainly for [former prisoner] Frank “Big Black” Smith. He sublimated a lot of that [trauma] into his determination to take on the State of New York in the civil case. [Smith, a recipient of especially vicious and prolonged torture, worked on behalf of 1,280 Attica inmates and himself to sue the state, and won an admission of guilt and an $8 million settlement, in addition to $4 million in legal fees.]

But it’s always, I have to say, Eric, one millimeter below the surface of everybody. Everybody that I talked to for this book—and, honest to God, it didn’t matter whether it was a survivor or someone who had experienced it as an observer, like [writer] Tom Wicker in The New York Times, or someone who was a judge, like Judge [Michael A.] Telesca, who had settled the case—everybody I talked to—if they did not completely break down, they became deeply emotional. This event scarred everybody. To the extent people were able to move on, it is just beneath the surface for it to bubble up again.

Which administrators, if any, fought for the inmates’ human and civil rights?

I think, ironically, one of the sad characters is Russell Oswald, who was the commissioner of corrections. I think he did believe that he was going to try to humanize the prisons, but, at the end of the day, any gains that could have been had from that uprising, which would have potentially humanized the prison and improved conditions and made working life better for the guards inside—all those opportunities were squandered because, at the end of the day, administrators frankly did not value prisoner lives as they valued their own lives.

And there’s a lot of resonant themes here that connect us to today and police shootings, for example.

Do you think most Americans regard torture as something we only do overseas?

I absolutely think so. When they learn otherwise and when they get evidence of otherwise, the next default decision they make is that these people must have done something to deserve it. In part, that’s why this Attica story is so important: because you cannot read this story [as] anything other than something you would imagine going on in a horrific dictatorship somewhere abroad.

You mention in the book several times that the last two volumes of the Meyer Report of 1976 [three total volumes of published results of a 1975 investigation by New York Special Assistant Attorney General Bernard S. Meyer] were sealed. Do you have any idea and for how long?

They were both sealed because they contained some of the names of the troopers who were shooters. The state police worked very, very hard to make sure that the public would not see the full story of Attica.

Are they still sealed?

No, because there’s subsequently been a lawsuit to open the Meyer Report. A pathetic 42 pages dribbled out two years ago that proved that the prisoners were right, that they had been abused and tortured. But, to this day, we still have not seen the rest of Volumes 2 and 3, and the State of New York has already indicated that, when it is made public, they’re going to heavily redact all the names. I find it just a shell game.

Have you seen any substantial parts of Volumes 2 and 3?

No, I have not.

Regarding the files you saw that later vanished from the Erie County Courthouse and the New York State Museum, could you estimate how many boxes or how many rooms’ worth full of boxes?

What was in Erie County was on a wall that was…maybe an eight-foot-high wall by probably a 15-foot-long wall. That entire space was filled with shelves, and on every square of those shelves were loose documents—a blizzard of documents, so I don’t know how to estimate that. But it was a lot of paper.

In the New York State Museum, the artifacts and the papers and the things that they had—oh, my god, it literally did fill a corner of their warehouse.

Did you manage to go through all these boxes?

With what was in Erie County, I did the best I could. I made copies of what I could and took notes from what I could, but I was only able to be there for a short period of time, so undoubtedly I didn’t see everything.

In the Museum, I got to see quite a bit, but, again, it all disappeared, ultimately, so I didn’t see it all.

So how long did all of that take, just to go through and make copies?

I was there for two days of research, I believe, and this is in the days before cellphones were smartphones, so I didn’t have a scanner app. I didn’t have any ability to just snap hundreds of images, so I took ferocious notes and I gave them a check for $200 and asked them, could I Xerox as much as I could manage in that one day? Two, three hundred pages, probably…the tip of the iceberg.

In one of the notes, you cite a confidential memo from the Rockefeller administration. How did a confidential memo happen to fall into your hands?

That was one of those documents that I found.

On that pivotal moment on page 52, when the inmates were locked into “A Tunnel” with two corrections officers, one of them shortly before involved in a violent altercation, who ordered this?

It looks like it was coming straight out of [Vincent] Mancusi’s office, meaning the warden. It could have been the assistant warden, but it was definitely a management decision, not a guard’s decision.

What was the rationale for locking inmates into a tunnel?

They were being punished for the fact that [prisoner William Ortiz], who they wanted to put in keeplock [indefinite cell confinement] and not [serve] breakfast—his fellow prisoners had let him out and let him go to breakfast. And so, instead of letting this entire company go out to the rec yard, as would have been customary, they decided that [the prisoners] would have to go back to their cells. And so that’s why they locked the door to the rec yard.

But what they didn’t do was tell the guards who were running that company what was happening. So what happens is: they get to this tunnel and the guards go to open the door to let them into the yard, and the door is locked. And they don’t know why it’s locked. And the prisoners don’t know why it’s locked. And remember: in a prison, every tunnel you enter, you can’t leave ‘til the gate behind you is closed. So there’s this pivotal moment where they are all trapped in here and nobody knows what’s going on, and everybody panics.

The democratic decision-making body that was formed by prisoner election—basically a representative form of government—seems modeled on the United States republic. Was there any objection to that from the more radical prisoners? Was that surprising to you?

Nope. I think what was surprising to me was that this myth of Attica has been that these crazy rebel militant prisoners were at the core of the uprising. My research shows that it was incredibly democratic, that they had already tried to work through the system to tell the commissioner and state officials what they needed, and that the fact that it became an uprising was accidental. When it began, they had a faith in the system, and so they wanted things to be done through democracy and consensus, which I think is actually very interesting and admirable.

At the Sept. 10 meeting in D Yard, District Judge John T. Curtin’s injunction prohibiting administrative reprisals against the Attica prisoner-revolt participants was rejected, especially by inmate Jerry Rosenberg, who said the injunction referred to amnesty for only the Sept. 9 takeover of the prison. It’s technically true, but were the prisoners correct to assume this meant no amnesty from Sept. 10 forward?

I’m not sure what the answer to that is. They were right to be suspicious, because I now know from my own research that every deal—even agreeing to the demands that Oswald did—he injected words like “to the extent possible,” he deliberately injected words into so that he could skinny his way out of those promises later. And so they were right to doubt that this in fact gave them anything. But, at the same time, people like Jerry Rosenberg definitely escalated tensions by accusing [observing attorney and prisoner advocate] Herman Schwartz of being a traitor and ripping [the Curtin injunction] up.

You mention the New York Post writing, “Everyone—prisoners and prison officials, mediators, the Rockefeller people, the press—tended to believe whatever confirmed their own preconceptions, their own fears.” Do you agree?

Oh, absolutely. That’s why they didn’t even need to have it corroborated that Frank “Big Black” Smith had castrated [corrections officer] Mike Smith [whom Frank Smith had not harmed at all]. It just completely filled their own racial narrative.

Do you think this helps explain modern-day Americans’ disdain for facts, science, and other points of view?

Absolutely. It is a cautionary tale.

National Guardsmen physician John W. Cudmore said, “I think Attica brings to mind several things. The first is the basic inhumanity of man to man, the veneer of civilization … the absolute horrors of the situation …. [T]hat day tore from them the shreds of their humanity. The veneer was penetrated.” Might all the work for justice and telling the stories of Attica have restored some of that humanity?

I think so. That’s why, at the end of the book, that the ultimate legacy of Attica is not repression; it is in fact this extraordinary determination to be treated as human and the reality that justice can in fact happen. I think it’s the core. This is a real David-and-Goliath story of justice, not just repression.

In April of ’73, Oswald left the commissioner of corrections position. Why? The index says he retired, but the text doesn’t.

I think he did [retire]. I don’t know so much the inside story, but I know from other information that he was broken by Attica. He was the man in the middle for too long, and it was a devastating experience, and he was never quite the same afterwards. [Oswald died on March 8, 1991. The New York Times reported three days later that Oswald’s wife Jane attributed Oswald’s death to heart disease.]

Did he ever express remorse or regret about the massacre?

I did see the deposition that I quote from, where he does say the police used excessive force. I think that he felt that, internally, he had to justify what happened because he had to live with himself. But even he could see that it was excessive.

You really brought Oswald to life. I didn’t know it was going to be possible for me to see any of the administrators or officers in the same human light as the victims.

Well, I appreciate that because, I tell you, it’s been hard to know how to write some of these people, because some of them ultimately supported pretty horrific things. But I think you’re right: someone like Oswald—I think his intentions were good, but he was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t, at some level.

In the 1994 damages trial, some victims are named in your footnotes only. Was that to preserve their dignity, to keep them out of this litany of atrocities?

No. My publisher was very insistent that, because there were so many names and there was so much going on, just for the sake of being able to read it clearly, [I had] to minimize the [number of] names in the text, so that if you heard the name, you’d know that you’d hear about them again, and that there were some key stories I focused on.

Did any inmates or their families object to the book being written?

Not that I know of.

In the last chapter of the book, you assert, “The state had managed to keep the survivors of its horrific retaking from knowing the details of that plan ….” Do you think those details will ever be available to the public?

I don’t know. I think, probably, one day. But what really needs to happen is some form of truth and reconciliation commission, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

For readers feeling squeamish about the book’s graphic depictions of violence and cruelty, would you care to share any coping strategies?

That’s a great question. I don’t know whether you would agree with me, but I was very, very deliberate in that I did not make this pornographically violent. In the section for the retaking, you’ll notice that it’s quite short, and that there’s only two chapters about the retaking, No Mercy and The Beat Goes On. And then I wait until the civil trial to revisit it again, but with new information. That was a deliberate choice.

The whole reason why that book was written with such short chapters is so that people could take a breath, put it down, walk away from it, think about it, and come back. I chose to do that because I agree with you that it can be relentless.

Sadly, a lot of the Attica story has a page-turner quality, and you could get compulsive with it, right?

I think that’s true, but I also really, really hope that—as much as it is rooted in injustice and violence—you also have a sense in the story, as you’re reading through it, that there’s always somebody in the wings who is resisting it and trying to tell what’s really going on and trying to bring some modicum of justice. Even in the retaking part, you know that these lawyers are at the outside of the prison, banging on the door.

What’s been the reaction to the book from New York State and corrections people?

Great time to ask that, because I was just upstate New York last week. I gave seven different talks, I think, including one where there were troopers there and corrections officers. I must say that I am very, very humbled and honored to report that it’s been good. People who’ve not read it, I think, have been angry because they think, ‘Well, she must be too pro-inmate,’ but at the talk there were troopers sitting in the front row. I told the story…I hoped they would have agreed with, which is that everybody was a victim here—frankly, even the troopers, because Rockefeller had no business sending them in there. So they were quite good. I met some of the hostages that I had not met; they were very grateful.

The State of New York, however, has not said anything publicly, and I think it’s very interesting that, when the book came out, they suddenly said that they were going to make some of these documents available online, on the New York State Archives website, and it’s there. But, if you search it, nothing comes up of substance. So I think they tried to make a political point when they got some bad press, but overall they’ve not responded.

You mention troopers at these talks. Are we talking about 1971 Attica troopers?

There was at least one of them there.

Recently Georgetown University preferentially admitted a student whose enslaved African ancestors had built the school. Have the descendants of the tortured, abused and murdered Attica prisoners and hostages looked into calling for similar reparations?

They have not, but I think that that’s part of what that whole process of trying to take the state to court was about. When they had a settlement with the state, part of that was the economic damages that they were paid. They never said, ‘That’s enough.’ They never said, ‘That’s justice.’ But they said, ‘That’s at least something.’

Have you come across any credible literature attempting to defend the state’s actions and inactions?

No, I really haven’t.

Can you recommend any other books about Attica?

Certainly Tom Wicker’s book A Time to Die. It’s a great memoir. Former New York congressman Herman Badillo, who was an observer, had a great memoir [A Bill of No Rights: Attica and the American Prison System]. These are all contemporaneous to the events. Those were beautiful memoirs. There will undoubtedly be more one day. Probably the most important was written by the whistleblower at the heart of the Attica investigation, Malcolm Bell—his book Turkey Shoot, which has just been rereleased.

I can’t think of any projects as painfully ambitious as Blood in the Water except maybe Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking, and sadly we know what happened to her [Chang took her own life seven years later, while working on a book about the Bataan Death March]. Were there times when you just had to put the book away and not be living every minute of it?

Absolutely, and there were many times when it was such a daunting story and such a big story that I doubted seriously my own ability to write it, but frankly all I would have to do it talk to one of the survivors or have one of them call me up and say, “Is the book almost done?” Because it’s been so important for them that this story was told.

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Since the paperback publication of Blood in the Water and to Thompson’s surprise, important new information about what happened at Attica back in 1971 continues to surface, and she continues to pursue those leads and share her findings in articles and public appearances.