Blood in the Water Read online

  Other state officials largely disagreed with Oswald and Rockefeller that the actions of a handful of revolutionary troublemakers could explain the tension and violence in jails and prisons across New York. On May 26, 1971, a special legislative committee comprised of three Republican and two Democratic assemblymen toured Auburn and talked directly to prisoners there to get a sense of what was going on. They subsequently issued a five-page report on prison conditions that confirmed, among other things, that there had been a great deal of prisoner harassment at this facility, as well as evidence of injury. Still the head of DOCS clung to the idea that certain troublemakers behind bars and their lawyers on the outside were causing the most serious problems.

  By the summer of 1971, Oswald had so fully adopted the “militant troublemaker” analysis of the problems at Auburn and other prisons in his system that he decided the only way to restore peace in a given facility was to remove the “problem” prisoners. So he closed Auburn’s Special Housing Unit and transferred all the “militant troublemakers” who were still awaiting court dates. All the alleged leaders of the rebellion, including the so-called Auburn 6, were sent to Attica. Once they were moved, he ordered that these men stay in segregated housing “until they give evidence of being amenable in other parts of the institution.”21

  In the wake of the transfer of men out of Auburn, Oswald felt that a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Refreshed and recommitted to his initial reform agenda, the commissioner wrote to Rockefeller, “We must convince all that we do not countenance disinterest in prisoners or brutalizing of any kind by anyone and that we will make opportunities for rehabilitation available.” Most important, he went on, “by showing that we care” the image of correction would start “changing for the better.”22

  But the Attica Correctional Facility, already severely overcrowded and now home to the Auburn 6, had seen no positive change. Still facing harsh conditions, capricious rules, and racial discrimination, Attica’s men were more frustrated than ever.23

  4

  Knowledge Is Power

  In the summer of 1971 Attica’s prisoners weren’t just frustrated, they were, as prison officials like Oswald worried, becoming much more politically aware. Not only had these men been developing a powerful critique of poor prison conditions, but they also had begun to discuss how they might reform their institution—what they might do, concretely, to get the state to treat them as human beings who were serving their time, not as monsters deserving of abuse and neglect.

  One key reform that the incarcerated had already managed to secure in this period was in the area of education. Although they were not granted eligibility for Pell Grants until 1972, by the late 1960s prisoners were taking a variety of courses in penal facilities across the country. By 1970 Attica had hired quite a few teachers, including several reading instructors, one who taught math, and a few who offered courses in history and sociology. Officially hired to help men get their high school equivalency, these instructors were instrumental in inspiring Attica’s incarcerated to see the world both within and outside of Attica’s walls as inexorably linked.1

  During one English course offered at Attica in the summer of 1971, two “outspoken streetwise thinkers,” Kenny Malloy and Tommy Hicks, were particularly vocal about “their feelings about race, economics, politics and crime and justice.”2 Both were members of the Black Panther Party and had participated in Auburn’s November 1970 Black Solidarity Day uprising.3 But as politically savvy as these two students were—Hicks could “quote black poets, writers and historical black figures…[and] speak Swahili fluently and Spanish well enough to be understood”—they were by no means the only men at Attica who were articulating potent critiques of the injustice.4 As one of Attica’s men put it, there were many prisoners there who were determined to get as much education as they could with the goal of “bettering [their] lot and [their] family’s lot.”5

  Sociology classes were particularly popular with Attica’s men in the summer of 1971. In one weekly class, a racially mixed group of fifteen prisoners read authors ranging from Adam Smith to Marx and Mao. Each week these men challenged one another to think about how these texts might apply to their own experiences. Several of the students in this class could share practical experiences that helped them to think about how marginalized people might empower themselves. Two students in the class, Samuel Melville and Herbert Blyden, had both been in the Tombs in New York City when it had erupted the summer before. Both had a lot to say about the importance of taking action if one really wanted to change things for the better.

  Sam Melville (born Sam Grossman before he chose the literary moniker) looked more like an absentminded professor than the “Mad Bomber” the media had dubbed him. Melville had landed at Attica after having been sentenced to eighteen years for setting explosives in government buildings in protest against the war in Vietnam. As he saw it, the war would never end until the United States experienced firsthand the destruction it wrought abroad. Being incarcerated at Attica, where officials, in Melville’s view, also acted brutally and with impunity, only solidified this Brooklyn-born white radical’s conviction that society had to be overhauled by any means necessary.

  Herb Blyden was also persuaded that the United States needed to undergo some major changes. Blyden had been born on the island of St. Thomas, but in his thirty-three years this broad-shouldered and tall black man had had more than his share of run-ins with the police in New York City. For Blyden it was crucial to read as much as one could about everything from American colonialism and imperialism to how the legal system operated. Blyden had been one of the most outspoken men during the Tombs jail rebellion, and the aftermath of that uprising had shown him firsthand how prisoners who took on the state needed as much information as they could get about how the law might eventually be used against them.

  The presence of these men offered Attica’s otherwise apolitical men—like Big Black Smith—a new understanding of their discontents and a new language for articulating them. But contrary to what state officials such as Russell Oswald thought, adding experienced activists like Blyden, Melville, Malloy, and Hicks to the general population at Attica is not what riled up the prisoners. No one had to be persuaded that things at Attica were bad or needed remedy. The men at Attica were well aware of how brutal America’s prisons could be—particularly if those incarcerated remained silent and state officials were allowed to do anything they liked with no public scrutiny.6

  The fate of the Auburn rebels transferred to Attica had been most instructive in that regard. Although Oswald’s decision to close Auburn’s dreaded Special Housing Unit convinced many outsiders that he was committed to penal reform, those on the inside knew that the alleged leaders of the rebellion had been sent straight to another segregation unit, HBZ, when they arrived at Attica.7 Auburn transferee Jomo Joka Omowale later described their reception: “The guards were big and…they said they would try to kill us….We were scared.”8

  Notably, because the Auburn transferees had educated themselves about the law, they didn’t stay in HBZ forever. These men knew that the state had no legal grounds to hold them in this place indefinitely, and, thanks to the round-the-clock efforts of their advocates (including Lewis Steel, Herman Schwartz, and a young lawyer named Elizabeth Fischer), they were, after six months, released into Attica’s general population.9 Central to that victory was the decision of federal district judge John T. Curtin—a man who would be asked to rule on prison officials’ actions at Attica many more times over the coming year.

  The prisoners well knew that any legal activism on their part infuriated Attica’s superintendent, Vincent Mancusi. They had already butted heads with him in the metal shop strike, and it was clear that he was determined to fight the Auburn transferees’ release from HBZ with everything he had. Whereas Mancusi feared the Auburn prisoners would set about brainwashing the entire prison population and turn everyone into a radical troublemaker, it was in fact how DOCS officials had treated these A
uburn transferees that ended up further radicalizing many men at Attica. Not only had they been beaten, but they had also been subjected to the harrowing experience of the Box for six whole months, after they had been promised no reprisals. That the word of prison officials meant nothing increasingly angered and agitated most of the men locked up at Attica.10

  Even while they misunderstood its origin, by the summer of 1971 prison officials were well aware that they were sitting on a powder keg. As Commissioner Russell Oswald noted, that summer, “the focus of our anxieties moved from Auburn to Attica.”11

  5

  Playing by the Rules

  Although Judge John T. Curtin forced administrators to let the Auburn transferees out of HBZ, prisoner frustration remained high. Few among them believed that prison administrators had been chastened into treating them with greater dignity or humanity, and one group of prisoners decided that it was now time to articulate a specific list of all that needed to happen at their facility to address this most important issue. On June 16, 1971, a surprise cell search turned up a draft of demands—one that greatly alarmed Attica superintendent Mancusi and the COs who had confiscated it. Two weeks later, Commissioner Oswald received the same set of demands in a letter signed by a group of five men calling themselves the Attica Liberation Faction. There actually wasn’t much of an Attica Liberation Faction to speak of, but, as one prisoner later explained, “when the Manifesto was written up, there was obviously a need for a name on behalf of all inmates…[even though] as far as a strict organization, there was no such thing.”1

  The letter unnerved Oswald—especially since it was also cc’d to the governor—but it was not the vitriolic attack the commissioner might have expected from an entity calling itself a Liberation Faction: “Dear Sir, Enclosed is a copy of our manifesto of demands. We find it is necessary to forward you said copy in order for you to be aware of our needs and the need for prison reform. We hope that your department don’t cause us any hardships in the future because we are informing you of prison conditions. We are doing this in a democratic manner; and we do hope that you will aid us.”2

  If Oswald was relieved that the letter’s opening was neither threatening nor abusive, he was still greatly unsettled by the passion of its attached manifesto. “We the inmates of Attica Prison,” that document began, “have come to recognize that because of our posture as prisoners and branded characters as alleged criminals, the administration and prison employees no longer consider or respect us as human beings but rather as domesticated animals selected to do their bidding and slave labor and furnished as a personal whipping dog for their sadistic psychopathic hate.” The manifesto went on to list twenty-eight demands for reform, including changes in the parole system, religious freedom for Muslims, improvements in the working and living conditions, and a change in medical staff and medical policy and procedure.3 The five men writing as the Attica Liberation Faction—Herbert Blyden, Frank Lott, Donald Noble, Peter Butler, and Carl Jones-El—closed by reminding Oswald that they were playing by the rules. “These demands are being presented to you. There is no strike of any kind to protest these demands. We are trying to do this in a democratic fashion.”4

  Oswald reacted with a mix of caution, suspicion, and conciliation. Caution first: now that the “alleged representatives of inmates at Attica Correctional Facility have submitted a long list of demands,” he wrote to Rockefeller, “concern over lodging the ‘Auburn 6’ at Attica becomes magnified.”5 Would it just call more unwanted attention to their case to move them to a nearby county jail to await their day in court on the charges they faced from the November uprising, he wondered, or would it be worse to keep them in the general population at Attica where they could further agitate the other prisoners?

  Then suspicion: the more times he read the manifesto, the more cynical Oswald became about its provenance. Oswald was sure that he had seen a treatise just like this not too long ago and it hadn’t come from a New York prison, but from California. After investigating he reported to Rockefeller, “We have since discovered that these demands are almost entirely copied from demands issued at Folsom Prison in California as developed by Black Panther leadership there some time ago.”6 The commissioner found it particularly “interesting” that Attica’s “July Manifesto”—as it was now being called by the prisoners—had demanded “religious freedom.” In his view this was a dead giveaway that radicals were stirring up trouble in this prison from as far away as California, and worse, that “the Black Muslims were involved.”7 He found it equally disturbing that one of the signers of the manifesto was Herbert Blyden, who he knew had been a key participant in the New York City jail rebellion of 1970.

  It was true that these five Attica prisoners had modeled their call for prison reform on a manifesto that had been drafted by men in California’s Folsom State Prison.8 The dramatic prisoner protest at Folsom the year before had been a big news item, and copies of those inmates’ grievances could be found in countless cells across the country. But that did not negate the legitimacy of the cry for reform coming out of Attica; nor was Blyden’s involvement indicative of any incipient rebellion. Blyden could see clearly that conditions at Attica were just as dreadful as at the Tombs, and he simply felt it necessary to speak out.

  Prison officials at Attica itself expended little effort trying to understand the real reasons Attica’s July Manifesto read so similarly to Folsom’s. Having grasped instead at sinister explanations for the penning of this document, administrators decided that the best response to it was to clamp down even harder on the prison population. Things became so grim at Attica in the wake of the July Manifesto that, as prisoner Sam Melville reported in a long handwritten letter to his lawyer, men were now ending up in segregation—getting a “60-day box bit”—simply for having the manifesto.9

  But while Superintendent Mancusi opted to punish those who were sympathetic to the July Manifesto, over in Albany Oswald had decided on a strategy of conciliation. To Rockefeller he explained that he intended to “investigate all demands with a view toward responsive action where possible and beneficial.”10 Oswald had spent his life as a prison reformer and it was still important to him that the prisoners at Attica feel that he had their best interests at heart. This, he believed, might be their only hope in trying to thwart the designs of outside agitators.

  On July 7, 1971, Oswald replied to the authors of Attica’s July Manifesto and assured them that he would “give careful consideration to the entire list.”11 He also reminded them of their stated intention to proceed in a democratic fashion, adding pointedly, “I applaud this as a rational approach.”12 Suspecting that his letter would be read in every cell block, Oswald also informed the men that he had already been hard at work to address penal problems. “You may have…noted that some change has already come about and I assure you that greater change toward a more progressive, humane and rehabilitative system is in the planning state.”13

  On July 19 Oswald received a response, this time penned solely by Frank Lott, expressing appreciation for the dialogue that had now begun, as well as the Attica prisoner population’s faith in the commissioner’s “sincerity.”14 He added, though, that with the exception of management having placed water pitchers on the lunch tables for the first time, “the conditions listed in the last two pages of our manifesto still exist,” and he then went on to enumerate those.15

  A month went by. Hearing nothing from the commissioner after this moment of good-faith back-and-forth made Attica’s self-appointed spokesmen nervous. On August 16, 1971, Lott wrote again on behalf of the men calling themselves the Attica Liberation Faction, this time to bring the commissioner’s attention to the fact that Superintendent Mancusi was still censoring the newspapers that prisoners read even though the courts had recently ruled that such censorship was not legal, and also to impress upon Commissioner Oswald how desperate the men were to see signs of change. “We are anxiously awaiting your evaluation of our manifesto,” he wrote. “I do hope that you will
drop me a few lines and let me know what is happening.”16 Still, Lott did not want the commissioner to feel threatened. Despite the fact that conditions had grown even more oppressive for the men in Attica since they first contacted the commissioner—with the escalation of cell searches, the confiscation of writing and reading materials, and the increase in disciplinary lockups—Lott promised Oswald, “we will continue to strive for prison reform in a democratic manner.”17

  This time Oswald replied to Lott. He reiterated that much was already being accomplished in the area of prison reform and again assured him that he would continue to study improvements that needed to be made.18 But Attica’s prisoners needed to be realistic, he chided. “Complete change cannot be brought about in just a short time.”19 They knew that. But they also knew that the sorts of things they were asking for—“such simple changes as providing clean trays from which to eat in the mess hall, or allowing more than one shower a week during the hot summer months”—did not require “complete change.”20