On Sept. 13, 2007, as I was sitting in front of a tray in Clinton Correctional Facility’s mess hall, I got a warning from a fellow man. “Don’t eat,” he said. “It’s Attica Day.”
As someone who was fresh up to New York prisons, I had never heard of that day. But I could tell it meant something by the silence. Plus, no one was eating their food. This was serious.
On the way back from the mess hall, a man named James Martin told me, “Don’t worry, I got a bowl for you in the block.” Then he explained how on Sept. 13, New York prisoners marked the end of the 1971 uprising at Attica Correctional Facility by refusing meals. As I leaned on his cell bars, he described how men would enter the mess hall, grab their utensils and serving trays, bypass the food service line, and drop their unused items into the designated receptacles.
If someone was hungry, they could take their meal back to their cell. The cardinal rule was, “Don’t eat in the mess hall.” According to James, this tray of food could get you stabbed in the ‘80s.
For people who don’t know the history, the Attica rebellion began on the morning of Sept. 9, 1971. It was one of many prison uprisings during this period, and it occurred just weeks after guards at California’s San Quentin prison killed the Black Panther and author George Jackson.
What sparked the men at Attica to breach the prison’s command center and take more than 40 workers hostage was a violent skirmish between prisoners and guards the night before. State police retook three of the four cell blocks within hours. But as almost 1,300 incarcerated men occupied the D Yard, their spontaneous riot evolved into an organized response to years of torture, racism, overcrowding, censorship, medical neglect and dehumanization.
In a rare show of solidarity, Black, White and Latino prisoners elected representatives, including members of a politically active Black group known as the Attica Liberation Faction. They brought in civilian and legal observers and negotiators. They made a medical station and set up peer patrols to ensure that the hostages and observers weren’t killed by incarcerated men. And they issued a list of demands to corrections officials, such as minimum wage for their labor, access to healthy food, adequate medical care, “true religious freedom,” an end to information censorship, and officer training that would promote “understanding rather than punishment.”
Talks were relatively peaceful at first. But on Sept. 11, William Quinn, a 28-year-old corrections officer who had been severely beaten during the initial takeover, died in a hospital. Negotiations with corrections commissioner Russell Oswald stalled when prisoners demanded amnesty for the uprising and the “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement to a non-imperialistic country.”
With the encouragement of President Richard Nixon, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered a swift and forcible end to the uprising. On the morning of Sept. 13, a state police helicopter dropped tear gas on the facility, and law enforcement fired thousands of rounds into the D Yard. During the retaking, 10 hostages and 29 incarcerated participants were fatally shot, and almost 90 were wounded. The total death toll of the four-day rebellion was 43. All but four of those people were killed by police bullets.
I had learned some of this history before I got to prison, but the Attica Day tradition intrigued me. Over my 19 years inside, I’ve made a point to talk to older men about how risky this ritual could be.
This past August, 68-year-old George Branch told me that in 1972, when he was at Elmira prison, guards attacked men who refused to eat in the mess hall. The following year, he said, men paid their respects by wearing box-braided black shoestrings on their wrists. The corrections officers caught onto that as well and violently obstructed their political action.
Despite the repression, the mess hall tradition was passed down. “The older guys would pull your coat,” explained David Everette, a 64-year-old who learned about Attica Day when he entered Auburn Correctional Facility in 1981.
“Everyone knew what happened at Attica,” added Vance Jackson, 62. “No one had to tell me what to do on Attica Day.”
Last Sept. 13th — a Friday— I wasn’t so sure about what to do. I had been transferred into Green Haven Correctional Facility the night before, and I was surprised to see men eating and laughing out loud in the mess hall.
J. H., a man I had known over the years from other facilities, sat across from me at a smooth steel table. “You’ll see,” he said, after explaining how bad things had gotten at Green Haven.
When J. left, his tray bearing congealed oatmeal, four packets of sugar, milk and white toast remained next to mine. I sat with my hands folded, staring at these men of a younger generation who either didn’t know or didn’t care about Attica Day.
I felt compelled to tell them what prison was like in 1971. How Attica had a capacity of 1,600 but held more than 2,200 people. I wanted them to know that these men could only shower once a week and were kept in their cells 14 to 16 hours a day. I wanted them to acknowledge how racism and staff violence were rampant in a facility where 54% of the prisoners were Black, 9% were classified as Puerto Rican, but nearly 100% of the corrections officers and administrators were White.
Most importantly, I wanted them to realize that without the Attica rebellion, they wouldn’t have commissary, family visits, higher education or a grievance process. They wouldn’t even have hot water or soap.
Several older men I’ve interviewed trace the fading of the tradition to the rise of gang culture in the 1990s. But Raking “Bison Brim” Brown, 46, disagreed. “The people deteriorated, not the culture,” he told me in August. “These new dudes don’t have the same level of consciousness and history.”
Raking and I went on to discuss how drug abuse erodes the discipline that Attica Day requires. He also pointed out that the cost of food from the commissary was outpacing our meager wages. These prices make it difficult to feed another person who is solely dependent on food from the mess hall.
This and other conversations have made me question if I, at age 46, am doing enough to keep Attica Day relevant. In August, I finally broached the subject with two younger guys I know.
“I’m fresh up. I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that shit,” replied a 31-year-old I’ll call E. G.
All I got from 25-year-old T.J. was, “Shit got crazy.”
I interacted with these men on a regular basis. Yet, I had failed to pass on the lessons of Attica Day. I needed to take responsibility for this and become a griot who carries on tradition through oral history.
As I step into the role, I like to think about the action that Donnell Jefferson, 57, once took. As a critical thinker who went to college before his incarceration, Donnell wondered what the meaning of Attica Day was. “I asked myself, ‘Why are we going to the mess hall, not eating, and assaulting people who do?’”
So with the goal of educating newly incarcerated people, Donnell did some research, then hand-wrote a series of tracts about the uprising. In short blurbs, he laid out what led up to the 1971 Attica rebellion, how people died, what they ate, and what politicians said in the aftermath of one of the most brutal confrontations in U.S. prison history.
In August, a 43-year-old named Amin Rashid told me how he’d received one of these write-ups in 2018. At the time, he was living in the isolation of a Special Housing Unit, and he held on to the tract. Years later, when Amin and Donnell met at Green Haven, the younger man recognized the older man’s handwriting. Donnell had made an impact without even knowing it.
What Donnell and Amin taught me is that Attica Day will only be as relevant as we make it. The story may be aging, but we need to remember how our forefathers rose up for us.
Joseph Wilson is a father, self-taught composer, librettist, singer, songwriter, pianist, art curator, writer and co-founder of the Sing Sing Family Collective. He is currently incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York.