Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt is now available from University of California Press.
♦♦♦
Attica casts a large shadow over the history of the American prison-industrial-complex; it is at once an illustration of the carceral system’s murderous logic of domination as well as an illustration of the indomitable will of those caught in its grasp.
But the accepted history of the Attica rebels—marked by an overreliance on official or officially sanctioned sources—has failed to reckon with the true stakes and aspirations of the rebellion. With Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (Univ. of California Press, 2023), Orisanmi Burton fills crucial gaps in our understanding of the rebellion and the men who waged it. Through a mixture of interviews with a number of the participants and deep archival research—often drawing from the Attica rebels’ personal correspondences and diaries—Burton situates the Attica rebellion within the larger context of the numerous prison rebellions that preceded it. Far from isolated revolts for better conditions, these rebellions, as Burton so deftly demonstrates, took place as part of a conscious political struggle that sought to transform the world beyond the prison walls as well.
We have chosen this particular excerpt for two reasons: first, it provides a clear example of Burton’s breadth of research and counter-hegemonic methodology, and second, as many have stated, the current war on Gaza was immediately precipitated by an event that recalled, in so many ways, a prison rebellion. As this excerpt makes clear, the racist logic of dehumanization and the attendant tortures that were inflicted upon New York prison inmates find a cruel resonance in the current discourses around Gaza and in the U.S. and Israel’s justifications for the ongoing colonial genocide of the Palestinians.
Jake Romm
The following is excerpted with permission from Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton, published by University of California Press. © 2023 by Orisanmi Burton.
♦♦♦
Orisanmi Burton
INSURGENT COUNTER-HUMANISM
The corporeal terrain of struggle is the terrain of physical violence. Prisoncrats legitimated their violence by hiding it, mystifying it beneath obfuscating language, and by labelling the rebels as the extremist initiators of violence. However, as Fanon explains, it is the colonist who speaks in the language of violence, the colonist who relegates the colonized to a status of lower “species,” and thus, it is the colonist who “has always shown them [the colonized] the path they should follow to liberation.”52
Black captives were seen as beyond the pale of humanity, as beasts who needed to be contained. As a high-level prison official explained in 1974, many of the guards felt they were a “special kind of breed of animal [that has] very little hope for rehabilitation.”53 Against this normalized dehumanization, the Auburn rebels enacted an insurgent counter-humanism. Into this atmosphere of totalizing violence, they introduced a counterviolence that communicated their willingness to universalize the disposability of life, if no other options were available. Barred from accessing the trappings of humanity, the colonized sought to reduce the colonizer to a state of equality revealing, in Fanon’s words, that “his life, his breathing and his heartbeats are the same as yours.”54 Coupled with its epistolary narration, this reciprocation of violence reflected the rebels’ militant refusal of the epistemic and ontological arrangement of the world.
Prisons had long served as cauldrons of martial Black radicalism. Behind the walls there was no shortage of people who engaged in the disciplined study and practice of unarmed combat, weaponizing their bodies by doing thousands of push-ups per day, executing weighted punches, and hardening the bottoms of their feet by running barefoot in the prison yard. During the late 1960s, Black radicals regularly organized secret fighting competitions in an abandoned area of Green Haven Prison. Attended by various Black nationalist formations, these underground contests pro- vided opportunities for captives to hone their martial prowess in an environment oriented toward collective survival and liberation. They employed East Asian styles such as karate and judo, as well as their own fighting systems. With names like “Mental Boxing” and “Kill the Enemy Within,” captives developed these techniques to preserve bodily autonomy while fighting on the internal terrain of war: the conquest of fear, doubt, and the inferiority complex imposed by the colonizing process. “Whenever possible we will avoid antagonizing the Pig,” notes the Rules and Regulations of the Auburn BPP. And yet members were instructed to arm themselves with “knives, karate, [and] brute strength” so that “if the Pig should make it apparent that he intends to take you off this Planet, you may get the opportunity to take at least one Pig with you.”55
Isolated on the roof, the Auburn 80 responded to carceral siege with ever more rebellion. On December 20, 1970, for example, they launched an attack from within the most secure section of the prison. A memo from Warden Fritz limns this insurgency through the drab vernacular of state bureaucracy.
Whereas, a number of inmates in one of the Special Housing Units participated in a second uprising on December 20, 1970 in that when staff released them from their cells in order to provide outdoor exercise, these inmates armed themselves with a variety of weapons made from cell furniture destroyed for this purpose and mop handles and brooms, broke the windows in the Special Housing Unit, removed the control levers used to open and close the windows, and armed themselves with such levers as weapons, and then refused to return to their cells upon order of institution officials, making it necessary to use tear gas, mace, and other physical force to [compel] inmates to return to their cells and to submit [to a search] for weapons, all of which created a grave threat to [the] safety and security of the Facility.56
Fritz frames the SHU rebellion as an unprovoked guerrilla ambush against unwitting guards who were only performing their duty to ensure their captives received their legally mandate hour of recreational time outside their cages. Unresponsive to rational speech, this bloodthirsty horde left the guards with no choice but to beat them back with defensive force and tear gas, which they dispensed with the utmost restraint.
Six months after this confrontation, The Black Scholar published a letter that indicts Auburn prisoncrats for consigning the rebels to a realm beyond humanism’s protective embrace. According to Jalil Abdul Alim, he and other members of the Auburn 80 were caged twenty-four hours per day in “cruel and inhuman conditions.” He wrote that in response to “trivial things like demanding our human rights, hot meals, clean clothes, constitutional guarantees, showers, etc,” they were subjected to physical, psychological, and sexual attacks that assailed the surfaces and the interiority of their bodies: the flesh, the vital organs, the nervous system, the respiratory system, the senses. “My first beating came after 38 of us were gassed and maced and I refused to submit to a ‘rectal examination.’ I was deaf in my left ear for more than two weeks, and received lacerations on my legs, arms and head.”57 By placing “rectal examination” in scare quotes, Alim demystifies this commonly used technique of sexualized con- quest that is normally cloaked in rationalistic jargon.
The rebels were not passive recipients of these treacheries but rather historical agents who analyzed what was being done to them and consciously fought back. Although they numerically outnumbered their tor- mentors, they were technologically outgunned and physically immobilized in carceral space. Responding to increasingly militaristic siege tactics, they employed a form of carceral guerrilla warfare. As George Jackson explains, guerrilla warfare is “not fought with high-tech weaponry, or state-of-the-art gadgets. It’s fought with whatever can be had—captured weapons when they can be had but often antiquated firearms, homemade ordnance, knives, bows and arrows, even slingshots—but mostly through the sheer will of the guerrilla to fight and win, no matter what.”58 The Auburn rebels actualized this insight, fighting to maintain a modicum of autonomy with no conceivable path to victory. “During the onslaught of these pigs, we were being gassed and forced to break up our toilet bowls, sinks and beds in order that we might defend ourselves to a degree, from those space-men looking pigs with their clubs, mace, and array of gas- masks, oxygen cans and teargas guns, with which we were vamped on. The racist pigs left 20 and 30 gas canisters behind, that we were left to deal with.”59 For their ongoing rebellion they paid a high price, not only in blood and bone, but also in financial debt for the damage incurred to the prison. “I have to pay $87.74 before I’ll be able to buy the bare necessities—toothpaste, soap, etc,” Alim wrote. “I hate to even mention how much prison time and wages it would take for me to pay that price.”60
“We was crazy,” Brother A explained to me over the phone. “We used to like cursing at them, calling them pigs, spitting on them, and throwing our piss and shit on them.”61 I had asked him why he and others on the roof had organized such strong resistance. Rather than responding through the rubric of politics—radical, revolutionary, or otherwise—he attributed their protracted rebellion to a psycho-affective disorder. He explained that the rebels were not “in their right mind,” were not operating as rational, self-owning subjects, but rather as the bearers of madness, of ungovernable cognitive schemas. “And some of us were extremists,” he continued. His adoption of a term that is often hurled by the state as a delegitimizing gesture resonates with this proclamation by Jackson: “I am an extremist. I call for extreme measures to solve extreme problems.”62
It is telling, however, that the examples Brother A uses to illustrate rebel “extremism” and “craziness”—the hurling of offensive language, bodily fluids, and feces—again reflect the profound asymmetry of this struggle.63 A prison psychiatrist who testified at a federal hearing noted that the rebels were struggling through severe trauma, resulting in a sharp increase in suicidal ideation and incidents of self-harm.64 And yet prisoncrats were in a position to weaponize mental health. Numerous letters accuse the state of having captives forcibly committed to the Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and of deploying drugs to reduce them to a vegetative state.
What does it mean to be crazy, to be extreme, to be mad, amid a condition that is itself beyond “reason”? A letter from James Kato Dunn dated January 5, 1971, echoes Fanon, positing that it was the carceral environment that was crazy and extreme. Inscribed in beautifully ornate penmanship, the letter accuses prisoncrats of subjecting captives to “uncivilized acts of insane punitive maltreatments.” Hoping to curtail the “abuses and denials of certain guaranteed rights under the US Constitution,” Kato’s letter pleads for legal support.65 However, as time wore on, and these abuses intensified, he grew more belligerent, developing a reputation for grabbing patrolling guards through the bars of his cage and choking them out whenever he caught one getting too close. These attacks would invariably result in Kato being singled out for special brutalities, humiliations, and violations. Yet the guards understood that they could not abuse him without incurring a consequence, and so they began to give the area in front of his cage a wide berth.66 In a letter published months later in Right On!, Kato seems to have abandoned any aspiration for inclusion into normative humanity or citizenship. Gone are the references to the US Constitution, human rights, or attorneys. In their stead, Kato demands “equal weapons not equal rights!”67 Outside of the social contract and the polity, the only way to ensure survival and secure the preconditions for being human was the capacity to inflict what Fanon called a “reciprocal homogeneity” of violence.68
Determined physical rebellion overflowed into the Cayuga County Courthouse, where rebels noted the irony in the fact that affixed to the building’s exterior was a plaque commemorating Harriet Tubman, the militant abolitionist who lived in Auburn for a time and is buried in its cemetery. The rebels narrated themselves as Tubman’s progeny, employing a range of abolitionist and counter-humanist tactics reflecting their desire for disengagement with the carceral regime. A surveillance report notes that the six captives charged with crimes stemming from the November 4 takeover “had to be carried from their cells to vehicles and forced into the courtroom.” During their arraignment the Auburn 6, as they came to be known, refused to answer to their slave names and declined to enter pleas, demanding instead that the federal government launch a probe into ongoing carceral violence. “They pounded tables, shouted obscenities, kicked doors and were completely and positively uncontrollable,” noted an agent for the New York State Police.69 At one point a fight broke out in the courtroom itself. After being assaulted by a uniformed officer, Auburn rebel Kareem C’Allah retaliated, executing a double snap kick to the officer’s chest and using his manacles to choke him until his face “turned purple.” Kareem relented only after another officer put a gun to his head, cocked the hammer and promised to “blow his head off.”70
Convinced that they would not receive a fair trial, the Auburn 6 accepted a plea bargain for reduced sentences. “We realize that any amount of time in any prison is no ‘bargain,’” wrote their legal defense team. “But we felt that a decision ought to be based on the chances we had of an acquittal, and the chances we had of using the trial to expose the conditions which existed at Auburn, and which continue to exist in every penitentiary in New York, as you well know.”71 But rather than turn themselves in and willingly return to their tormentors, two of the Auburn 6 jumped bail, inhabiting an illegal freedom that extended the Auburn rebellion more than two years beyond its officially declared end.72
On May 8, 1971, the isolated rebels launched another collective rebellion from Auburn’s SHU. This one occurred simultaneously with a protest in which over 100 PSC members marched in the rain outside the prison. As chants denouncing prison slavery, class warfare, and homeg- rown fascism seeped through the concrete exterior, Brother A and oth- ers used the metal springs from their bedframes to pick the locks of their cages, then armed themselves with razor-sharp shards of porcelain obtained from shattering the sinks affixed to the cell walls. They then emerged from their cages and ambushed the guards, slashing them with their self-fashioned blades. The attack yielded a predictable result.
“They beat us damn near to death and threw us back in our cells,” Brother A recalled in a manner chilling in its matter-of-factness. And yet, the guards were beaten and bloodied too. In the absence of victory, the production of mutual suffering would have to do.
The Auburn rebellion exposed the inadequacy of existing carceral infrastructure to contain Black insurgency. A confidential DOCS report noted that “the single yard is an open invitation for a few militants to take over.”73 Warden Fritz, meanwhile, complained to the commissioner that “the physical plant is not so designed to provide the necessary supervision for inmates who are bent and determined upon rebellion.”74 Brother A recalls that one of the immediate legacies of the Auburn rebellion was that DOCS shored up these structural vulnerabilities, henceforth soldering stainless-steel sinks, toilets, and bedframes directly onto the surfaces of its enclosures. After Attica, as I will discuss in the second part of this book, so-called Control Units, Maxi-Maxi, and Supermax prisons exploded. Because of struggles like Auburn, carceral institutions of the future were increasingly designed for war.
As a protracted collision between opposing forces, Auburn radically disrupted the normative paradigm of humanism. The rebels responded to the living lie of human universality by exposing the physical and symbolic violence that relegated them to its underside. Through implacable resistance, noncooperation, and epistolary insurgency, their counter-humanist praxis appropriated and redistributed a fraction of the violence that encircled them, seeped into their pores, and assailed their psyches. In doing so, they communicated their refusal to be dominated and their desire to be liberated from humanity as embodied by their captors. Engaging Fanon’s dialectics of violence and liberation, George Jackson had written, “Two men die with the stroke that slays the slave- master: the slave-master dies in a way that he can do no man any further harm; and then the slave mentality of the former victim dies.”75 But what then?♦
All endnotes from this excerpt are available here in .pdf format.
