“Prisons are War”: The Long Attica Revolt and Abolition Internationalism

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MILLENNIALS ARE KILLING CAPITALISM AND ORISANMI BURTON

In 2017, we interviewed Orisanmi Burton for our 12th issue, Racialized Incarceration (July-Aug 2017). Six years later, he published his research in an important book entitled Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. In it, he differs from the usual historical accounts of the 1971 Attica rebellion that saw close to 1,300 incarcerated people take over the space of the prison for four days, forming what George Jackson calls “a Black Commune,” a hundred years after the 1871 Paris Commune. Like the Paris Commune, the Attica rebellion was repressed in blood, killing twenty-nine rebels and ten hostages (prison guards). Rather than reading this historical event in its punctual manifestation and through a prison reformist framework, Orisanmi’s book centers the analyses of the rebels themselves, as well as the Black liberation movement and the global struggle against colonialism. He describes the numerous prison uprisings of 1970 and 1971 in the State of New York to form what he calls the Long Attica Revolt. He also allows us to envision the life organized in the liberated space of the prison yard, from where the rebels can watch the stars, share meals, organize politically, build improbable defense weapons, or even celebrate their sexuality. The terminology he uses throughout the book strongly reinforces the revolutionary framework through which the Revolt was constructed. This manifests through calling incarcerated people “captives” and those who take part in the uprising, “rebels,” through mobilizing concepts of political Blackness, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism, or through using the rebels’ chosen names that pay tribute to the history of decolonization, Black liberation, and Islam.

In August 2023, Millennials Are Killing Capitalism recorded a three-hour long podcast interview with Orisanmi about his book, which constructs a helpful toolbox for readers. This issue of The Funambulist was imagined with Orisanmi’s contribution to it and we agreed on publishing fragments of this interview (about 20% of it). We are very grateful to the MAKC comrades for allowing us to do so, and would like to point out that their important questions have been drastically reduced to accommodate this format. The following fragments were chosen to introduce the book’s methodology, the importance of Orisanmi’s argument that “prison is war,” the foundations of the Long Attica Revolt, the mindset of the rebels, as well as the envisioning of an abolition internationalism.

MAKC: To start, could you just say a bit about your overall methodology and approach to this book, and how it differs from conventional narratives of Attica, as well as some of the people and events this approach pointed you towards?

ORISANMI BURTON: Absolutely. There’s a dominant story of Attica, and the rise of the US carceral state more broadly, and it’s been told and retold numerous times over the years. You know, there’s several documentaries about Attica. There’s a Pulitzer Prize winning book about Attica, there are books that were written by participants and books written by observers, for instance Tom Wicker’s book, A Time to Die (1975), which is actually a phenomenal book… They all have their strengths and weaknesses, as does my book. But they have an important thing in common, which is that the specificities of that prison as well as the rebellion that happened in Attica and its repression tend to be exceptionalized. There’s been minimal effort really to explore what was happening in other prisons in New York and beyond and how there were relationships being formed, material relationships, ideological relationships being formed across the entire carceral system, and how that sort of shaped what emerged in Attica, between September 9 And September 13, 1971, which is the official chronology of the Attica rebellion.

Another thing is that the Panthers and the Young Lords are typically mentioned as part of the context that inspired the Attica rebellion, but that’s pretty much it; the sense that there was a general mood of rebellion and resistance in the air—which of course there was, but it was much deeper than that. And there tends to be no mention whatsoever of any connection between the Black Liberation Army and Attica.

The global context of anti-colonial struggle might be mentioned as a general background, but again, there have been few attempts that I’m aware of, to go deeper into interrogating the intimacy between global anti-colonial struggle and what was going on, not just in the United States, but within US prisons.

And then Attica is reduced to the four days during which the rebels held the prison. My argument really is that Attica is an ongoing structure of revolt. The book really focuses on the sort of ten years between 1970 and 1980, roughly; the rebellion is very much a living presence throughout that time. 

There’s also this tendency to interrogate the legal aftermath of Attica. There’s a sense that after the rebellion and the massacre, there’s this legal struggle that happens for years. And of course, that’s important, but there’s also an ongoing revolutionary struggle within and beyond the walls that continues in the name of Attica. What I’m doing is I basically ignore what’s happening in the courtroom, not because it’s not important, but because it gets talked about, often at the expense of all of this other continued organizing, repression, resistance, and rebellion, that continues to happen on the inside, and really on both sides of the walls. Another way that this text is different is that it questions fifty years of Attica state narratives, state definitions, state understandings of the demands, understandings of time, and understandings of politics. Those efface this whole other domain of knowledge, and theorization and historiography that took place and continues to take place around Attica, specifically its revolutionary abolitionist and anti-colonial dimensions, which have been largely put aside in favor of something I call “a counter insurgent historiography,” because of how it displaces sort of more radical narratives and aspirations. 

[…] I tried to write the book in a way that allowed me to share what I’ve learned. I’ll tell one story. When I started working on that research in 2014, I started by interviewing Eddie Ellis, who was a member of the Black Panther Party. He was in Attica during the rebellion. He wasn’t in the actual rebellion, but he watched the whole thing unfold. That interview lasted something like six hours, and when I listen to it now, I cringe because I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was asking all the wrong questions. And he had this very firm yet gentle way of redirecting all of my questions in such a way that let me know that I was basically asking the wrong questions; that I needed to think more historically, because I was asking about things that were unfolding at that time in 2014. And he was basically saying, you can’t understand that unless you understand this. And you can’t understand this until you go deeper. And so that’s the beginning of this project. And Dylan Rodriguez had always told me: “This is the spine of your project: that the demand for the story that you’re telling, actually grows out of a Black radical demand for a more rigorous revolutionary genealogy of these histories.” So that’s part of my method of writing is to start with what Black revolutionaries and Black radical intellectuals are saying, and to see to what extent I can bolster, annotate and rigorously support their claims with empirical evidence using the tools of academic scholarship. 

This led me to this extensive genealogy of events and intellectuals, both known and unknown: the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, Queen Mother Moore, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey… I’m not talking about spiritual influences, I’m talking about material relationships. These people are connected to Attica in a material way. Martin Sostre, Yuri Kochiyama… the list goes on. So what I’ve been doing is to think about the rebellion not as this discrete event, but as a generalized phenomenon that was moving through the entire carceral system. In fact, it was forced into the carceral system through state repression, and it manifested itself in different forms. There was the capturing of hostages and the seizure of territory, which we all know about, because it makes the paper, but then there was this extremely significant other forms of rebellion, psychological narrative, rebellion, epistemic, ontological, spiritual rebellion, all of these things were taking place. I tried to trace that circulation, using Black radical and revolutionary sources of knowledge as the starting point. I don’t start with the state archive, and then sort of pepper the analysis with quotations from the Black Panther: I start with people who lived this struggle, I start with their claims and, from there, I dig to see what evidence I could find of that elsewhere. 

MAKC: Awesome, that’s really beautiful. I’d love it if you could take a couple of minutes to talk about some of the distinctions you’re making in the introduction, around liberalism, the law and war, and how you think of something like slavery or the 13th Amendment in relation to the prison industrial complex as well.

OB: No doubt. I want to have more conversations about this, because I think it will help us.

It grew out of my need to clarify the relationship between what I’m saying, which is that prison is war, and what I see as one of the dominant leftist critiques of prisons, which is that prisons are slavery.

And to be clear, when I first began to be politicized around how prisons function in US society, learning about the exception clause in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was transformative: it radicalized me. And of course, many people who have experienced prisons, compare it to slavery or analogize it or describe it as slavery constantly, and I don’t have a problem with that. It’s not my place to say no, that’s not how you shouldn’t narrate your experience or analyze the institution. I get it. But there’s a way in which this recourse to the 13th Amendment bothers me, and it’s because it falls prey to a kind of legal liberalism, which asserts falsely that prisons are slavery because there’s a piece of legislation that makes the condition possible. I think that’s false and that it leads to a dead end. 

The paradigmatic justification for slavery is war, and it is embedded within classical liberal theory. Someone like John Locke, wrote in the Second Treatise of Government (1689) that prisoners of a just war can be enslaved. We know that John Locke was financially invested in the transatlantic slave trade, and that he helped write the constitution of Carolina in 1670. This treatise was, among other things, an extended justification for Indigenous expropriation and slavery. This is a critical text of classical liberal theory to the so-called “Founding Fathers,” who drew on that text to formulate the American project. So there’s this relationship. There’s this cynical manipulation of theory and philosophy to justify war and slavery from the beginning. I also write about the Supreme Court case, something like forty years prior to the ratification of the 13th Amendment, where Chief Justice John Marshall, who was a slave owner, makes the same argument as Locke. He says that African people forcibly brought to the western hemisphere were captured in just wars and therefore could be legally enslaved. The case was basically trying to adjudicate whether or not these captured Africans should stay enslaved in the US, because they were brought to the US illegally after the slave trade had already been abolished in the US—not slavery, but the trade. This legitimized slavery into US jurisprudence before the 13th Amendment, and the justification is war. 

Slavery is not the result of law: it is the result of war. Law is an instrument of war that legitimizes slavery, but it’s not its source. Locke also says that slavery is the state of war continued. So slavery is war. Olaudah Equiano in his Slave Narrative (1789) says the same thing: slavery is war. And then someone like Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book called On War (1832), which says that war is politics by other means. He defined war as an act of force to compel an enemy to do one’s will. Hegel defines slavery as the master’s capacity to eradicate the independent will of the slave. So war and slavery are both about the imposition of one’s will upon another. The aim of war, as defined by von Clausewitz, is to eliminate resistance. Well, something that can’t resist is a slave. So slavery is war, it’s just a particular moment of war, where one side has almost zero capacity for resistance. But you’re not really a slave, if you’re conscious of the fact that you’re a slave, because that means the master has not entirely imposed his will upon you. Because his will is to make you an object incapable of resistance. And if you know that you’re being oppressed and you’re capable of some kind of resistance. 

One final point about war. The capitalist state and its white supremacist, war waging apparatus. They’re the ones who initiated and waged this war against colonized people, and other targeted populations, as well as against nature. Targeted communities are responding to this war through resistance. Joy James has this concept of war resistance to talk about militant struggle as a way to not necessarily call it “violence,” because there’s a way in which when you talk about violence from below, it gets equated with violence from above. I think war resistance is really helpful. I talk about “counter-violence,” and I talk about “counter-war.” It’s important because the state strives to criminalize militant resistance and makes it appear as though those who are responding to a condition of war are actually the initiators of that war. So we have to be very clear that it’s not what’s happening. In fact, the counter-war that I’m talking about does not seek a symmetrical aim. In other words, to Attica rebels, and this sort of longer genealogy of anti-colonial Black radical cultural war, the aim of it is not to produce slaves. The aim is to disengage from the carceral regime and to create different forms of life. 

MAKC: We’d like to talk about the New York City jail rebellions. Could you give folks an overview of these rebellions and what they were?

OB: Sure. The New York City jail rebellion of 1970 was a massive eruption that ruptured the entire city’s jail system in the summer and fall of that year. And it inaugurates what I’m calling the Long Attica Revolt. The typical timeline of Attica is September 9 to September 13, 1971. The New York City Jail rebellion started on August 10, 1970. It initiates an unbroken chain of struggles that culminate in Attica, over one year later. I think there were seven jails in New York City at the time, distributed across four city boroughs, and Rikers Island, which was much less dense than it is now. Conditions were abominable in the jails, and between 1967 and 1970, the population of incarcerated people more than doubled. The system was designed to hold around 8,000 people, but at the time of the revolt, it held over 14,000. Most of these people were pretrial detainees, meaning they had been accused of crimes, but hadn’t been convicted of anything, so the reason why they were in jail is either because they were denied bail by a judge, or much more commonly, because they were too poor to pay the bail amount that was set by the judge. Some people were in jail for a year or two years or more, because they couldn’t pay, you know, $100. This is similar to what’s currently happening on Rikers Island and in jails all around the country. As I was working on this, it was really clear to me that so much of what these folks were struggling against continues to be relevant. 

Part of the argument that I’m making is that official explanations for these rebellions that focus on conditions, overcrowding, rancid food, and racism, as the only cause of the rebellion, undercut and diminish the extent of the organizing, political education, radical study that preceded the rebellions.

The conditions may explain why people rebelled, but they don’t explain why the rebellions took the shape that they took, which is, I would argue, a revolutionary shape. That can only be explained by talking about their political consciousness that they had been nurturing within and against these conditions. And that’s the part that constantly gets sort of papered over or excised. 

At this time, you have this volatile combination of people behind the walls. And you alluded to it in the intro, but you had members of the Panther 21, who were in jail, because of a COINTELPRO and NYPD frame up. They were held on $100,000 bail so, in some ways, their case was exceptional. But it reflected the fact that people are in jail because of the way that capitalism was increasingly disposing of people who didn’t have enough money to be seen as worthy of circulating in the world, and people who were politically radical and revolutionary. The Panther 21 were initially scattered throughout the jail system. They tried to keep them apart, to dilute their political potential. But they waged a lawsuit and won the right to all be concentrated in the Queens branch House of Detention, where they later ended up leading a rebellion but they did not start it. Part of the story is that the state doesn’t really know what it’s doing. It’s just kind of fumbling through things. They really underestimate the intelligence and dynamism of these movements. So they thought that if they just incarcerated all the Panthers in one wing of the jail that they could control the jail. So they put all of them in the Long Island City branch of the Queens House of Detention, except for Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird, the two female defendants in the Panther 21 case, who were in the woman’s House of Detention. They put them in their own wing of the jail, isolated from everyone else, because they have this sort of epidemiological theory of radicalism where they think it spreads like a disease: if you quarantine certain people, the disease won’t spread. But a rebellion jumps off anyway, and the Panthers had nothing to do with starting it. Assumptively non-political people who were in prison for social crime started it, and they released the Panthers into the rebellion, at which point three of them took on leadership roles in the branch Queens rebellion. Now, this is interesting, because COINTELPRO was designed to destroy the Black liberation struggle, among other struggles, and one of their methods was to incarcerate people. But you see that their plan for incarcerating the movement backfired, because the specific individuals that they targeted for COINTELPRO then later showed up as being on the front of this prison struggle. 

So the Panther 21 were in the jail system, and other panthers from a lesser known trial called the “mini Panther trial,” were in there, including someone named Ricardo De Leon, a Panamanian Black Panther, you had members of the Young Lords, as well as other Puerto Rican nationalists. You had a brother in there who had participated in the Cuban Revolution. You had a pair of Taiwanese dissidents who had been accused of attempting to assassinate China’s Vice President in there, you had Samuel Melville, a white revolutionary, who later shows up in plays a central role in Attica and is connected to the Weather Underground. In 1968, you had a whole bunch of members of the Revolutionary Action Movement who were in there, you had Vietnam vets, people who had combat experience and knowledge of strategy and tactics, people who were in paramilitary street formations, (so-called “gangs”). And then you had a lot of people who didn’t have any of that kind of background but who, by virtue of their life experience, were primed to formulate a critique. They already had a critique of capitalism because of the conditions of their own lives, but they also were not averse to criminalized violent acts: they were primed to engage in radical activity, including engaging in acts of counter-violence. The state really did not have a plan for how to manage this population, they thought that they just put people in cages. The prisons were unprepared to act as the bowels of state repression. 

That’s the genesis of the New York City Jail rebellion, but it ends up spreading throughout the entire carceral system, even in places that didn’t have rebellions that we know about. I wrote an essay in the Black Scholar journal, which talks a little bit about the organizing that was happening in the woman’s house of detention: the Bronx House. It never erupted in rebellion, but there were several events where people set fires and engaged in acts of nonviolent resistance. Part of what I tried to do in the book is just to talk about the extent of the strategy and tactics that were being employed and how these folks pulled these different factions of the prison together, and instilled a sense of discipline, and started to develop their own political formations and tried to think about how to exert leverage from within these institutions that are designed to sort of isolate them. 

MAKC: The conversations that you had writing the book form the backbone of the interrogations that you articulate. One really interesting example, that I felt was your engagement with Jomo Omowale’s thinking through a dialogue with his daughter, Emani Davis, and your interviews with Luqmon. So I just wanted to give you space to talk about that a little bit. 

OB: Yeah, thank you. Jomo Omowale is a really interesting figure. I’ve never met him, but I feel like I know him very well. I met and interviewed the woman that he was married to for a very long time. Elizabeth Gaynes, a lawyer and activist in her own right, and their daughter Emani. I learned a tremendous amount from both of them. Emani was really the first person I met who talked about Attica in a way that was totally outside the normative, rational Western paradigm. She’s very political and in tune with her spirituality. She is able to communicate with her father, so we’ve talked about that a lot. She’s a very deep thinker. Jomo was known as one of the most political people in Attica in terms of his political ideology. He had Marxist-Leninism down, and that’s fascinating to understand, but there’s all this stuff in his archive that exceeds Western radicalism. I’m thinking with Cedric Robinson and others, to think about how to make sense of that. But when I met Emani, she was already taking it to a whole other level. She would talk about how Attica was a blood sacrifice for future generations, things like that. I started telling her about little things I was finding, and that I found interesting, like how important the stars were to the Attica brothers, many of whom, after they took over the prison, brought all their stuff outside and slept outside.

There are all these moments in the archive, where they’re talking about being able to see the stars for the first time. That was really moving to her to think about them as stargazers.

And then we would talk about how Harriet Tubman would use the stars to navigate [on the Underground Railroad]. There’s this whole other register of rebellion that’s happening at the very level of humanity. Because it’s very clear that “the men of Attica were different than their captors.” They were in the process of formation, of mutation. Thinking with Jomo through Emani helps to clarify, and it helped me feel like I had permission to go there, beyond the rational to take those things seriously, not to marginalize them, but to bring them to the center. 

Luqmon is another figure. His given name was Larry White. He just passed away a couple of months ago. Rest in power, Larry White. Anyone who was in New York prisons during the 1970s or 1980s, in men prisons in New York, and in women’s prisons to an extent, knows and respects Larry White, just like Eddie Ellis; the two of them were comrades inside. They ended up in Green Haven. Eddie, who, as I mentioned before, was one of the first people I started to interview, introduced me to Larry. I must have interviewed Larry a hundred times; at some point we just became friends. He was just a brilliant thinker who, after being transferred out of Auburn, where he took part in the Auburn rebellion in 1970 wrote a letter to his son, which gets included in this pamphlet. The pamphlet is about this brutal war that’s happening in Auburn, and all of the essays in the pamphlet are about surviving his war, fighting and engaging in this low intensity war, except for Larry “Luqmon” White’s. His was this love letter to his son who he hadn’t met. And I found the letter, which Larry hadn’t seen for fifty years. His son had never seen it. I brought them together, we read the letter together. It was like… I mean folks can read it and see what I’m talking about. It has these deep, multiple layers of meaning. These cats were really brilliant. He’s talking about music, he’s talking about sound. He’s using fiction to tell stories within stories. These cats are asserting demands within demands. They’re operating on multiple levels simultaneously. So part of what I tried to do in that section with Emani and Jomo and Luqmon was to try to capture some of that complexity, but also the kind of unruly, ungovernable brilliance of their radical imagination. I just did my best to do justice to that.

MAKC: One of the [Attica rebels’] demands you focus on was the demand for repatriation. Basically, the idea that the rebels would be allowed to fly to a country of their choosing, presumably in exchange for the release of the hostages. This included significant organization and coordination, which potentially could have led to a different outcome. You talk about reasons that this is not as discussed within various histories of the rebellion, which I think gets back to the question of what’s legible to liberal humanism. But could you say a bit more about how you think about this demand and what it reveals about a portion of the rebels and the internationalist component of Attica?

OB: This was one of the things that was most fun to try to figure out: all of the international connections. Eddie Ellis was really good friends with someone who was then known as Max Stanford, who’s now known as Muhammad Ahmad, who’s the founding member of the Revolutionary Action Movement. Right about the time Eddie went to prison, in 1967, Muhammad Ahmad had just returned from China, where he was visiting his mentor, and comrade Robert F. Williams, who had been sort of functioning as an advisor to Mao Zedong. And like I said before, Eddie was in Attica. He wasn’t in the rebellion, but he helped politicize people before the rebellion. So the people who were rebelling in Attica were at most two degrees separated from Robert F. Williams and Mao Zedong. It’s an interesting fact. There’s this broader phenomenon of abolitionist internationalism, which gets expressed through the rebellion. The demand for transport to a non-imperialist country is an expression of that. People mentioned it sometimes, but oftentimes it doesn’t come up at all, because again, this is an internal demand: it’s not legible to the state. I argue that they were really asking for people who supported their movements to make that happen. 

Safiya Bukhari-Alston, who was a member of the New York Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, who was present throughout this story, was in communication with the Auburn rebels and with Attica. She writes in her autobiography about when she heard that demand, she got on the phone and started calling representatives from foreign governments that the Panthers had contacts with which were sizable. We have to remember at this time, there was an international section of the Black Panther Party in Algeria, which was primarily constituted by fugitives, who had escaped from prison or escaped capture, and flew to Algeria, often through Cuba, sometimes on hijacked planes. Sekou Odinga was in Algeria, when the Attica rebellion took place. He was a member of the Panther 21. He escaped capture, went underground, and ended up going to Algeria. He had been in prison in the 1960s, so some of the people who were in Attica knew him personally. They were friends with him, or they knew him on the street, knew that he was in Algeria, and knew that he was a fugitive. So from that perspective, this demand for transport is like a rational, plausible demand, because they knew people who had escaped from the clutches of the state and were now in what they understood to be non-imperialist countries. And they wanted to participate in this broader global anti-colonial struggle. Several of them were developing an analysis of the place of prisons within broader struggles against colonialism. At that time, in the early 1970s, the Vietnam War was still unfolding, but one of the primary sites of anti-colonial struggles was against the Portuguese, in particular with the PAIGC. They were thinking with Amílcar Cabral. I talked to one brother, who I think was in Elmira.

He was incarcerated with a lot of people who were very intellectual and very pan-Africanist in their outlook, who wrote a letter to the United Nations to try to force the authorities to allow them to go to Angola. To leave the prison and go to Angola to fight against the Portuguese.

They wanted the right to do that, and they developed a legal argument to do that. They sent this letter to the UN, which apparently was intercepted by prison authorities. It was one expression among many of this abolitionist internationalism, this anti-carceral internationalism, that was prevalent throughout the prison system at the time, and the state didn’t take it seriously. And liberal analysts don’t take it seriously. But movements took it seriously, and were trying to make it happen. The fact that it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t important. Fifty years later, we’re not in the same context of internationalism. People who survived the Attica rebellion, who are still alive and who I talked to, when they talk about it, you can tell they might even be a little bit embarrassed about it. Because it may sound naive or ridiculous now, but when you put it in the context of when it was uttered, it was audacious. It was brazen. It was ambitious. But it wasn’t ridiculous. It seemed possible. For sure. ■