The building gave in.
The outcome made me feel better about living there, even though I sensed there could be some resentment among my neighbors. But pretty much every all-white co-op in New York at that time had similar explicit or implicit rules.
* * *
Almost immediately after the inmates took control of D yard, leaders emerged. They quickly released a statement larded with the stilted rhetoric of 1960s radicalism, “The incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwhacking of the two prisoners on Sept. 8, 1971,” the demands began, making reference to a brutal disciplinary action the day before, “but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administration network of the prison, throughout the year. WE are MEN! We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”
Five demands were made, and fifteen “practical proposals.” Among the demands was turning Attica into a federal prison and assuring that the prison would be rebuilt by inmates at minimum wage—not the slave labor that they were protesting. The demands also included, “complete amnesty, meaning freedom from any physical, mental, and legal reprisals,” and also “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a non-imperialistic country,” which to mainstream America could only sound like self-parody. The final demand was for an observers’ committee. The leadership provided a list of people they wanted there—including the famed radical lawyer Bill Kunstler, Tom Wicker from the New York Times, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. They also invited others who wanted to be there or who could be useful. I was in the latter category.
I left for Attica wearing a tan polyester summer suit, with my banged-up leather briefcase holding some work papers, a change of underwear, and a few basic toiletries. I had mutton-chop sideburns and wore horn-rimmed glasses. My hair was black and bushy. I walked past the doorman and the pretty flower arrangement in our lobby to hail a cab for LaGuardia Airport, where a plane would take me to Buffalo. It was sunny and warm out—almost fall.
Among the prisoners at Attica was my client Tony Maynard. There was also Sam Melville, a young man from the Weather Underground, a radical organization that had split away from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to, it said, bring the Vietnam War home to America. He was a client of my partner, Henry diSuvero. Tony being there was definitely a motivating factor for me, but I’m not sure I knew Sam was there until I saw him in D yard.
Maynard had been wrongfully accused of a 1967 shotgun killing in Greenwich Village, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to ten to twenty years. Using a shotgun as the murder weapon was completely out of character for this stylish man with an artist’s sensibility. The authors James Baldwin and William Styron, who knew Tony, and the editorial chairman and columnist of the then liberal New York Post, James Wechsler, had made a considerable amount of noise about the wrongful conviction, but it didn’t matter. As I saw it, the “crime” Tony committed was being black. Making matters worse, Tony had a beautiful white wife, and the two of them had spent enough time making the scene in Greenwich Village to become a target. As Baldwin would later tell me, more than being black, Tony became a target because he was “arrogant and didn’t know his place.”
I agreed with Baldwin. It certainly didn’t help that Tony had what you might call an attitude problem, but fighting the prevailing winds of racial prejudice in the 1960s criminal court system was more often than not impossible.
I had tried Tony’s murder case, and I bonded with him during the long days we spent together and the discussions on weekends and after court. When Dotty said “Attica,” I heard “Tony Maynard.” He was transferred there from the Green Haven Correctional Facility, where I had recently visited him in what was called “the Hole.” He was disciplined a lot, and was not what one might call a model prisoner. Well spoken, smart, unbending, and rebellious, Tony had all the qualities a prison guard would be unlikely to tolerate. He would make a tempting target when authorities put down the rebellion, which I assumed would happen—maybe even before I could get there.
Tony was wearing a tattered tailored suit—he refused to wear prison clothes—when I caught sight of him in D yard, which we entered with the state corrections commissioner, Russell B. Oswald, to negotiate with the leadership. Tony looked pretty out of place, more like one of the observers than a participant among the thousand or so black, Latino, and white convicts milling around D yard preparing to defend their revolution.
Tony, whose presence made me feel more secure in the chaos of the yard, said, “Once the hacks are back in control, you can forget racial harmony,” adding, “Nothing good can come of this.” Surveying his fellow prisoners waving homemade flags and chanting “Black Power!” he added contemptuously: “They’re all so blind. Today they’re kings. They think the world will listen. The TV cameras and negotiations add to the illusion. But no one really cares what happens to a bunch of convicts and the clock-punchers who run an asylum run amok. We’re all less than nothing to the people that matter.”
I shared Tony’s ambivalence about the sort of canned big-talk-but-often-empty radical rhetoric that had emerged from the heyday of the civil rights movement and migrated into the prisons.
Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” What happened at Attica came close to King’s definition. Before they rampaged through the prison, the inmates were an unheard group of people who now had access to the outside world. No one listened to them or even gave them a name. To the all-white guards who controlled their lives, their skin color denoted them as subhuman beings. Their only strength came from communication. That’s why what happened at Attica was different from a riot. It was an uprising. But unlike the few uprisings that have succeeded, there was no way the prisoners would be able to hold on to the territory they had taken, and failure appeared to be a given. To prevent the stranglehold the authorities had on the prisoners who were trapped in the yard they had seized from turning into a bloodbath, only the observers could open a dialogue, but the odds of either side listening were slim. That’s where things stood. Blacks were fed up. Jim Crow and other forms of apartheid like school segregation were now against the letter of the law, but still the norm all over the country and held in place by force and more passive forms of economic domination. Whites also were angry about the threat of black demands for a share of what they saw as their jobs, and the right to move into their neighborhoods and go to their schools. There was a lot of fear all around, but almost no willingness—or perhaps better, capacity—to occupy the gray area where race issues could evolve and change. As a not-quite-radical, not-quite-mainstream civil rights lawyer, I sensed how difficult it would be to find that gray area in the Attica yard.
The other prisoner I knew about at Attica was Sam Melville. As a white man, he was definitely in the minority there. Because he was my partner’s client, Sam sought me out in D yard. He had been convicted for a string of highly publicized Weather Underground bombings that took place in 1969.
When Melville saw me, he talked his way through the phalanx of prisoners guarding the negotiators.
“They’re going to come looking for me,” Sam said, in a matter-of-fact way. “And I’ll be here. I’m a dead man.”
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
He shook his head. We exchanged a few words, shook hands, and he disappeared back into the crowd.
After it was all over, there were reports that some of the prisoners who led the rebellion were killed long after authorities regained control of the facility. Sam Melville was one of the people mentioned on that list, though he was not part of the leadership. After retaking the prison, state spin doctors said that Melville got shot while trying to explode a fifty-gallon fuel tank. They said he
had four Molotov cocktails.
It made no sense. The uprising was over. It would have been suicide, and I saw no inkling that Melville had that kind of ending in mind. To the contrary, the Weathermen issued warnings and planned their bombings to avoid hurting anyone.
* * *
Tony Maynard and Sam Melville were both right. The fact that there was a soon-to-be-dead prison guard, and forty-two correction officers and workers—all of them white—being held hostage by prisoners who were predominantly black and Puerto Rican was the best indicator of how the situation at Attica was going to end. It didn’t matter that the only thing most prisoners had to do with the takeover was proximity. It didn’t matter that prisoners were often confined to their cells for days on end and were only allowed one shower per week, or that they had to make a roll of toilet paper last for a month and do menial jobs for twenty-five cents a day. It didn’t matter that dietary restrictions prescribed by religion were not accommodated, or that their personal letters were censored. They were numbers, not names, subject to whatever brutalities the guards visited upon them, slaves of a system from which there was no appeal.
All this stuff was in the Attica prisoner demands—the list of them growing with every passing day—and while officials agreed to twenty-eight of those demands knowing full well that some would require funding as well as a lengthy legislative process that would go nowhere. The list of demands was one that could expand with the ever-expanding universe. And while the prison administrators were willing to rubber-stamp demands that made no real difference, they were steadfast in their refusal to consider any kind of meaningful amnesty.
As I had represented the Auburn Six, I expected as much. In Auburn the prisoners were promised no reprisals if they surrendered, which they did. Then they were terrorized while awaiting trial for charges racked up during the uprising. Word of their treatment traveled far when a federal judge transferred them to prisons around the state, including Attica.
Forty years after the Attica prison uprising was crushed, tapes were released on a Freedom of Information Act request that recorded conversations between Governor Rockefeller and President Richard Nixon discussing the retaking of Attica. The “silent majority” point of view is unmistakable:
“Tell me,” Nixon began one of the conversations. “Are these primarily blacks that you’re dealing with?”
“Oh, yes,” Rockefeller replied. “The whole thing was led by the blacks.”
“I’ll be darned,” President Nixon replied affably. “Are all the prisoners that were killed blacks? Or are there any white…”
“I haven’t got that report,” the governor replied, “but I’d have to—I would say just off hand, yes. We did [it] though, only when they were in the process of murdering the guards, or when they were attacking our people as they came in to get the guards.”
“You had to do it,” Nixon said, as if he were reassuring himself.
In reality Rockefeller didn’t have to do it. After four days of unrest and disorder, things were starting to fray. The weather was horrible. Conditions in D yard were bad and getting worse. Nixon was wrong. I was there. Rockefeller wasn’t. Everyone just needed to be patient. If we couldn’t talk it out, we could wait it out. Rockefeller didn’t want to wait it out. He wanted to make a point. As New York City’s most prominent Puerto Rican politician at the time, Herman Badillo, said, “There’s always time to die.” The claim that prisoners were “in the process of murdering the guards” was a bald-faced lie. Whether Rockefeller was repeating bad information or made it up out of whole cloth is unclear. After the lie became accepted truth in the public imagination, autopsies showed that troopers—not the prisoners—killed the nine prison guards that Monday morning. As for the racial makeup of the prisoners, Rockefeller was wrong about that too, unless he unconsciously lumped Puerto Ricans and blacks together under the heading of “minority” and never got word of the whites in that ocean of rage.
Either way, you get the picture.
* * *
Later in the tapes Rockefeller told the president about the observers’ committee that I was on, and the three days we spent trying, and ultimately failing, to negotiate a peaceful end to the rebellion.
“We had a committee of citizens,” Governor Rockefeller said, “invited by the prisoners, thirty-two of them. Tom Wicker was one. We had that Kunstler, that lawyer.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know of him,” President Nixon replied.
“We had the head of the Mau Maus,” Rockefeller continued. “A motley crowd. And some good people, some legislators. And Tom Wicker was so emotional in this thing that it was unbelievable.”
“Which side?” President Nixon asked.
“Oh, on their side,” Rockefeller replied.
“Always, always,” Nixon said. “I know, I know.”
I was in the room when Tom Wicker; Clarence Jones, the publisher of the New York Amsterdam News, who had been one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, key lawyers; and State Senator John Dunne made the eleventh-hour call to Governor Rockefeller at his 3,400-acre family estate in Pocantico Hills, begging him to show good faith in the negotiations by coming to the prison. I was there when he said no. In addition to the rain and growing squalor, there were limited amounts of food and water, and Warden Vincent Mancusi controlled both. The prisoners’ position on amnesty and going to nonimperialist countries would soften. They would get hungry. They would get more miserable. I had already negotiated a provision that prisoners would not be charged with crimes related to property damage. But even though there was virtually no hope we could expand the concept to limited amnesty, we needed to buy some time. Rockefeller declined.
In the morning on the fourth and final day of the uprising, the sound of helicopters signaled the beginning of the end. I didn’t know it then, but according to Tom Wicker’s report in the Times, the attack began at 9:43:28. New York State Police troopers dropped tear gas into D yard and they as well as prison guards let loose a barrage of gunfire, shooting into the thousand or so inmates huddled there. Some used dum-dum bullets, which killed and maimed as many people as possible—including the hostages—until the firing stopped. In a matter of minutes the smoke cleared to reveal a scene of slaughter. The observers inside the prison were safely away from where the shooting occurred. Guards came into our sanctuary and ushered us out of the prison shortly after the attack. Outside, the assembled townspeople jeered and cursed us. In the anguish of the moment, I have forgotten how we were taken away. Inside the yard the guards forced the inmates to strip naked and run a gauntlet, beating them with clubs.
If the Left called it an “uprising,” and to the mainstream it was a “riot,” Tom Wicker and I ended up calling it a rebellion because for those of us who were there, that’s how it seemed. After the prisoner takeover, they were getting a chance to be heard for the first time in America, but they were misheard, distrusted, and ignored while the administration representatives placed all the blame for what happened on them. In short, the keepers and the kept might as well have been speaking different languages. As much as I liked to think of myself as a person with one foot in each world, I was unable to translate, nor was anyone else able to say what needed to be said. In all likelihood there was no solution other than time, as Herman Badillo had put it. And time meant surrender, with whatever promises of reform had been made, something none of the observers was willing to say face-to-face at the negotiating table while they and the prisoners were together in the yard.
A few hours after troopers retook the prison, I was in the back of a cab heading south on Central Park West feeling defeated, angry, and depressed. I came home wearing the same suit. I stank. Where there had been a toehold to push against what looked like an impending disaster and a sense of mission when I left, there was now a massacre. I feared Maynard was dead. I wondered if any of the inmate leadership had survived. For days afterward my calls to the prison went unanswered.
While we were waiting for the light to change, I remember looking at t
he Dakota where the rich and famous lived, with its Victorian gas lamps and bathysphere-like guard booth. We rolled to a stop at my building six blocks south, just above Columbus Circle. I don’t recall who the doorman was that night, or the floor captain. I noted the difference between the stewards’ room at Attica, where the observers’ committee was camped out, and the shimmering terrazzo floors of the lobby as I trudged toward the elevator at the far end of the southern hallway. The elevator man deposited me on the semiprivate landing my family shared with one other apartment. I could hear the sounds of daily life on the other side of our door. My three kids and Kitty were in there safe and sound. The door was unlocked. That familiar feeling that I led a double life was strong as I stood there with my hand resting on the doorknob. I turned it and opened the door. In the foyer my four-year-old, Patrick, came shooting past with a quick hello. I went to our bedroom to change, gathered all the clothes I’d been wearing, and threw them in the garbage.
There was a message waiting for me on the table from The David Frost Show, a big television program at the time. They wanted me to be a guest that night. Frost was hosting a special panel on what had happened that morning. I would join Senator John Dunne, Leo Zeferetti, the head of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, and Clarence Jones. Although I was on the show, you won’t find my name in the online listing of who appeared that night. David Frost turned to me early for comment, which is the one and only reason I’m not listed as one of the guests. I was exhausted and angry, and to this day I don’t regret a thing about what I said. I don’t remember what Frost asked me. I do remember attacking Rockefeller: “He only cares about his class prerogatives. The white guards didn’t matter any more than the black prisoners to him. They were all expendable.”
Cutting me off, Frost turned to cooler, safer voices for the rest of the discussion.
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