"Our collective understanding of Attica and Black rebellion more broadly is further impeded by the apparent need of analysts to pander to white audiences that devalue, criminalize, and assail complex and protracted Black insurgency while craving explosive spectacles of Black suffering and death. The rebellion was savagely crushed when a state assault force shot thirty-nine people to death (rebels and hostages) and wounded/tortured countless others. Across the various journalistic, cinematic, and scholarly narrations of Attica, we have been led to believe that what is most important about the event is its repression—the way in which the state deployed, then attempted to conceal, overwhelming violence against it. While I offer an extended exegesis and theorization of the massacre in the following chapter, I agree with the Institute of the Black World (IBW) who, just days after the massacre, wrote that 'it is much easier for us to grasp the despicable treachery of the state officials of New York ... than it is to digest the meaning of Attica.' I would go further and suggest that explications of official malfeasance and trickery are not only easier to convey but more comforting, because they hold out the possibility of redress, whereas the revolutionary, abolitionist, and anticolonial content of the rebellion, which I endeavor to elaborate here, constitutes a terrifying antagonism with the known world.
... When the captives rebelled, they ruptured an acute site of racial-colonial domination and sowed the seeds of something entirely new. In doing so they embodied, rehearsed, and struggled through a constellation of radical and revolutionary tactics, dynamics, and contradictions. They developed ethical practices of solidarity, interdependence, place-based struggle, self-actualization, internationalism, care, and militant defiance, including experimentation with underground infrastructures of guerilla warfare capacitation. The prefigurative implications of their praxis were apprehended by the IBW, who called Attica 'The Revolution That Was/The Revolution That Is to Be,' and by the Prisoners Solidarity Committee, who wrote, 'Under these bizarre conditions, [the Attica rebels] projected onto that arena a glimpse of what is possible—class solidarity, the overthrow of racism, the ingenuity and initiative of the masses, their iron self-discipline and their humanness even to the lowest of their tormentors.' Many on both sides of the struggle believed that if the dispossessed could organize themselves, seize power, and radically transform social relations in Attica, one of the most repressive sites in the United States, then revolution on a much larger scale was possible."
Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (2023)
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