“Break And Enter / Rompiendo Puertas"
Anti-Poverty and Housing Rights
“Break And Enter / Rompiendo Puertas,” also known as “Squatters,” is a short film by the Newsreel collective in New York City. It focuses on "Operation Move-in," an anti-poverty and urban redevelopment campaign by Puerto Rican and Dominican families to actively reclaim unused, vacant housing on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
A July 22, 1970, New York Times article, by Edith Evans Asbury, titled, “Squatter Movement Grows As Housing Protest Tactic,” offered a view of the campaign as it unfolded:
City officials, the courts, a hospital, Columbia University and private landlords were embroiled in a growing squatter movement yesterday as about 170 families illegally occupying apartments insisted on what they called their “Moral” right to remain.
At the end of the day, 25 men, women and children evicted from a building on West 15th Street won a promise from the city's Housing and Development Administrator, Albert A. Walsh, that the city would negotiate with the, landlord who evicted them.
The group, which went first to City Hall to see Mayor Lindsay, held a sit‐in at the administration's head quarters at 100 Gold Street all afternoon. They represented six families who had moved into empty apartments at 233 West 15th Street and were evicted by the police Monday.
The Rev. Robert O. Weeks, who had accompanied the families, hailed Commissioner Walsh's announcement as a “great victory,” declaring that “bureaucracy does work.”
City to Furnish Cots
Others in the group ex pressed skepticism, but left the Gold Street offices cheer fully, minutes after a contingent of policemen had arrived.
Mr. Weeks had sheltered the evicted families the previous night in Holy Apostle Episcopal Church, of which he is rector. He led them back to the church at Ninth Avenue and 28th Street, with Commissioner Walsh's assurance that the city would furnish them with 50 cots and blankets.
The group had demanded that the city take over the building from which they had been evicted‐ and convert it to units for low‐income families. They said the owner, Leon Nagin, of 425 Beach 146th Street, Far Rockaway, Queens, had boarded if, up prior to converting it to luxury units.
The announcement that sent the squatters away smiling at 5:45 P. M. yesterday was that Mr. Nagin had agreed to suspend any dernolition work for the rest of the week while he discussed selling the building to Housing and Development Administration for rental to low‐in come families.
Mr. Walsh told the group that there was “a very real possibility” that the city's proposal would be accepted, but warned that it might take several months to rehabilitate the building.
Housing Promised
Meanwhile, Commissioner Walsh promised to provide temporary apartments for the squatters in unoccupied apartments of city‐owned buildings in lower Manhattan urban renewal areas.
Buildings in Manhattan's Upper West Side Urban Renewal Area already contain about 150 squatting families, according to Operation Move In, a group of several anti poverty and community organizations in the area.
The families in the Upper West Side buildings, and in other buildings, have been as in moving into the vacant apartments by a variety of tenant organizations, community groups and churches.
They say that poor and middle‐income families are being squeezed out of Manhattan as the buildings they occupy are vacated and demolished to make way for new housing that they cannot afford. They argue that the current housing shortage is so critical that the poor and middle‐income families have a moral right to move into habitable boarded up buildings.
These arguments were offered in Civil Court yester day by volunteer lawyers on behalf of several families who made an unauthorized take over of apartments on East 13th Street. But a jury re turned a verdict in favor of the landlord, and authorized him to proceed with their eviction.
Hospital the Landlord
In this case, the landlord is the New York Eye and Ear Hospital, which owns four tenement buildings on 13th Street between First and Second Avenues.
The hospital seeks to clear tenants from the buildings to convert them to a residence for nurses.
Six squatter families were welcomed into the buildings, at 317 to 327 East 13th Street, on June 5 by families already living there.
“I was delighted to see them move in,” Mrs. Rose Arak, a resident for 40 years of 319 East 13th Street, said yesterday. “When those apartments were vacated and the tin was put over the windows, it was an open invitation to addicts and junkies and bums, and I was afraid to go into the halls alone.”
One of the squatter families moved from a city‐owned building in Brooklyn where it had been robbed of all furniture and clothing, and arrived with nothing but two sleeping bags, according to Mrs. Arak. “Now their apartment is completely furnished —by neighbors around here,” she added.
Philip Goldrich, a Bronx teacher who has lived at 317 East 13th Street for five years, also helped to welcome the squatters.
“I can't find a decent apartment at a price I can pay, so I know they can't,” Mr. Gold rich said yesterday.
Eric Greenbush, one of the lawyers representing the 13th Street squatters' families, will be back in court to day to press, for a stay of their eviction from Judge Richard W. Wallach, before whom the case was tried.
Over on East 11th Street, a group of squatters moved into buildings owned by a private landlord.
Here, too, the squatters were welcomed by people al ready living in the building. And here, with the help of Mrs. Francis Goldin, of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, tenants, supporters and the squatters were able to persuade the landlord to discuss letting the squatters stay.
“He's really a wonderful landlord,” Miss Susan Hirsch, an elementary school teacher and a resident, said yesterday.
“He takes wonderful care of our buildings, as you can see,” she said, waving a hand at freshly painted, well lighted halls. “But he wants to hold apartments empty so he can sell the buildings for a lot of money, and that's just not fair in a housing crisis.”
The owner, Jack Gucker, was not available for comment yesterday. But squatters' representatives reported that they had met, with him and that he was considering letting the squatters stay for a limited time as rent‐paying tenants.
“I hope it is true,” said 13‐year‐old Luz Rosado, in a sunny, fifth‐floor apartment at 120 East 11th Street.
“On Allen Street we all had to sleep in one room,” the girl went on, gesturing toward her three brothers and a sister. “Here I have my own room, and everything is so nice.” She translated for her mother, Mrs. Anna Rosado, who already had sheer white curtains hung, at all of the windows and was talking of painting the kitchen white.
Another landlord that yielded somewhat toward a squatter this week was Columbia. University. It permitted Mrs. Juanita Kimble, who moved in with her eight children, to have the gas turned on and plumbing connected at 130 Morningside Avenue.
“No, we have not accepted her as a tenant,” a university spokesman said yesterday. “We acted on a humane basis.” The building is scheduled for eventual demolition and replacement, he said.
Newsreel
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1970
poster
A.J. Muste at 5th Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade (1 image)
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
Roz Payne photograph of legendary pacifist and anti-war activist, A.J. Muste, during a 5th Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade in New York City, perhaps in 1965 or 1966.
During the mid-1960s, the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade organized dozens of local peace and anti-war groups in a series of anti-war parades, “peace-ins” and other events. Dave Dellinger, who would later gain notoriety as a member of the Chicago 7 during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, and Norma Becker, who worked for the War Resisters League, led the group.
A.J. Muste was born in the Netherlands in 1885 and emigrated to the United States in 1901, where his father was a factory worker at a plant in Michigan. Muste was ordained as a Dutch Reform minister in his young adulthood and moved to New York City with his wife and three children. There, he was introduced to liberal theology and pragmatism and joined the local chapter of the National Civil Liberties Union, which would later become the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization formed in opposition to WWI by Muste, Jane Addams and Bishop Paul Jones. Muste’s stance against the war compelled his more conservative congregation to oust him.
Following his rejection by the church, Muste focused his peace and justice work on the political left. During the late-1910s and 1920s, Muste worked within the labor movement, famously leading striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and serving as the director of the Brookwood Labor College, a training school for the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1929, the more conservative American Federation of Labor accused Muste of being a communist, prompting him to found the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, a faction dedicated to organizing for militant industrial unionism. The CPLA ultimately evolved into the Trotskeyite, American Workers Party, which Muste led until a religious experience in 1936 prompted him to break with Marxist-Leninism and rededicate himself to Christian pacifism.
As national secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Muste dedicated himself to training a new generation in nonviolent direct action against racial segregation. He also published an important book, Nonviolence in an Aggressive World, in 1940. As the southern black freedom movement gained steam, Muste became an important adviser and ally to prominent advocates of non-violence, like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr.
During the post-WWII era, Muste was also focused on opposition to the Cold War and U.S. militarism. He continued to write and counseled draft and tax resistance to oppose those policies. In 1941 he said, “The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?” Later, he argued, "We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life. Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society.” Muste helped form several organizations dedicated to militant nonviolence and the creation of a New Left.
As a new generation of young activists rose in opposition to the war in Vietnam, Muste gained a new following and influence. In an article in a 1965 issue of Liberation, titled, “Who Has the Spiritual Atom Bomb, he wrote, “It is said that if the United States were to stop shooting and withdraw its troops from Vietnam, the Viet Cong would then stage a great purge of the people who we have been seeking to protect — have pledged to protect. First of all, so far they have been getting precious little protection from us. The Vietnamese people as human individuals have been shot at by the French, by us, by Communists, by guerrillas for years. Maybe, if only somebody would stop shooting at them that would be something to the good.” In a 1967 New York Times article, “Debasing Dissent,” Muste was famously quoted, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” In defense of dissent, Muste wrote in 1967, shortly before his death, “There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force.” Muste played a central role in organizing the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Muste died in 1967.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1965 or 1966
Asylum for Kristina Berster
New Left
On July 16, 1978, West German, Kristina Berster, and two American accomplices were picked up by U.S. Border Patrol officials in Vermont for illegally crossing into the United States from Canada. Initially, the FBI and other law enforcement claimed Berster was a terrorist on the lamb from Germany, where she was a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the Red Army Faction.
Baader-Meinhof was a radical, left-wing organization established in 1970 that engaged in a series of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies and shoot-outs with police over the course of three decades, though their activity peaked in 1977. Stefan Aust, who wrote a book about the history of Red Army Faction, detailed the background and emergence of the group, “World War II was only twenty years earlier. Those in charge of the police, the schools, the government — they were the same people who'd been in charge under Nazism. The chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a Nazi. People started discussing this only in the 60s. We were the first generation since the war, and we were asking our parents questions. Due to the Nazi past, everything bad was compared to the Third Reich. If you heard about police brutality, that was said to be just like the SS. The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it. You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up.” As Red Army Faction member, Gudrun Ennslin, is reported to have said after the death of one his comrades, “They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can't argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven't. We must arm ourselves!” Aust went on to explain the appeal of Baader-Meinhof to some West Germans, “The Baader-Meinhof Gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed that a quarter of West Germans under forty felt sympathy for the gang and one-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police. Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang's righteousness (as) Germany even into the 1970s was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. (Andreas) Baader, a charismatic action man indulged in the imagery, telling people that his favourite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall, (while) he paid a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.” Red Army Faction was organized into cells and practiced what Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella called the “urban guerrilla.” According to Marghella, an urban guerrilla, was “A person who fights the military dictatorship with weapons, using unconventional methods... The urban guerrilla follows a political goal, and only attacks the government, big businesses, and foreign imperialists.” In response, West German authorities initiated a growing clamp-down on left-wing activists and lawyers, as well as critics of the government, generally.
At the same time in the U.S., legislators and law enforcement were growing increasingly concerned about “terrorism” and looking for legal and social bases to tighten strictures on so-called “terrorists.” One point of concern was the northern border with Canada. In this context, many saw the Kristina Berster case as an opportunity for U.S. law enforcement in the post-1960s era to promote this new anti-terrorism agenda. At first, the FBI Press Officer claimed the arrest “marked the first time a member of the notorious urban gang has been caught trying to enter the country.” In Burlington, Vermont, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Jerome O’Neill, stated that Berster was one of the 34 most wanted persons in the world. These were explosive claims that were picked up and repeated by national press across the country, including the New York Times. Quickly, though, those grand assertions began to unravel. West German authorities corrected FBI statements, saying that Berster was not, in fact a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and that they may not even be interested in extraditing her, prompting a corrected statement by the FBI. Yet, the cat was out of the bag in the U.S. media and the retraction did not change the overall tenor of coverage in the case, with most media continuing to refer to Berster as a “terrorist.”
American journalist Greg Guma has written extensively about the Berster case. In an article titled, “How disinformation turned Kristina Berster into an ‘enemy of the state,’” he described the context of growing radicalism in Germany when Berster entered the university:
“WHEN KRISTINA Berster, then 20, arrived in Heidelburg in late 1970, the student movement was well underway. The young in Germany were restless and angry, mostly about Vietnam. The rhetoric had turned revolutionary since the days of ‘Ban the Bomb!’ and the Berlin Wall. Student radicals numbered over 170,000, some of them turning gradually to Communism or Maoist ideology.
In a sense, German youth were emulating American dissent. The New Left in the US had reached a crisis point with the police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and the Days of Rage, which sparked the formation of the Weather Underground. German protest erupted with demonstrations in Berlin and the bombing of two empty department stores by Andreas Baader and Gudrin Ensslin.
The purpose of the bombings, said Baader, was ‘to light a beacon’ against the consumer society. As Ensslin explained, ‘We set fires in department stores so you will stop buying. The compulsion to buy terrorizes you.’ The analysis was superficial, but it struck at the core of German complacency in an era of intensive economic development.
With their accomplices, the couple was caught and convicted on arson charges, but they found support from one of Germany’s leading leftist journalists, Ulrike Meinhof.
When they were released in 1969, pending appeal of their cases. Baader and Ensslin went underground with help from Meinhof, and on September 29, 1970, the Red Army Faction (RAF) was officially born with the robbing of three West Berlin banks. Baader said the first problem of ‘the revolution’ was finding financial support.
By early 1971, West German police were turning to automatic weapons and brutal tactics at demonstrations. Anyone who looked like a nonconformist risked a spontaneous interrogation. New search, arrest and gun laws were passed; roadblocks were a common sight on the Autobahn. The excuse for the broad extension of police powers was a nationwide search for the Baader-Meinhof group, even though the political fugitives were responsible for only five out of 1,061 bank robberies committed during their heyday. The first suspect killed by police was a 20-year-old hairdresser named Petra Schelm.
Berster was interested in psychology and grew increasingly alarmed at what she viewed as the isolation, atomization and alienation of people in West German society, as well as the frightening new psychological tactics authorities were developing against political dissidents. Berster was deeply influenced by radical concepts of therapy articulated by people like Thomas Szasz, who wrote, “The parallel between political and moral fascism is close. Each offers a kind of protection. And upon those unwilling to heed peaceful persuasion, the values of the state will be imposed by force: in political fascism by the military and the police; in moral fascism by therapists, especially psychiatrists.” After Berster was implicated by an informant as a left-wing sympathizer, she was detained and imprisoned for six months. During that time, she saw first-hand the erosion of legal rights in the West German system, as her lawyer was targeted and sanctioned by the state.
When Baader and Meinhof were arrested in 1971, they were placed in what was called “wipe-out detention.” As Guma explained, “It was a world of total sterility: luminous white, with fluorescent lights always on and all windows covered. The cells were soundproofed and filled only with white noise. In the ‘Dead Wing’ there were no visitors except lawyers and relatives. Reading materials were censored and other prisoners were never seen nor heard. When Jean-Paul Sartre saw Baader after two years in the ‘Dead Wing,’ he said, ‘This is not torture like the Nazis. It is torture meant to bring on psychic disturbances.’
Berster called this form of solitary confinement ‘the most effective way to destroy personality irreversibly. Humans are social. When you cut that off, when people are not able to talk or relate to others, an internal destruction begins. You become catatonic; somatic problems begin.’”
As a result of her own experience and the treatment of members of the Red Army Faction, Berster became increasingly interested in and involved with the prisoner’s rights movement in her country through the Socialist Patients Collective. In 1972, West German political leaders passed repressive new legislation against radicals, heightening concern that Berster and others would not receive fair trials. At the same time, growing debate divided the New Left in West Germany over the necessity of armed struggle. Berster later told supporters in Vermont that she had “problems with violence… I can’t shoot someone. I could never do violence.” As the 1970s pressed on, Berster decided to flee West Germany, spending time in Yemen, obtaining an Iranian passport and then ending up in Montreal. At her trial, Berster explained why she had crossed over to the U.S. in Vermont, “When I was in Paris, I was told that to get into the States, all you had to do was walk through Vermont’s northern border… They gave me a plan, with a map they drew, to enter from Noyan, Quebec, to Vermont.” Berster hoped to receive asylum in the U.S.
The Berster case attracted the support of a group of New Left activists in Vermont, including Roz Payne, as well as famed radical lawyer, William Kunstler, who represented Berster and saw in her case an opportunity to press back against increasing legal attacks against leftist lawyers in Germany, as well as new forms of political repression in the U.S. “This case goes far beyond Kristina Berster,” Kunstler told the press. “I am very concerned with West Germany’s treatment of so-called terrorists and the so-called left wing lawyers who defend them.” Kunstler also expressed concern over the “panic” reaction in the U.S. over the “terrorist” label, which resulted in $500,000 bail for Berster, to date the largest amount ever set for a border charge. The Berster Defense Committee in Vermont conducted a regional survey to assess public perceptions of the case and mounted rallies in support of Berster.
In October of 1978, after the longest jury deliberation in Vermont history, Berster received a mixed verdict, convicted on a felony and misdemeanor charge related to her border crossing, but acquitted of the more serious conspiracy charge. Several jurors were clearly sympathetic to Berster’s political plight and expressed hope after the trial that she might still win asylum in the U.S. The judge sentenced her to 9 months in jail, all but two weeks of which she had already served. The prosecutor in the case continued to stoke public fears about Berster, revealing to the media that Berster had spent time in Yemin. Immediately, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service initiated deportation proceedings against Berster. Roz Payne worked as an investigator and paralegal for attorneys Bill Knsutler, Jesse Berman, Bill Kittel and Chris Davis on Berster’s immigration case. Ultimately, in 1979, a deal was brokered between U.S. and West German officials to drop the original charges against Berster and allow her to return home without a deportation order.
Reflecting on the case years later, Guma wrote:
“What to make of the Kristina Berster case? In one sense, it was a matter of human rights. Victimized by shifting international politics, a student activist whose only crime was crossing a border to seek asylum had spent almost two years in prison, in Germany and then the US.
But there was more to it than that. Berster’s case demonstrated how a campaign against terrorism can easily go off the rails, threatening anyone who actively tries to change the way society is run – from civil libertarians and prison reformers to anti-nuclear protesters and feminists. Across the country, despite claims that the days of COINTELPRO were over, reports were surfacing – harassment, covert agents provoking violence in nonviolent groups, wiretapping, political grand juries, and intrusive surveillance. As the 1970s wound down a chill was setting in, and terrorism was becoming an excuse for virtually any tactic the government found effective…
[Berster’s] US stay had revealed a few things — for example, that officials, working in and with intelligence agents, were ready to lie in court and sanction illegal surveillance, and that some media could be used to distribute rumors and falsehoods; The evidence remained circumstantial, but it also looked like Vermont had witnessed the manufacturing of a terrorist scare, an attempt to warp public perceptions for political gain. The FBI had lied, so had the prosecutor. Anyone who supported the defendant was targeted for surveillance. Then there was the simulated terrorist ‘siege.’
In essence, it looked like a concerted effort to influence public opinion, what would soon be labeled ‘perception management’ in a Defense Department manual. Basically, this tactic involves both conveying and denying information ‘to influence emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.’ The goal is to influence both enemies and friends, ultimately to provoke the behavior you want. ‘Perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations,’ according to DOD.
In the Reagan years this type of operation was euphemistically labeled ‘public diplomacy,’ which was officially expanded to include domestic disinformation during the Bush I administration. In those days it was mostly about stoking fear of communism, the Sandinistas, Qaddafi, and anyone else on Reagan’s hit list. Clinton modifications were outlined in Directive 68, which still showed no distinction between what could be done abroad and at home. When Bush II took office, the name was changed again, this time to ‘strategic influence.’
Kristina Berster Defense Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1978
poster
Attica - Tip of the Iceberg
Prisoner's Rights Movement
This document explores the Attica Prison Uprising and links it to other race rebellions and massacres of the time period, including the war in Vietnam; the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa; police killings of students at Jackson State, Greensboro and Augusta, Georgia; and uprisings in Watts, Newark and Detroit. The artifact also includes a "Letter to the People of America"; a tribute to George Jackson by Angela Davis; "Demands for Albany National Action; a letter from Angela Davis to Ericka Huggins, profiles of three men in Attica during the uprising - Richard Clark, Herbert X. Blyden, and Sam Melville; a reprint of a New York Times article by Tom Wicker, "The Animals at Attica"; and a statement released by prisoners at Attica on 9/20/71.
The Attica Liberation Faction
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
mimeograph
leaflet
Students of Norwalk - Beautify America - Get a Haircut
Counterculture
One of the key themes of the 1960s was generational tension. Youth culture styles and fashion were a consistent target from various authorities, from parents, to media commentators, to law enforcement and school officials. Long hair on men became a particular point of contention. To some adults, long hair symbolized opposition to the War in Vietnam, or an acceptance of countercultural values, like drug use, premarital sex, and resistance to traditional authority. During the late-1960s, several school attempted to compel young white men to cut their hair. In 1968, for instance, the principle of a New Hampshire Catholic school marched 18 students from class to a local barbershop for a haircut. That same year, school officials at Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk, Connecticut, suspended 53 male students because their hair covered their ears or hung over their collars. They also restricted young women from wearing thigh-high mini-skirts. 18 male students complied, but others resisted, protesting outside the school with signs that read, “”It’s 1968, not 1984,” “Is Hair Unfair?” “Does Society Hang by a Hair?” and “Unconstitutional Harassment.” The ACLU represented four of the students in a court challenge, but lost. The school principle argued that long hair was a major classroom distraction, while the ACLU cited the Magna Carta and U.S. Constitution, claiming the restrictions violated fundamental individual rights and had nothing to do with education. The judge skirted the constitutional issues, justifying his decision by saying it would be unfair to the 18 students who complied with the order if he ruled for the four who refused to comply. In a separate 1970 case in Massachusetts, though, a judge sided with the students, writing, “We see no reason why decency, decorum and conduct require a boy to wear his hair short. Certainly eccentric hair styling is no longer a reliable sign of perverse behavior. We do not believe that mere unattractiveness in the eyes of some parents, teachers, or students, short of uncleanliness, can justify the proscription. Nor, finally, does such compelled conformity to conventional standards of appearance seem a justifiable part of the educational process.”
This slipping from the February 6, 1968, New York Times shows a billboard in Norwalk ridiculing long-haired youth.
New York Times
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
February 6, 1968
article clipping
We Are Attica: Interviews with Prisoners from Attica
Prisoner's Rights Movement
The Attica Prison uprising, which took place in upstate New York in September of 1971, was the largest prison rebellion since the Civil War. During the late-1960s and early-1970s, a prisoner’s rights movement emerged across the U.S. At the Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, prisoners complained about chronic overcrowding, censorship of letters, poor living conditions that limited them to one shower per week and one roll of toilet paper each month. Puerto Rican and African American prisoners, who made up a majority of the inmate population received especially harsh and discriminatory treatment, including the lowest-paying jobs, racial harassment and violence from the primarily white guards. Emboldened by the spirit of the Black Power movement and radical ideology, some inmates saw themselves as “political prisoners.”
As their demands continued to go unmet, the situation at Attica became increasingly volatile. On the morning of September 9, 1971, a small group of prisoners overpowered guards, spurring a more wide-spread uprising at the prison. In the initial chaos, Correction Officer, William Quinn, was badly beaten and thrown out a second floor window, which resulted in his death a few days later. Ultimately, a group of inmate leaders restored order within the prison and began negotiating with outside authorities, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller, through intermediaries that included noted civil rights attorney, William Kunstler, and New York Times columnist, Tom Wicker. Prisoners also requested Louis Farrakhan, from the Nation of Islam, but he refused. One leader of the prisoners, 21-year old, L.D. Barkley, famously said in an early statement, “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace, that means each and every one of us here, have 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. We will not compromise on any terms except those terms that are agreeable to us. We’ve called upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens the lives of not only us, but of each and every one of you, as well.” Prisoners issued a list of demands, such as better education and food quality, fair visitation rights, improved medical treatment and sanitation, less mail censorship, more religious freedom, fairer disciplinary and parole processes, an end to brutality from guards and, most controversially, amnesty for crimes committed in the course of the riot itself.
Gov. Nelson A Rockefeller refused to visit the prison during the take-over, instead breaking off negotiations and ordering state troopers and guards to retake Attica by force. During the siege, law enforcement shot indiscriminately, killing 9 of 42 hostages, as well as 33 prisoners. Retaliation against inmates by prison authorities was pervasive, including beatings, torture, burning, and sexual abuse. Evidence suggests Barkley initially surrendered along with other prisoners, but that officers searched him out then shot him in the back.
The New York State Special Commission on Attica later wrote, "With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War." The rebellion at Attica did ultimately result in some modest prison reform, including a grievance procedure and more regular communication between prison authorities and prisoner representatives. In addition, lawyers successfully defended the prisoners who were indicted after the uprising and many years later obtained $8 million from the state for some of the survivors and the families of the dead. Similarly, the State of New York agreed to a $12 million settlement with the families of slain prison employees.
In the decades since, the Attica uprising has continued to carry political and cultural currency, referenced in books, film, television, music and poetry. According to Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, the tragedy at Attica “shows the nation that even the most marginalized citizens will never stop fighting to be treated as human beings. It testifies to this irrepressible demand for justice. This is Attica’s legacy.”
This pamphlet includes a chronology of events and a series of interviews with prisoners from Attica, including Roger Champen, Frank Lott, Donald Noble, Jerome Rosenberg, George Nieves, Carl Jones-El and Frank Smith.
created by Attica Defense Committee and published Great Jones Printing Company
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
pamphlet