black butler and his wife, who served as our cook and maid, and so I was very aware of the ways racial prerogatives affect domestic workers. Quickly I learned that our housekeeper, Joyce McKenzie, who came from Jamaica, had to take the service elevator to our apartment. I was furious.
“As far as it goes with our housekeeper,” I told the manager, “that policy is over right now. As for the rest of the building, I’ll give you a week.”
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