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