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