deposited me on the semiprivate landing my family shared with one other apartment. I could hear the sounds of daily life on the other side of our door. My three kids and Kitty were in there safe and sound. The door was unlocked. That familiar feeling that I led a double life was strong as I stood there with my hand resting on the doorknob. I turned it and opened the door. In the foyer my four-year-old, Patrick, came shooting past with a quick hello. I went to our bedroom to change, gathered all the clothes I’d been wearing, and threw them in the garbage.
There was a message waiting for me on the table from The David Frost Show, a big television program at the time. They wanted me to be a guest that night. Frost was hosting a special panel on what had happened that morning. I would join Senator John Dunne, Leo Zeferetti, the head of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, and Clarence Jones. Although I was on the show, you won’t find my name in the online listing of who appeared that night. David Frost turned to me early for comment, which is the one and only reason I’m not listed as one of the guests. I was exhausted and angry, and to this day I don’t regret a thing about what I said. I don’t remember what Frost asked me. I do remember attacking Rockefeller: “He only cares about his class prerogatives. The white guards didn’t matter any more than the black prisoners to him. They were all expendable.”
Cutting me off, Frost turned to cooler, safer voices for the rest of the discussion.
The news was filled with misinformation. Prison officials said the hostages were killed by the prisoners: “I saw slit throats” was repeated over and over. What actually happened took a while to get sorted out, which gave the lies time to settle into the popular imagination. By the time autopsies revealed the truth, Attica was fixed in the public imagination—slit throats and all.
The first of many funerals had been held the same day the story broke about the way the guards had really died. There were two. One was for William Quinn, the corrections officer who was injured on the first day of the uprising and—contrary to official reports—the only prison employee actually killed by the inmates. The other funeral was for the first of nine hostages killed when Governor Rockefeller gave Commissioner Oswald the green light to crush the uprising.
On the day of those funerals, the op-ed section of the New York Times published the transcript of a Panglossian speech about prison reform by Commissioner Oswald. It had been recorded and played over the public-address system at Attica a week before the uprising. The decision to play that tape belied the profound disconnect between the prison administration and the prisoners not just in New York State, but around the country.
There was nothing radical about the need for change. About two weeks before Commissioner Oswald’s tape got its chilly reception from the inmates at Attica, George Jackson was shot in San Quentin Prison, and the news spread fast. No ordinary prisoner, Jackson had been a symbol of black resistance. Imprisoned for ten years at California’s Soledad prison for a seventy-dollar gas station robbery, his letters had been published in an acclaimed book, Soledad Brother, the year before. Acquitted of killing a guard, he had been transferred to San Quentin and killed in what the authorities claimed was an escape attempt. Fearing a national movement, prison officials around the country were trying, and failing, to stop the flow of information between prisoner activists. Mail was read, censorship increased, and little if any effort was made to conceal it. The goal was to squelch news about conditions at other prisons. But not all information traveled by mail. Visitors and newly arrived prisoners, like the members of the Auburn Six, brought news too.
Even if the flow of information could have been stopped, prison authorities were working under a false assumption. There was no organized movement, nothing orchestrated in any meaningful way—not by the Black Panthers, YAWF, or anyone else. A limit had been reached. The appalling conditions and human rights abuses that were commonplace around the nation’s prisons didn’t square with two decades of civil rights upheaval. A few prisoners became readers of historical and political works that sought to explain why they and so many who looked like them found themselves imprisoned. As a result some