courageously testified that Tony was at their apartment on the night of the crime, and withstood the pounding on cross-examination from Sawyer, delivered with Davidson’s full approval.
Even so, despite Davidson’s hounding our every move, I sensed the warmth in some of the jurors’ eyes, and that some were rooting for us. Also some of the jurors appeared impressed that William Styron testified for Tony as a character witness, as did Tony’s grandmother. Tony also testified in his own behalf, withstanding not only Sawyer’s cross-examination but Davidson’s endlessly biased rulings in favor of the prosecution.
To undercut the Quinns’ alibi testimony further after I rested our defense, Davidson allowed Gino Gallina to testify that he had broken no laws or rules by imprisoning the Quinns until they renounced their alibis because he had an immigration officer threaten to deport Michael’s wife, Giselle. Adding insult to injury, Davidson protected Gallina from cross-examination with regard to his blatant wrongdoing.
After both sides rested and Sawyer and I summed up, Davidson gave a one-sided version of what the witnesses had testified to. After his jury charge, the jurors debated for three days, evenly split between guilty and not guilty. When the courtroom door was open to the back area where the jury room was, we could hear the jurors’ raised, sometimes angry voices. Prodded by Davidson, after the all-white jury reported it was hung, the jurors finally compromised on a manslaughter verdict. Apparently satisfied, Davidson shortly afterward released me from contempt.
When I saw Tony in the Tombs that evening after the verdict, he gave me a big hug and assured me that we would overcome what had happened to both of us: “No injustice this great can stand.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get this overturned,” I said.
“I know you will,” Tony replied. “I’ll stay strong.”
Two months later Davidson sentenced Tony to the maximum ten-to-twenty years. On his way upstate to prison, he remained unshaken.
I couldn’t say the same for myself. I had come a long way from that ceremonial courtroom eight years earlier with the visage of Chief Justice Taney and the legacy of Dred Scott bearing down on me. But in that time I had learned that it did not take a ruling that blacks would be forever slaves for other judges to let them know that their status still remained in slavery’s shadow.
16
Auburn Prison and Life in the Hamptons
“You don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican,” Malcolm X said in his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots.” “You don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk, and you sure don’t catch hell because you’re an American; because if you were an American, you wouldn’t catch hell. You catch hell because you’re a Black man.”
That speech was well known among the black activists of the 1960s. I doubt there was anyone among the African American leaders of the Attica uprising who hadn’t read it. “Message to the Grassroots” was about the race problem in America. It referred to what Malcolm X deemed the white co-opting of the 1963 March on Washington. More generally the speech argued that there had been a failure in the fight against racism. Malcolm X claimed that the rhetoric of nonviolence hadn’t worked, and that it never would. He said push had come to shove and it was time to paint the streets red. “Revolution is bloody,” he told the parishioners of Detroit’s King Solomon Baptist Church. “Revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way.”
This is the same speech in which Malcolm X juxtaposed the figures of the “house Negro” and the “field Negro.” He jabbed a linguistic finger at the former, explaining that when the house Negro talked about America, he used the words “we,” “us,” and “our.” The house Negro was oblivious to the blunt fact that he neither was nor ever would be invited to participate in the great American dream. Meanwhile the field Negro was just looking for a way out. For some that meant drugs and for others, revolution. Malcolm X went further in his taxonomy of racism, talking about Uncle Toms and the way Movement people patted themselves on the back for the so-called victories of the civil rights struggles while the house and field Negroes alike got no relief. The triumphs of the Movement were legal half measures called coups, according to Malcolm X.
“Uncle Tom” was never a term I used, but Attica for sure was not taken over