On this day, 9 September 1971, the Attica prison uprising began in upstate New York when over 1,000 imprisoned people took control of the facility.
2,200 people were detained in the prison designed to hold only 1,600. 54% of those imprisoned were Black, while 100% of the guards were white. Historian Howard Zinn described the situation in A People’s History of the United States: “Prisoners spent 14 to 16 hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, their parole system inequitable, racism everywhere.”
Less than three weeks after the killing of Black prisoner activist George Jackson, Attica inmates united across racial lines and, using pipes, baseball bats and chains, rose up and took over the prison, taking 42 staff hostage. They then formulated and agreed a set of demands including better sanitary conditions, federal takeover the prison, the dismissal of the prison superintendent and amnesty for acts committed in the uprising.
While the corrections commissioner was prepared to accept most of the demands, amnesty was not agreed. Instead, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered a violent attack to retake the prison.
On September 13, state troopers and prison guards stormed the prison, indiscriminately fired machine guns, and murdered 39 people. 10 of those they killed were prison staff whom officials then claimed were killed by prisoners.
Despite the repression, a wave of rebellion swept prisons across the US.
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The Catiline Conspiracy was the attempt of the Roman senator Catiline to overthrow the government of Rome whilst Cicero was a consul. This happened during the Roman Republic which was the period of Rome’s history before the Empire. The Roman Republic spanned from the late sixth century through the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE which caused the chaos that led to the birth of the Roman Empire under the first emperor, Augustus Caesar.
Cicero (born Marcus Tullius Cicero) was a statesman, orator, poet and writer. He was born on January 6th 106 BCE during the Roman Republic. As a young man, he studied philosophy and law and at seventeen, he served in the Social War under the father of Pompey the Great. Then we have Catiline who was born in circa 108 BCE to a distinguished patrician family. His full name was Lucius Sirgius Catilina and he also served in the Social War under Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo (Pompey the Great’s father) and was praetor in 68 BCE before governing Africa for two years. He returned to Rome in 66 BCE and ran for the consulship but allegations of extortion in his province resulted in his candidacy being refused.
“Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.”
— John Dewey, “Time and Individuality”, The Later Works, vol 14 (via philosophybits)
