Blood in the Water Quotes

“I think Attica brings to mind several things. The first is the basic inhumanity of man to man, the veneer of civilization as we sit here today in a well-lit, reasonably well appointed room with suits and ties on objectively performing an autopsy on this day, yet cannot get at the absolute horror of the situation, to people, be they black, yellow, orange, spotted, whatever, whatever uniform they wore, that day tore from them the shreds of their humanity. The veneer was penetrated. After seeing that day I went home and sat down and spoke with my wife and I said for the first time being a somewhat dedicated amateur army type, I could understand what may have happened at My Lai.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Twenty-one-year-old Chris Reed was gunned down with four bullets, including one that “exploded and took out a big chunk “of his left thigh. He listened in terror as troopers debated in front of him whether to kill him or let him bleed to death. As they discussed this the troopers had fun jamming their rifle butts into his injuries and dumping lime onto his face and injured legs, until he fell unconscious.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Ultimately, the human cost of the retaking was staggeringly high: 128 men were shot—some of them multiple times.75 Less than half an hour after the retaking had commenced, nine hostages were dead and at least one additional hostage was close to death. Twenty-nine prisoners had been fatally shot.76”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“The truth was that the only thing that kept the prison running smoothly under these circumstances was that the prisoners usually followed the rules and did what the officer in charge asked them to do. But as the number of men at Attica grew, order and calm were harder to come by. Significantly, the profile of the average prisoner coming to Attica had changed. Many more prisoners were young, politically aware, and determined to speak out when they saw injustices in the facility. These were black and brown youth who had been deeply impacted by the civil rights struggles of this period as well as by the writings of Malcolm X, Mao, and Che Guevara. These younger men made it clear that they were more willing to stand up for themselves—less likely to put up with poor treatment than were Attica’s veterans. Correction”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“The troopers themselves were less politic about how they felt about the men they were now supposed to rehouse. Directly below a chalked inscription made by the D Yard rebels commemorating the beginning of the uprising on the 9th of September, members of law enforcement made their own inscription: “Retaken 9-13-71. 31 Dead Niggers.”93”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Even at the time, however, National Guardsman Callahan could see that the abuses happening to prisoners following the retaking were fueled by outright racism. Callahan overheard one trooper bragging of shooting a black inmate with a .357 and watched him then give a “White Power salute.”54 He also saw “a prison guard sergeant telling this very tall, yellow-skinned black to strip” and when the man refused, the sergeant “told others to hold him down and then kicked him in the head like a football—he went limp.”55 Another Guardsman overheard one trooper saying to another over by a food stand outside Attica’s walls that it was “hot work killing niggers.”56 Racial hostility was in fact so intense that during the legislators’ tour that morning, even Assemblyman Arthur Eve was showered with invective. “Guards [were] yelling at Eve—get your nigger ass out of here.”57”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“The bottom line, Rockefeller confirmed for Nixon, was that the entire rebellion had been masterminded by African Americans. “The whole thing was led by the blacks,” he said, and he assured the president that he had sent in the troopers “only when they were in the process of murdering the guards.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Nixon was clear to the men assembled that, in his view, “Rockefeller handled it well” because, as the president put it, “you see it’s the black business…he had to do it.”43 To a one, these men felt strongly that this rebellion was of a piece with the revolutionary plots that had recently been hatched in the California system by black activists such as Angela Davis, famed leader from the Black Panther Party. All”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“A number of prisoners killed had, according to several witnesses, actually still been alive after troopers had control of the facility. One”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“I never saw human beings treated like this,” another prisoner later recalled. He couldn’t understand: “Why all the hatred?”57 But it wasn’t just any hatred—it was racial hatred. As one prisoner was told by a trooper who had a gun trained on him: he would soon be dead because “we haven’t killed enough niggers.”58 Everywhere there were cries of “Keep your nigger nose down!”59 “Don’t you know state troopers don’t like niggers?”60 “Don’t move nigger! You’re dead!”61 Underscoring just how much racial hatred was fueling trooper rage in D Yard, one prisoner, William Maynard, tried to carry Jomo to safety after he had been shot multiple times. As Maynard struggled along, a CO ordered him to stop and put his hands in the air. As he dutifully put his hands up, still trying to balance Jomo on his shoulders, the CO shot him twice in the forearms. As Maynard fell in a heap, with Jomo on top of him, this same officer “loaded up his gun and shot Jomo six times right on top of me and kicked me in the face and says both the niggers are dead and went on.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“This was perhaps most or particularly true for Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, New York’s governor since 1959, when he decided to get tougher on crime. Rockefeller had been a lifelong Republican, but he had routinely found himself in the liberal wing of his own party. Historically, this had benefited him mightily. He was, for example, one of the few of his party to survive the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964. But Rockefeller had ambitions beyond New York. A savvy politician, he increasingly realized that the liberal reputation that had earned him such a following in New York was fast becoming a liability—especially if he hoped to win his party’s nomination for the presidency. Throughout the 1960s he had watched Richard Nixon slowly but surely steal his political thunder across the nation. And so, by the close of the decade, Rockefeller had begun to craft a more conservative and more traditionally Republican image for himself. In 1970, Rockefeller made no bones about the fact that he too would be “tough on crime.” This had suddenly become the platform that could get a man elected.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“The Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 lavished even more federal funds on fighting crime. In addition, landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Terry v. Ohio—which gave the police virtually unlimited powers to stop and frisk citizens without probable cause—intensified the policing of poor neighborhoods and people of color, which, in turn, resulted in record arrest rates. Before long, prisons like Attica were bursting at the seams.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“So obvious was the racial discrimination at Attica that white prisoners readily agreed that guards applied rules differently to blacks and Puerto Ricans.39”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Puerto Rican and African American prisoners were subject to far more stringent rules when it came to family visitation as well. Twenty-six point six percent of all Puerto Ricans and 20.4 percent of all blacks at Attica were in common-law relationships, but prison policy was clear that no common-law wives or children from those unions were allowed to visit.36 Even letters between common-law partners were confiscated. In”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Even though only 37 percent of the prisoner population was white, whites held 74 percent of the jobs in Attica’s power house, 67 percent of the coveted clerk positions, and 62 percent of the staff jobs in the officers’ mess hall. By contrast, 76 percent of the men in the dreaded and low-paid metal shop, and 80 percent in the grueling grading companies, were African American or Puerto Rican.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“In their conclusion, the authors of the report bluntly summed it up: “The decision to retake the prison was not a quixotic effort to rescue the hostages in the midst of 1,200 inmates; it was a decisive reassertion of the state of its sovereignty and power.”71”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“And the McKay hearings drove home to anyone listening that the outcome—the retaking of Attica—had been almost incomprehensibly barbaric. Powerful testimony by National Guardsman physician John W. Cudmore made the room fall silent.66 Speaking quietly, Cudmore summed up everything he had witnessed on September 13: “I think Attica brings to mind several things. The first is the basic inhumanity of man to man, the veneer of civilization as we sit here today in a well-lit, reasonably well appointed room with suits and ties on objectively performing an autopsy on this day, yet cannot get at the absolute horror of the situation, to people, be they black, yellow, orange, spotted, whatever, whatever uniform they wore, that day tore from them the shreds of their humanity. The veneer was penetrated. After seeing that day I went home and sat down and spoke with my wife and I said for the first time being a somewhat dedicated amateur army type, I could understand what may have happened at My Lai.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Another serious barrier to the McKay investigators was that many prisoners were deeply suspicious of them—particularly because they were an overwhelmingly white group. Aware of this potential reaction, Robert McKay and Arthur Liman had tried to include black interviewers in the group; Liman had specifically met with members of the Black Law Students Association at Yale, but he ultimately recruited only four part-time students. Ironically, these few black interviewers among so many whites became objects of suspicion for the prisoners. As a prisoner writing on behalf of the group of eighty men who were locked in Attica’s HBZ segregation unit put it, “When the McKay Commission saw that the greater majority of us, who are black, were reluctant to talk to them (white), they went and got five or six blacks, hoping we would relate to them. As a result, we strongly feel that the Blacks appointed to this Commission compromised their principles and sold their Blackness to obtain information from us.”49 If the commission were really interested in “hearing about events leading up to the rebellion and its bloody climax,” he went on, from the beginning it “should have been made up of our peers, of people who know how we live, who come from our communities, who are poor like us, who can relate to our struggle for survival in this society.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“To the dismay of Fischer, and to the great consternation of prison officials, the governor gave in to McKay. Russell Oswald was particularly worried by what this would mean for his people. He wrote to Attica superintendent Vincent Mancusi, “Frankly I can see nothing but trouble ahead for you, Walter [Dunbar] and me, for the next several months with the manner in which this Commission is moving. You are undoubtedly aware of the fact that they have recruited law students from New York University, Columbia University Law School and Yale Law School to assist in their study. Need more be said?”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Although four full days had passed during which those in charge could have ensured that all protocols regarding the distribution of weapons were followed, none of the weapons now being readied for the retaking had been formally recorded. And thus, the men who were about to go into Attica were accountable to no one.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“For the life of him, Callahan could not understand why the governor would send such an unwieldy and clearly disintegrating group into an operation as delicate as a hostage rescue. “There was a way to do this,” he later reflected, but unleashing hundreds of overwrought, fatigued, and excessively armed men was not it.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“I didn’t want to die and I didn’t feel it would serve a purpose to die for what was going on. Nothing concrete has happened then in terms of seeing some changes.”24 As he tried to bed down that night, Champ hoped against hope that Blyden was wrong about what would happen. Champ felt some peace, though, knowing that “if there are any lives lost in here, and if a massacre takes place…in the final analysis the world will know that the animals were not in here, but outside running the system and the government.”25”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“The men leading the assault on D Yard would themselves be armed with pistols and shotguns, which utilized unjacketed bullets, a kind of ammunition that causes such enormous damage to human flesh that it was banned by the Geneva Conventions.19 Many of the other troopers and COs preparing to go in were also carrying other weapons that would have a particularly brutal effect, such as shotguns filled with deadly buckshot pellets that sprayed out in a wide arc. As all state officials knew, although there were some gas guns in the yard that could fire tear gas, no prisoner in the yard was carrying a firearm.20”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Troublingly, the various reports disseminated by the FBI were often misleading if not outright inaccurate. In one teletype sent to the director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, as well as to the White House and the U.S. attorney general, at 11:58 p.m. on September 9, the Buffalo office reported that during the riot “the whites were reportedly forced into the yard area by the blacks” and Black Power militants there were rounding up not just employee hostages but also all white prisoners, which was misleading in that it suggested a race riot was unfolding.42 More inflammatory still, the FBI’s Buffalo office stated that the prisoners “have threatened to kill one guard for every shot fired [at them]”; that they “have threatened to kill all hostages unless demands are met”; and that all of the hostages “are being made to stand at attention” out in D Yard.43 None of this proved to be the case. During the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s the FBI was deeply invested in destabilizing and undermining grassroots organizations that it considered a threat to national security—as were the politicians, such as Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell, who supported its efforts and relied on its briefings.44 One of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs in this period—COINTELPRO—was notorious for using rumor and outright fabrication stories in an attempt to destroy leftist, antiwar, and civil rights groups from within. For this reason Commissioner Oswald’s determination to keep negotiating with the men in D Yard infuriated much of the Bureau. As one internal FBI memo put it, state officials had “capitulated to the unreasonable demands of prisoners.”45 And these weren’t just any criminals; as the FBI noted on multiple occasions, “The majority of the mutinous prisoners are black.”46 As dusk fell over D Yard on the first day of the Attica uprising, FBI and State Police rumors about black prisoners’ threats and outrageous actions only multiplied. But no matter how hostile everyone else was to the idea of the state negotiating with the prisoners, Commissioner Russell Oswald insisted even more forcefully that he was going to see these talks through.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“While the men at Attica hoped that powerful people such as State Senator John Dunne still might do something on their behalf, there was little consensus regarding what to do if this effort also failed to bring some meaningful improvements to their facility. The disparate political factions in the yard had been talking about this very question for some time now—activists like Sam Melville from the Weather Underground (a revolutionary organization committed to fighting racism and imperialism), Black Panthers like Tommy Hicks, Black Muslims like Richard X Clark, and men like Mariano “Dalou” Gonzalez from the Young Lords Party (a grassroots activist organization working in cities like New York and Chicago to improve conditions for Puerto Ricans).1 Still, no new strategy had been agreed upon. By early September 1971, however, and after Oswald’s taped message, all of them could agree on one crucial point: most men at Attica were now at a breaking point. Just about anything might cause this place to explode.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“In some ways the men at Attica couldn’t believe that the head of the entire New York State Department of Correctional Services was coming to talk with them. They hoped that the recent rebellions at Auburn and in New York City jails had taught officials like Oswald a lesson—that prisoners would never stop demanding to be treated as human beings. They wanted him to see the wisdom of really listening to prisoners rather than ignoring their needs. As inspiring as it was to read the broader critiques of injustice found in George Jackson’s Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, or in Mao’s Little Red Book—which Attica’s prisoners read and discussed passionately—they also prayed that having Oswald’s ear might net them needed changes now.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“Although the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 is commonly assumed to have signaled the beginning of America’s “law and order” moment, the dramatic shift in focus from liberalization and reform in the first half of the 1960s to maintaining civic order and fighting crime had actually first begun during the administration of Lyndon Johnson.2 With the same enthusiasm that led him to authorize the Office of Economic Opportunity and sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Johnson, a liberal Democrat, created the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA) in 1965, not only granting a wholly new level of funding to law enforcement and prisons, but also creating the bureaucracy necessary to wage a historically unprecedented War on Crime. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 lavished even more federal funds on fighting crime. In addition, landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Terry v. Ohio—which gave the police virtually unlimited powers to stop and frisk citizens without probable cause—intensified the policing of poor neighborhoods and people of color, which, in turn, resulted in record arrest rates. Before long, prisons like Attica were bursting at the seams.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“In the early 1960s, Northern cities including Philadelphia, Rochester, and New York, were the sites of particularly intense urban rebellions against seemingly intractable discrimination and the lack of jobs, as well as against the abusive actions of law enforcement.1 Although Northern politicians had been relatively sympathetic when such racial uprisings rocked Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama, when they witnessed upheaval in their own downtowns they were greatly unnerved. Northern politicians very quickly began responding to the unrest and anger they saw on their city streets just as their Southern counterparts had: they sought to discredit these protests as the behavior of a criminal element bent on destruction. By 1965, politicians from both North and South, and from both major political parties, were routinely equating urban disorder with urban criminality. All agreed not only that crime was fast becoming the nation’s most serious problem, but also that it was well past time to wage a major new war against it.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy