How the Attica Prison Uprising Became a Symbol of Resistance

On September 9, 1971, inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, revolted over inhumane living conditions and demanded greater rights. In the process, the inmates, led by Frank “Big Black” Smith, took over much of the facility and ultimately held 42 staff members hostage. What followed was an intense four-day standoff between the inmates and the state of New York, culminating in a forceful retaking of the prison at the order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Tensions had been building for months at the facility, where about 2,200 inmates were housed in a prison designed for only 1,600. Conditions were poor: Inmates were allotted only one roll of toilet paper a month and one shower a week, food was inadequate and racial tensions were high.

The events that sparked the rebellion began on September 8, when a scuffle broke out in the prison yard between two inmates and guards. The inmates were placed in isolation, and some were reportedly beaten as they were led into their cells. The next morning, amid anger over the punishment, prisoners overpowered guards, setting off the uprising. Three inmates were killed, and guard William Quinn was fatally injured. He died two days later.

The takeover became a national spectacle as reporters and television crews were able to enter the prison. That access gave the prisoners a national platform from which to issue their 33 demands. They called for access to medical care, nutritious food, expanded family visitation, fair wages for inmate labor, legal representation and due process during parole hearings, access to books and newspapers and complete amnesty from criminal prosecution for those involved in the takeover.

Ultimately, Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald accepted most of the inmates’ demands. But officials refused to grant amnesty from prosecution. After negotiations reached an impasse, Governor Rockefeller ordered state police and other law enforcement officers to retake the prison by force.

Helicopters dropped tear gas into the yard, and state police and corrections officers fired a barrage of almost 2,000 rounds. The assault killed 29 inmates and 10 hostages. Four other people—one corrections officer and three inmates—had been killed earlier in the uprising, bringing the total death toll to 43.

Afterward, Governor Rockefeller defended the response and the actions of the state troopers. State officials initially claimed that the inmates had killed the hostages by slitting their throats. Autopsies soon showed that the 10 hostages killed in the assault had died from gunfire by law enforcement. Rockefeller maintained that there was no alternative to retaking the prison by force, characterizing the operation as a humane effort to restore order.

In November 1971, Governor Rockefeller appointed New York University Law School Dean Robert B. McKay to chair the McKay Commission, an independent panel set up to investigate the Attica uprising.

In September 1972, the commission released a 500-page report that found that the uprising was not preplanned but grew out of long-standing grievances over conditions inside the prison. The commission also confirmed that the 10 hostages who died during the retaking were killed by law enforcement gunfire, not by inmates.

The commission criticized Rockefeller’s decision to send in the troopers without first going to Attica and determining whether other options remained. It also documented abuses of prisoners after the state regained control, challenging claims that order had been humanely restored. During his 1974 vice-presidential confirmation hearings, Rockefeller acknowledged making a “serious mistake,” explaining his mistake was not retaking the prison sooner.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of social and political upheaval. The civil rights, women’s liberation, antiwar, Chicano, Native American and gay liberation movements were front and center. The prisoners’ rights movement, however, remained largely out of public view.

Part of it had to do with respectability politics, says Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan and author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

“For complex reasons, the Civil Rights Movement itself, the more traditional wing, had a very uncomfortable relationship with the ubiquitous Civil Rights Movement that went on behind bars,” Thompson says. "The more traditional Civil Rights Movement had to take the moral high ground; it didn’t want to be associated with anyone who was labeled a criminal.”

Moreover, Thompson argues that the government response and subsequent cover-up of the facts were part of a backlash against the Black freedom struggle, contributing to increasingly punitive approaches to prisons and incarceration.

“It was a broader backlash to the Black freedom struggle,” Thompson says.

The 1970s also marked the beginning of an intensified federal campaign against drugs that became known as the “War on Drugs.” In June 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and called for an “all-out offensive” against it. Over the following decades, increasingly punitive drug laws contributed to a dramatic expansion of the U.S. prison population and had a disproportionate impact on Black and Latino communities.

At the time, the Attica rebellion was widely covered on television, giving many Americans a rare glimpse of prisoners living under inhumane conditions. From that point on, the name Attica became synonymous with rebellion and resistance, resonating across popular culture.

One of the most notable examples came from boxer Muhammad Ali, who wrote the poem “Freedom (for Attica)” in solidarity with the prisoners. Ali, who that June had won a unanimous Supreme Court decision overturning his 1967 conviction for refusing induction into the U.S. military, had become a powerful symbol of political resistance in American culture. He read the poem during an appearance on the British talk show Parkinson, hosted by Michael Parkinson.

At the same time, John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote the song “Attica State” for their 1972 album Some Time in New York City. They first performed it at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in December 1971, followed by performances for The David Frost Show later that month and at a benefit at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for the families of those killed at Attica.

The name Attica eventually became a rallying cry, most famously invoked by Al Pacino in the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, when his character chants “Attica! Attica! Attica!” at police during a bank standoff. In the decades that followed, the uprising was referenced throughout popular culture, from Saturday Night Live to SpongeBob SquarePants to Orange Is the New Black.

“It essentially reflects Attica; it means, at the same time, the resistance of ordinary people against terrible oppression, despite terrible odds against them,” Thompson says.

On December 31, 1976, New York Governor Hugh Carey announced that he would pardon seven Attica inmates and commute the sentence of an eighth as part of an effort to “close the book” on Attica. At the same time, he announced that no disciplinary action would be taken against 20 law enforcement officers in connection with the uprising. Civil lawsuits, however, continued on behalf of Attica survivors and their families, with litigation stretching on for decades.

Meanwhile, Attica inmates saw improvements in prison conditions, including greater access to showers, better food, educational materials, religious services and law libraries. Such changes were among the reforms sought by the growing prisoners’ rights movement. In 1972, the American Civil Liberties Union established its National Prison Project to protect the civil and constitutional rights of prisoners. Then, in 1976, the landmark Supreme Court decision Estelle v. Gamble held that “deliberate indifference” to the serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.