Hi, I’m Deborah Holdship the editor of Michigan Today.
In this episode of Listen in Michigan my guest is Heather Ann Thompson professor and historian in the Afro-American and African studies department here at U of M in the Residential College. Thompson has a new book called “Blood in the Water” and it’s been described as the first definitive history of the infamous 1971 Attica Prison uprising the state of New York’s violent response and the victims decade long quest for justice. It took Thompson about 13 years to research and write this book in large part because she was seeking the truth. She wanted to find documents that the state of New York had actively suppressed and sealed and hidden from the public. And she succeeded in doing so, resulting in a book that is a detailed and vivid account not only of what happened during the four day uprising in September 1971, but in the ensuing 45 years in which the state actively misled the public to believe that it was the inmates and not law enforcement officers who were responsible for the 39 deaths that took place that day.
I spoke to Thompson about her book in the midst of a frenzy of public relations activity. So I apologize the interviews on the phone and the audio is a little funky. But I really wanted to hear from her as a historian and writer who has studied social justice mass incarceration and civil rights throughout her career. What Attica really means to her, and why it remains a compelling and contemporary topic even today. Here’s Thompson.
Heather Ann Thompson: I don’t feel like we can understand why the nation turned so viciously against the prisoners until we understand fully how state of New York distorted this really powerful prisoner rights protest and really made the nation feel that those to blame where the prisoners when all of the deaths that happened on the day of retaking were at the hands of law enforcement people who incidentally were whenever indicted and never prosecuted. Again, the nation had a very false impression of what exactly had happened that day.
To the extent that it tells the story that’s not been told before, I was because I was determined to find records that the state of New York has in fact that still remains sealed. One of the reasons we don’t know much about Attica other than the contours of the actual protests that lasted for four days is that the state of New York has actively field all of these records. And so to tell the story it took me 13 years because it was very difficult to find essentially who had either the copy of what the state had or perhaps the original of what the state had. And so hopefully more comprehensive than anything that we’ve seen because of this incredibly long research journey to find out exactly what happened not just during the rebellion which I do think there’s some real revelations there as well, but as importantly what happened in the subsequent 45 years that has meant that the survivors never fully knew what had happened to their loved ones and therefore have never been able to really heal.
Holdship: At one point Thompson’s research took a shocking turn when she discovered a stash of documents in a courthouse in New York, really incriminating evidence against the state debt clearly would not have been accessible to her if the powers that be new where these documents were. Here’s Thompson.
Thompson: It was shocking and also just a little bit surreal because of course at any moment I was waiting for someone to burst in the door in and shut it all down and in fact, I tried to make as many notes and copies as I could. But I always had trepidation because I knew that the minute word got out that that’s where they were that they would disappear and it appears that’s exactly what happened. Yeah so, in the book it talks about them and they’re no longer there that really speaks again to the ongoing desire on the part of the state of New York to just make this go away.
Holdship: Since the book’s release, Thompson has faced some criticism for releasing the names of state troopers and other law enforcement officers who may have killed or did actually kill inmates and hostages that day. Here’s how she explains that decision.
Thompson: As much as I perhaps would have liked to have had the choice whether or not to reveal who these people were, I did not have that choice because I am a historian by training and that means that how we do research and whatever the history is, it is. I was trying to write a part of the history which was the investigation into Attica. What did the state learn, what did the state know, who did it imagine had various crimes, who did it suspect, and what did it make of the investigation. And so though those documents indicated who it suspected and who it had evidence against though part of simply writing this history was writing that. But I agonized of course even though I’m a scholar who must tell history as it happens not as I hoped it would be you know, I have no desire to cause anyone any pain and the process and I knew that he would be very painful for the survivors who learn finally after 40 years some of the people who had committed the crimes, and frankly some of whom they might know. But also painful because even the perpetrators who would have managed to keep themselves out of the limelight for all this time, I don’t want to reopen anyone’s old wounds so that part was very difficult but I don’t say anyone was a murderer, I don’t say anyone committed a crime, I’m simply recording the history of that period. This is what the state believes this is what the state thought and its part of that history.
Holdship: One of the most disturbing ironies revealed in this book is that while the state’s response to the uprising itself was incredibly chaotic and disorganized, the cover-up that has taken place in the past 45 years? Unbelievably organized. Here’s Thompson.
Thompson: I think readers will be surprised to learn that a third of the book is the actual uprising and the rest of the book is about the long fight for justice to be heard on the part of the prisoners and the hostages and in turn, the enormous length that the state of New York and the state police went if you make sure that that story was never told. They were incredibly organized I think in that effort to protect the police. And also its the story that every step along the way and the lowest level bureaucrat all the way up to the presidence of the United States to the Justice Department of the United States to the Supreme Court of the United States. Those with power were told time and time again that these prisoners were being tortured that terrible things had happened and nobody with power helped them, nobody believed them nobody stood by them and so it’s a really amazing kind of David and Goliath story that at the very end the prisoners are finally able to walk into the courtroom and to tell their story, what had happened. One guy, one judge, there are some heroes. The judge at the end, Judge Michael Telesca, there’s the hero within the Attica investigation Malcolm Bell who’s the whistleblower, he’s the one who makes clear there has been a cover-up. And even that first coroner back in 1971 who went public at great risk to himself and pointed out that all of the hostages had, in fact, had been killed by law enforcement and not by the prisoners. There are some heroes in this story but there’s also a lot of real ugliness that people with the most power committed some pretty horrendous instances of neglect and not taking a stand against the abuses.
Holdship: Thompson says she’s ready for any critics who accused her of being too sympathetic towards the prisoners the heroes and villains in this book may surprise you.
Thompson: I think one of the other things that the book does or I hope that the book does is that you quickly learn that the people behind bars aren’t at all who you expect they will be. Certainly, there’s some bad guys and there certainly are people who have committed terrible harm against other people. But there’s also a 19-year-old on parole violation and there are people there who are drug-addicted whose crime was burglary because they were feeding an addiction and that they should have been and a public health facility not in a criminal justice facility. So the book also kind of makes the reader face, I think, a lot of assumptions I hope and one minute you find yourself sympathizing with the prisoner the next minute you’re angry at that prisoner next minute you’re sympathizing with a guard the next minute you’re angry. It really does take us to all those places which are not easy I think to read but hopefully, it makes it more open to the complexity that is our criminal justice system today. Some of the criticism is that I’m very sympathetic to prisoners and I’m very eager to talk about that criticism because I am absolutely glad of the fact that the book humanizes human beings that are behind bars and I make no apology for that. I mean when you have 7.5 million people in our correctional system, which we do, who I am humanizing is all of our brothers or fathers or mothers or sisters. So I make no apology for that but I do think that for readers they also need to get to the end of the book because it very much a story sympathetic to these guards who were absolutely defensible to the state at the prisoners were and frankly were time and again ignored when they too were talking about the horrendous working conditions that they face and that whether today and guards are placed in terrible workplace situations fearful themselves because of the overcrowding and having to treat people like animals creates a very unstable unsafe situation. So I hope people will stick with it to the end and that really the bad guys are neither the guard or a prisoner. The bad guys are really all of the people who are outside of that system with the power to make it better and the power to listen to those people on the inside and try to dodge responsibility time and again if not in some cases actively made it worse.
Holdship: Well that was professor Heather Ann Thompson. Thank you so much for listening, hope to have you back next month and as always, go blue.
Quest for justice
On Sept. 9. 1971, inmates of the Attica Correctional Facility in New York took control of the prison to protest decades of institutional barbarism and abuse. For four days they held guards and civilian employees hostage, negotiating for improved conditions. They invited civil rights figures, state officials, and members of the media to oversee the proceedings.
But on Sept. 13, the state, anxious to end the standoff quickly, sent hundreds of heavily armed troopers and corrections officers to reclaim the prison. A short and chaotic bloodbath ensued that left 39 prisoners – and hostages – dead.
In the aftermath, state officials claimed prisoners had committed the carnage in the retaking of the prison. And for the next 45 years, officials would stand by that lie – and build upon it – creating an indelible, false image that persists to this day.
Blood in the Water(Pantheon/Penguin Random House, 2016) by Heather Ann Thompson, a historian in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts’ Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and Residential College, now shatters that image. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book has been touted as the “first definitive history of the infamous Attica Prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice.”
Thompson devotes just one-third of the book to the uprising itself; the rest is a rigorously reported account of one of the most longstanding and horrific cover-ups in American history. She has compiled a trove of evidence that proves the real villains in this story are neither the inmates nor the guards of Attica, but the officials outside the system who had the knowledge and power to enact reform, but chose to do nothing.
“The book will surely open old wounds that were never allowed to fully heal,” Thompson says, citing New York state’s ongoing quest to obfuscate the truth. “After 45 years, we should be talking about Attica as history, not as present-day politics and pain.”
In this short podcast, and in the Q&A below, Thompson shares her thoughts about Blood in the Water. The book is a finalist in the nonfiction category of the 2016 National Book Awards.
Deborah Holdship: As a historian who has committed her career to studying, writing about, and pushing for social change around race, incarceration, and the prison system in this country, what does Attica represent to you?
Heather Ann Thompson
Heather Ann Thompson: In some respects, Attica is really ground zero for understanding race, civil rights, and human rights struggles in 20th-century America. It is a civil rights protest on the one hand, but it is a protest by the most marginalized citizens in the entire country, which is our prisoners — those with the least power.
Somehow [in 1971] 1,300 of them came together across divisions of language, race, and political persuasion to stand together for basic human rights.
That makes it a powerful story because it tells us something about the irrepressible human spirit, the irrepressible desire for justice and to be treated as human. That makes Attica live on.
But it’s also a critically important story as we try to understand why we became the country with more people locked up than any other nation on the planet.
DH: Your book has been described as the “first definitive account” of the events at Attica and their aftermath. That is no small task considering this subject has been covered extensively since it happened in 1971. What makes it “definitive” in your opinion?
HAT: I don’t think we can understand why the nation turned so viciously against prisoners until we understand fully how the state of New York distorted this really powerful prisoner rights protest. The nation was made to feel as if those to blame were the prisoners, when all the deaths that happened on the day of the retaking were at the hands of law enforcement, who, incidentally, were never indicted or prosecuted. So the nation had a false impression of what happened that day.
One of the reasons we don’t know much about Attica, other than the contours of the actual protest that lasted four days, is that the state of New York has actively sealed all of these records. It took me 13 years to complete this work because I was determined to find those records in order to tell a story that hadn’t been told before.
Hopefully it’s more comprehensive than anything we’ve seen because of this incredibly long research journey to find out exactly what happened, not just during the rebellion (and I do think there’s some real revelations there as well) but, as importantly, what happens in the subsequent 45 years that has meant the survivors never fully knew what happened to their loved ones, and therefore never had a chance to heal.
DH: You found some valuable records that had never been made public. What went through your mind when you realized what you had?
HAT: It was shocking and just a little bit surreal because at any moment I was waiting for someone to burst through the door and shut it all down.
I tried to take as many notes as I could and get as many Xerox copies as I could. I always had trepidation because I knew the minute word got out that that’s where [these documents] were they would disappear. And it appears that’s exactly what happened. The documents are no longer there. Again, that speaks to the ongoing desire of the state of New York to just make this go away.
DH: You’ve generated some controversy by printing the names of troopers who were never charged or indicted, but who killed or may have killed people that day. I read in a New York Times piece that you agonized over that decision.
HAT: As much as I perhaps would have liked to have had the choice whether or not to reveal who those people were, I did not have that choice. I am a historian by training. That means we do research. Whatever the history is, it is.
I was trying to write the part of the history that was the investigation into Attica: What did the state learn? What did the state know? Who did it imagine had committed various crimes? Who did it suspect? And what did it make of the investigation?
Those documents indicated who it suspected and who it had evidence against, so part of writing this history was writing that.
But I agonized, because, of course. Even though I’m a scholar who must tell history as it happened, not as I hoped it would be, I had no desire to cause any pain in the present. And I knew that it would be very painful for the survivors who learned finally after 40 years, who some of the people were who had committed these crimes – and frankly, some of whom they might know.
But I don’t say anyone’s a murderer. I don’t say anyone committed a crime.
I’m simply reporting the history of that period: This is what the state believed. This is what the state thought. And that’s part of that history.
DH: It’s been pointed out that one of the most disturbing ironies in the book is that while the handling of the riot itself was chaotic and disastrous, the cover-up in its aftermath was remarkably organized.
HAT: Readers will be surprised to learn that only a third of the book is the actual uprising. The rest is the long fight for justice to be heard on the part of the prisoners and the hostages, and, in turn, the enormous lengths to which the state of New York and state police went to make sure the story was never told.
Every step along the way – from the lowest-level bureaucrat to the Supreme Court of the U.S. — those with power were told time and again that those prisoners were being tortured, that terrible things had happened inside Attica. And nobody with power helped them. Nobody believed them. Nobody stood by them.
HAT: It’s one thing to imagine that no one really knew at the time, that, for example, police were the ones that had killed people and they weren’t getting prosecuted. Or that no one knew at the time how bad prison conditions were. And that is simply not the case. People at the time did know that law enforcement had killed people at Attica, but nevertheless protected them. And people did know the prisoners were being mistreated behind bars, and nevertheless let it happenDH: A book like this exists to set the record straight and right some horrible wrongs. Unfortunately there were opportunities in 1971 to right those wrongs and it never happened, then or since. How could we have been so blind, both then and now?
It does give us pause today. I hope the message humbles us a bit, and motivates us to be more critical of our own news media.
For instance, when we see stories where a police officer kills an unarmed black citizen and the officer does not get indicted, we assume there was no crime, no evidence.
I think Attica makes clear the extreme levels to which state officials will go to protect law enforcement.
DH: It’s sad that so many of the issues from 1971 remain current.
HAT: We are seeing that prisoners, once again, are speaking out about what have today become much worse conditions.
Historians always hope that if we can tell the story compellingly enough, or if we can somehow get the whole story told, our citizens and politicians and the people in the present day will learn and will perhaps avoid some of these horrible do-overs, these horrible moments in which we end up back where we were.
And this moment is no different. It’s terrible that we are once again facing police brutality issues to such an extreme, and that we again are facing the need for a civil rights movement.
At the end of the day, humans have one thing left: that they are human. They will fight back for the most basic human rights.
DH: What do you think will surprise people about this book?
HAT: You quickly learn that the people behind bars are not at all who you expect them to be. There are obviously bad guys and people who committed terrible harm against other people. But there are also 19-year-olds in Attica on parole violations. There are those who are drug addicted and belong in a public health facility, not a criminal justice facility.
So the book also makes readers face a lot of assumptions. One minute you find yourself sympathizing with the prisoners; the next minute you’re angry at that prisoner. Then you’re sympathizing with a guard, and the next minute you’re angry at that guard.
It really does take us to all those places, which is not easy to read. But hopefully it makes us more open to the complexity that is our criminal just system today.
HAT: I’m very eager to talk about that criticism because I am absolutely glad of the fact that this book humanized human beings who are behind bars. I make no apologies for that.DH: How do you respond to the criticism that you paint too sympathetic a picture of the prisoners?
When you have 7.5 million people in our correctional system – the people I am humanizing are all of our brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters. I make no apologies for that, but I also do think readers need to get to the end of the book, because it is very much a story sympathetic to these guards who were absolutely as dispensable to the state as the prisoners were.
Time and again the guards were ignored when talking about the horrendous working conditions they faced. And that resonates today. Guards are placed in terrible workplace situations, fearful themselves because of overcrowding. Having to treat people like animals creates very unsafe, unstable conditions.
I hope people will stick with it to the end. The bad guys are neither the guards nor the prisoners. The bad guys are those people outside the system — with the power to make it better and the power to listen to those people on the inside — who dodged that responsibility time and again, if not actively made it worse.
DH: I understand there is a movie in the works.
HAT: I hope to be involved. That was quite a surprise. I’m grateful for it because it said to me there’s something about this moment we’re in where people are interested in stories about justice, and stories about people who are fighting to be heard.
DH: It took you 13 years to write this book. What does that do to a person, to spend so much time in this heavy, heavy place?
HAT: It took so long that it became my part of my life. But any time I would begin to question whether I could do it, whether I’d find the records, or stick to it because it was difficult, I would have a conversation with just one of the many people who lived through Attica. To a one, they all broke down.
It was just so clear to me this history had to be written in one place. Or at least the first history.
We won’t have the full, full history until the state of New York releases its documents.
But it was an attempt, and I’m glad it’s over.
DH: What do you think about the way prison is presented on TV, in both “reality” shows and fiction?
HAT: Well, I think that for the last 20 years the way the media has portrayed life in prison has been terrible. There are some terrible shows like “Lockup Raw” and others that show mentally ill prisoners and people in their most stressed condition. This type of media has led to a generation of people who think prisoners are animals.
But then recently we’ve had prisoners, and former prisoners, talking about the need for prison reform. We have “Orange is the New Black,” written by a formerly incarcerated woman, and I think that has helped changed the imagery and the dialogue.
These are public institutions. We pay for them with our taxes. And we give them our faith that they are going to do what is right by our citizens, in terms of justice.
Therefore we have a right to know what happens in these prisons.
And we need to shine a light on who’s in them because, again, who’s in them is all of us.
Hopefully, the book will help to do a little bit of that.
rex hauser - 1978,1980,1988
I remember being in Sweden, at age 19, when Attica occurred. From outside of the country, it looked like a tragedy, and it felt like the end of an era politically. I wonder if shutting down the protest didn’t have something to do with the FBI’s Cointel Program, and with targeting of individuals such as Sam Melville, with whom certain authorities had a longstanding ‘beef.’
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ED Glass - 1973
This is history rewritten – good work.
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David Politzer - BS 1969
I just finished reading the book. The careful documentation and rich detail offer a basis for understanding why the justice and penal systems have, since then for the most part, only become more troubling and what are the forces and issues at play in vexing issues more widely in our country today.
Thank you, Prof. Thompson.
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