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Heather Ann Thompson

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy Hardcover – Illustrated, August 23, 2016

by Heather Ann Thompson (Author)

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The definitive history of the infamous 1971 Attica Prison uprising, the state's violent response, and the victim's decades-long quest for justice. • Thompson served as the Historical Consultant on the Academy Award-nominated documentary feature ATTICA

“Gripping ... deals with racial conflict, mass incarceration, police brutality and dissembling politicians ... Makes us understand why this one group of prisoners [rebelled], and how many others shared the cost.” —The New York Times

On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, the prisoners negotiated with officials for improved conditions during the four long days and nights that followed.

On September 13, the state abruptly sent hundreds of heavily armed troopers and correction officers to retake the prison by force. Their gunfire killed thirty-nine men—hostages as well as prisoners—and severely wounded more than one hundred others. In the ensuing hours, weeks, and months, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners. And, ultimately, New York State authorities prosecuted only the prisoners, never once bringing charges against the officials involved in the retaking and its aftermath and neglecting to provide support to the survivors and the families of the men who had been killed.

Drawing from more than a decade of extensive research, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on every aspect of the uprising and its legacy, giving voice to all those who took part in this forty-five-year fight for justice: prisoners, former hostages, families of the victims, lawyers and judges, and state officials and members of law enforcement. Blood in the Water is the searing and indelible account of one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century.

(With black-and-white photos throughout)

Print length

752 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

August 23, 2016
Dimensions

6.34 x 1.53 x 9.53 inches
ISBN-10

0375423222
ISBN-13

978-0375423222
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water

“Gripping . . . Not all works of history have something to say so directly to the present, but Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, which deals with racial conflict, mass incarceration, police brutality and dissembling politicians, reads like it was special-ordered for the sweltering summer of 2016. But there’s nothing partisan or argumentative about Blood in the Water. The power of this superb work of history comes from its methodical mastery of interviews, transcripts, police reports and other documents, covering 35 years, many released only reluctantly by government agencies . . . It’s Ms. Thompson’s achievement, in this remarkable book, to make us understand why this one group of prisoners [rebelled], and how many others shared the cost.” —Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times

“Chilling, and in places downright shocking . . . [Thompson] tells the story of the riot and its aftermath with precision and momentum.” —Bryan Burrough, The Wall Street Journal

“A masterly account . . . Essential . . . Blood in the Water restores [the prisoners’] struggle to its rightful place in our collective memory.” —James Forman Jr., The New York Times Book Review

“A long, memorable chronicle . . . dense with new information . . . Thompson’s capacity for close observation and her honesty [are] impressive.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“Masterful.” —Lewis M. Steel, The Nation

“Thompson’s book is a masterpiece of historical research; it is thoroughly researched, extensively documented and reads like a novel . . . Magnificent.” —Terry Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor

“Heather Ann Thompson tracked down long-hidden files related to the tragedy at Attica—some of which have since disappeared—to tell the saga in its full horror.” —Larry Getlen, New York Post

“Writing with cinematic clarity from meticulously sourced material, [Thompson] brilliantly exposes the realities of the Attica prison uprising . . . Thompson’s superb and thorough study serves as a powerful tale of the search for justice in the face of the abuses of institutional power.” —Publishers Weekly Review of the Day (starred review)

“[A] real eye-opener for readers whose interest in Attica and knowledge of what happened ended when the headlines receded . . . Compelling . . . Sensitive . . . Impressively authoritative and thoughtfully composed.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Blood in the Water is extraordinary—a true gift to the written history of civil rights and racial justice struggles in America.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Remarkable. Blood in the Water is a historical tour de force. It sheds new light on these most important historical events, events that in part triggered the wave of exponential prison growth today. For those of us who have been tracing the rise of mass incarceration in this country, Heather Ann Thompson’s book is a must read.” —Bernard E. Harcourt, Professor of Law and Political Science at Columbia University

“Heather Ann Thompson wields the powers of the historian with mesmerizing force. Forty-five years after the Attica uprising, Blood in the Water offers the most complete history to date on that tragic episode and does so with unflinching purpose: a clearer view of the consequences for human life, both past and present.” —Glenn E. Martin, Founder and President of JustLeadershipUSA

“Blood in the Water tells of warning signs in 1971 that still exist more than forty years later. Heather Ann Thompson’s prophetic analysis is a sobering reminder that we must all care about what is happening to human beings behind prison walls.” —Soffiyah Elijah, Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York

About the Author

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the J. Willard Hurst Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other accolades. She is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given congressional staff briefings on the subject. She has written on the history of mass incarceration and its current impact for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Newsweek, NBC, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post, as well as for various top scholarly publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
State Secrets

One might well wonder why it has taken forty-five years for a comprehensive history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 to be written. The answer is simple: the most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.

Some of these materials, such as scores of boxes related to the McKay Commission inquiry into Attica, were deemed off limits four decades ago—in this case at the request of the commission members who feared that state prosecutors would try to use the information to make cases against prisoners in a court of law. Other materials related to the Attica uprising, such as the last two volumes of the Meyer Report of 1976, were also sealed back in the 1970s. Members of law enforcement fought hard to prevent disclosure of this report in particular. Although a judge has recently ruled that these volumes can now be released to the public, the redaction process that they first will undergo means that crucial parts of Attica’s history will almost certainly remain hidden.

The vast majority of Attica’s records, however, are not sealed, and yet they might as well be. Federal agencies such as the FBI and the Justice Department have important Attica files, for example, but when one requests them via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), they have been rendered nearly unreadable from all of the redactions. And then there are the records held by the state of New York itself—countless boxes housed in various upstate warehouses that came from numerous sources: the state’s official investigation into whether criminal acts had been committed at Attica during the rebellion, its five years of prosecuting such alleged crimes, and its nearly three decades of defending itself against civil actions filed by prisoners and hostages. In 2006 I was able to get an index of these files, which made clear that this is a treasure trove of Attica documentation: autopsies, ballistics reports, trooper statements, depositions, and more. It constitutes ground zero of the Attica story.

Everything that the state holds in these warehouses can also be requested via FOIA, but here as well it is difficult to get documents released. As this book goes to press, and after waiting since 2013 for some explanation of whether my latest FOIA request would net me important documents, I just received word that state officials will not be giving me those materials. I know the items that I requested are there, according to the state’s own inventory, and I also know that I did not ask for any grand jury materials that would be protected, and yet my request is still being denied.

But thanks to so many who lived and litigated the Attica uprising, as well as so many others who took the time to chronicle or to collect parts of this history in newspapers, in memoirs, and in archives outside the control of the state of New York, I was still able to rescue and recount the story of Attica.

And, because of two extraordinarily lucky breaks I had while I was trying to write this book, the history you are about to read is one that state officials very much hoped would not be told.

First, in 2006 I stumbled upon a cache of Attica documents at the Erie County courthouse in Buffalo, New York, that changed everything. I had, for two years, been calling and writing every county courthouse and coroner’s office and municipal building in upstate New York in order to find any Attica-related records that had not been placed under lock and key by the Office of the Attorney General or sealed by a judge. I had little to go on in these early years—I didn’t have case numbers to search, I knew few names to inquire about. But one day I hit pay dirt. I was on the phone with a woman from the Erie County courthouse who thought that a bunch of Attica papers had recently been placed in the back room there. They had been somewhere else, but had been moved to the Office of the Clerk, perhaps after suffering some water damage. I headed to Buffalo.
When I walked into that dim file room at the courthouse I was taken aback. In front of me, in complete disarray on floor-to-ceiling metal shelves, were literally thousands of pages of Attica documents. In this mess was everything from grand jury testimony, to depositions and indictments, to memos and personal letters. Most stunningly, though, I found in this mountain of moldy papers vital information from the very heart of the state’s own investigation into whether crimes had been committed during the rebellion or the retaking of the prison. In short, I had found a great deal of what the state knew, and when it knew it—not the least of which was what evidence it thought it had against members of law enforcement who were never indicted. I took as many notes as I could take, and Xeroxed as many pages as they would let me, and, finally, had much of what I needed to write a history of Attica that no one yet knew.

Then, in 2011, I had another incredibly lucky break. I had just published an op-ed in The New York Times on the occasion of Attica’s fortieth anniversary when I received an email from Craig Williams, an archivist at the New York State Museum who wanted help making sense of a new trove of materials he had received from the New York State Police. Troopers had just turned over an entire Quonset hut full of items they had gathered from the prison yards of Attica immediately after the four-day standoff there in 1971—items that the state considered evidence in the cases that it might make against prisoners or troopers. I was thrilled to hear this, and soon headed to Albany.

When I got to the museum’s cavernous warehouse, I was glad to be joined by Christine Christopher, a filmmaker making a documentary on Attica with whom I had been working closely. Together we just stood for a while, staring at rows and rows of cartons, boxes, bags, and crates of materials that had been removed from the prison forty years before. And what had been gathered and hidden away for those many decades turned out to be grim indeed. In one particularly mangled container lay a heap of clothing—the dirty, rumpled pants and shirt of a slain correction officer, Carl Valone. His clothing wasn’t soiled merely with decades-old mud from Attica’s D Yard. It was stiff and stained with blood. I had met two of Carl Valone’s kids who were still desperate for answers regarding what, exactly, had happened to their father on September 13, 1971.

And this was just one box. Next to it sat another in which I found the now rigid, blood-soaked clothing of Attica prisoner Elliot “L. D.” Barkley. Like Carl Valone, L. D. Barkley had been gunned down during Attica’s retaking. I had met one of his family members too—L.D.’s younger sister, Traycee. She, like every one of the Valone kids, was also still haunted by Attica.

Although the detritus of Attica that the NYSP had saved in these many boxes revealed little new about why this event played out as it did, it was a harrowing reminder of its human toll. There was a dog-eared red spiral notebook filled with messages written by the prisoners who had survived the retaking, men who had hoped these pages could somehow be smuggled out so that their families and friends might know that they were still alive. There were also cartons of torn and faded photographs of prisoners’ loved ones, countless legal proceedings that the prisoners had painstakingly copied, and even their Bibles and Qurans—all of which had been ripped out of cells in the aftermath of the rebellion.

All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished, and all of the Attica artifacts that the New York State Museum had been willing to share have also been removed from anyone’s view. But all that I learned from those documents back in 2006 can’t be unlearned, and all of the boxes of bloody Attica clothes and heartbreaking letters written by Attica’s prisoners that I saw back in 2011 can’t be unseen.

And I have decided to include all that I have learned and seen in this book.

That said, this decision was agonizing. Although my job as a historian is to write the past as it was, not as I wished it had been, I have no desire to cause anyone pain in the present. I am well aware, and it haunts me, that my decision to name individuals who have spent the last forty-five years trying to remain unnamed will reopen many old wounds and cause much new suffering. That old wounds were never allowed to heal, and that new suffering is now a certainty, however, is, I believe, the responsibility of officials in the state of New York. It is these officials who have chosen repeatedly, since 1971, to protect the politicians and members of law enforcement who caused so much trauma. It is these officials who could have, and should have, told the whole truth about Attica long ago so that the healing could have begun and Attica’s history would have been just that: history, not present-day politics and pain.

Of course, even this book can’t promise Attica’s survivors the full story. The state of New York still sits on many secrets. This book does vow, however, to recount all that I was able to uncover, and by doing that, at least, perhaps a bit more justice will be done.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; Illustrated edition (August 23, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 752 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375423222
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375423222
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.34 x 1.53 x 9.53 inches

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HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. She has written on the history of mass incarceration, as well as its current impact, for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarcerations in the United States and has given Congressional briefings on this subject. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Brian S.

Brilliant, gripping, and compelling

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 13, 2022

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Blood in the Water is a superb book--and it's a truly worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The book is exceptionally well researched, very well written, and extremely readable. In all candor, I underestimated the book, and I should have read it years ago (it was published in 2016).

An additional surprise is the photos included in the book.

Blood in the Water has excellent notes; a bibliography would have been helpful.

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An Amazing Work of Research and a Moving Narrative!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 28, 2017

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In “Blood In the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy”, Heather Ann Thompson traces the trajectory of the Attica Uprising from the events that precipitated it through the lengthy legal battles of just a few years prior to her publication. She describes in detail the State of New York’s efforts to cover up its own culpability for the brutality and death that resulted in the New York State Police’s retaking of the facility. Thompson sums up the goal of the uprising while discussing the observers’ efforts at meeting with prisoners. The chants of “Power to the People” were, according to Thompson, “what Attica, at its core, was all about. These disfranchised and seemingly disposable men were determined to stand together, in unity, to make some concrete changes to their lives” (pg. 111).
Discussing the beginning of the disaster, Thompson writes, “It was obvious to anyone who was at Attica that members of law enforcement were so riled up that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for them to do their job dispassionately should they be sent in to retake the prison” (pg. 153). She continues, “Whereas the National Guard had a clear plan already in place for bringing civil disturbances in confined areas under control, known as Operation Plan Skyhawk, the New York State Police had virtually no formal training for this sort of action” (pg. 165). Rockefeller and his subordinates feared the image of National Guardsmen storming the prison would too closely evoke Kent State. As the police readied, “although for 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” (pg. 168).
Thompson describes the beginning of the cover-up following the retaking of the prison. She writes, NYSP “Captain Henry Williams went to great lengths to thwart every state effort to ask thorny questions about the actions of his men. And he went even further than that. In the immediate aftermath of the retaking, Williams took it upon himself to make sure as much evidence as possible was collected that might indicate that a prisoner committed a crime…while also making sure that nothing related to the shooting – shell casings, the weapons themselves – was collected” (pg. 288). In discussing Malcolm Bell’s attempt to apply justice evenly, Thompson writes that, despite efforts of NYSP to withhold evidence, “The one thing that [troopers’ statements] did provide, in a few instances, was evidence of which specific prisoners were shot by which specific troopers and, as important, evidence of which troopers had fired their weapons without justification and thus, in all likelihood, criminally” (pg. 409). She continues, “In the course of processing how it was that vital hindering cases had been allowed to implode, Bell eventually came to believe that a serious prosecution of members of law enforcement had in fact been set up to fail from the moment Simonetti had told him to switch his efforts from the shooter cases to cases of hindering the investigation back in August of 1974” (pg. 422). Further, “By the close of fall 1974, Bell had begun to worry that he had stumbled upon an outright conspiracy to protect Attica’s shooters, one that reached to the highest level of his own Attica investigation as well as to the office of the former governor, Nelson Rockefeller” (pg. 435). This led Bell to turn whistleblower in an attempt to expose the truth, though the State of New York managed to mitigate his revelations.
The state further betrayed the hostages, many of whom were state employees, by tricking them into accepting workman’s compensation in order to prevent them from filing a lawsuit. Thompson writes, “Without formally filing for workman’s compensation, the checks simply showed up soon after the retaking. Unbeknownst to the recipients, the instant that an Attica survivor or widow signed and cashed one of these checks, under New York state law they had ‘elected a remedy,’ which meant that they could no longer sue the state for damages” (pg. 518). In discussing the former hostages’ and their relatives’ attempts to sue the state, Thompson writes, “Getting a state official to acknowledge under oath who had shot John Monteleone, a hostage who had later died from that same shot, was huge. For the purposes of this lawsuit it confirmed just how excessive and brutal the shooting during the retaking had been. Of course it also confirmed that state officials were aware who had killed whom at Attica – the very point that Malcolm Bell had been trying to make when he went public back in 1975” (pg. 524).
Thompson concludes, “The Attica uprising of 1971 happened because ordinary men, poor men, disfranchised men, and men of color had simply had enough of being treated as less than human. That desire, and their fight, is by far Attica’s most important legacy” (pg. 570). Further, “The Attica prison uprising of 1971 shows the nation that even the most marginalized citizens will never stop fighting to be treated as human beings. It testifies to this irrepressible demand for justice. This is Attica’s legacy” (pg. 571).

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CJA

Exceptionally Well Researched and Written Tale of Attica and the Larger Issues of Criminal Justice Implicated by Attica

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 1, 2018

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This is a powerfully written narrative about the Attica uprising and suppression, and about the lengthy court battles that followed. Thompson sympathizes with the prisoners, but does not romanticize them. Their behavior in the early hours of the uprising was appalling, including the kind of rape, mayhem, and violence you would see in a very bad movie depicting the chaos that would attend a revolution or the apocalyptic end of the world. But the prisoners, to their credit, quickly restored order and formed a democratic system that mimicked the larger world outside.

This is illustrative of the larger theme of the book, which rejects the "animal" theory of criminal justice. In the popular imagination, the prison population includes many animals who are evil and who need to be warehoused indefinitely. Yet anyone who has ever spent any time with violent offenders quickly reaches the rather depressing realization that they are, above all, men -- not different in kind from "us." This is true even of the ones who commit the most evil acts. But the nation, led by Governor Rockefeller who put down the rebellion, took a different path at this time, doubling down on sentencing, rejecting the rehabilitative function of prisons, and increasing prison populations geometrically.

The most disturbing part of the book is its riveting retelling of the recapture of the prison by the State troopers. The police cooled their heels outside for 4 days, growing angrier at the use of liberal lawyers, journalists, and even the Black Panthers to attempt to negotiate a peaceful surrender. That anger is understandable, particularly given their fears of mistreatment of the hostages and the irritating radical chic of the prison leaders who asked for extradition to a non-imperialist third country. What is shocking is the absence of planning for the recapture operation and the choice of leadership to stoke the fires of police rage so that the operation was a bloody as possible. They went in with shot guns and explosive bullets that maximized hit targets, including killing several hostages with friendly fire. Then there was an orgy of violence, torture, and racist hatred in the aftermath of the takeover. This was all preventable and it is leadership -- from Rockefeller down to the officers leading the recapture -- who are responsible.

The police wrongly claimed that the prisoners had killed the hostages. This was not so much a brazen lie as it was symptomatic of the rumors and fears that drove the officers to such terrible violence. But the claim was soon exposed as untrue. Not to matter, as the truth is the first casualty of war, be it a shooting war or a war on crime. In the popular imagination, the truth was that prisoners are animals. Rockefeller, and Nixon, and Reagan all won the argument -- with rhetoric, emotion, and an underlay of racism, rather than with reasoned logic and data.

Unlike most lay authors, Thompson has the patience to do the work necessary to understand the complexities of the litigation that followed the uprising and that spanned 40 years.

This is exceptionally well researched and written with a novelist's eye for narrative. It was worthy of the Pulitzer

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Top reviews from other countries

Bart Blue

50 years of lies, deceit and politicical opportunism laid bare!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 3, 2021

Verified Purchase

Forget the lies, semi-heroic myths and half-truths designed to cover up murder, corruption and a failing judicial, political and sociological system.

Steve

Important Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 31, 2019

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horrendous story of the attempt to murder prisoners and the cover up that followed.

Paul Daniel Barron

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 12, 2017

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Excellent writing/ journalism on a episode of history l did not know. Gripping.

2 people found this helpful

Scotty

Attica Uprising

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 1, 2020

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What a phenomenal read to bring one closer to all of the injustices and blatant government cover ups and barriers put place to totally compromise any effective investigation. Not to mention all the pain and suffering for all those involved. Huge toll only made worse by government b.s.! Well written, researched and informative.

A wonderful read and a piece of history that needed to be exposed for what it was. How much has really changed with the prison system in the USA?

Peotti

It could happen again

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 13, 2020

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This event and the whitewashing that followed gives one insight into the struggles minority communities have to fight against. This happened in NY state not in Mississippi or Alabama. Yes it was 50 years ago but in many ways few things have changed, especially the "thin Blue Line", except that these communities are reacting more quickly to acts of violence and the media is more skeptical of so called "official" channels.
We are aware that correctional facilities in the US are in dire straits, many minor felons are housed with violent criminal offenders, many inmates suffer from mental health issues, overcrowding, under funding, no rehab and so on.
This book is very well written and relies on source materials even though the government hides many of the original documents. Thank you Ms Heather Ann Thompson for opening my eyes to an often forgotten event.

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Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy Hardcover – Illustrated, August 23, 2016

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Buy new:

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FREE delivery: Thursday, Dec 22

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used:

$12.28