40th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion and Massacre and the Struggle Today Against the New Jim Crow - 27:56

40th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion and Massacre & the Struggle TodayAgainst the New Jim Crow
with
. Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Consultant , Inst, for Development of Pan African
Policy (Ghana), a 43 year veteran of the Black Liberation and Pan-African Movements
. Joseph "Jazz" Hayden, Campaign to End the New Jim Crow
. Dr. Cornel West, Prof. Princeton Univ., public intellectual, author & activist

Forty years ago, September 9, 1971, inmates in New York's Attica Prison
began a protest against jail conditions that ended on September 13, as
one of the bloodiest days in the 20th century in the U.S. Troopers shot indiscriminately over 2000 rounds of ammunition, and 29 prisoners and
10 state personnel would die. After the shooting stopped, police beat
and tortured scores of prisoners, 90 of the surviving prisoners were
seriously wounded but were initially denied medical care. The state
would originally claim that all of the guards had died at the hands of the
inmates. The New York Times reported on its front page that the throats
of all of the guards were slashed. But it was lies, the guards as well as
the prisoners who were deemed expandable had been shot dead during
the raid.

The Attica uprising is an under-commemorated historic event. Millions,
watched the drama, from interviews with the inmate leadership all the
way to the climactic helicopter gunship assault, which was as ruthless
and one-sided as anything that was coming out of Vietnam. While the
legacy of the Attica uprising, includes the establishment of Prisoners
Legal Services, and the Prisoners Rights Project, it also includes the
Rockefeller Drug Laws. The lasting lesson of Attica is that little will
change until current and former inmates, many times more numerous
than in 1971, again take their destinies into their own hands, as many
are doing, and continue to organize themselves and we in our
communities follow suit in a political fight to roll back the prison state
in our lifetimes, inspired by the sacrifice of the heroic Attica Brothers.

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