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- [Elizabeth] They wanted people to see what happens
when you rebel.
You know, that they were prepared to kill you,
and not only kill you, but kill anybody.
That's the basic contradiction, you see.
The inmates couldn't believe
that the state would kill its own.
And the state couldn't believe
that the inmates wouldn't kill everybody.
And they were both wrong.
- [Man Over Speaker] Those of you who have not done so,
surrender peacefully.
You will not be harmed.
Place your clasped hands on your head.
- [Narrator] All right, here we go.
So, I mean, I guess tell me who you are
and what your title was.
- Who am I and what my title was.
I never had a, oh, well, that's not true.
I was, I still am, I sort of consider,
a staff attorney at Attica Brothers Legal Defense.
- [Narrator] On September 13th, 1971,
the state of New York shot and killed
39 of its own citizens, injured hundreds more,
and tortured the survivors.
During the 30-year legal battle that followed,
the prisoners who fought to expose the truth of that day
became known as the Attica Brothers.
Fink joined their legal team two weeks
after being admitted to practice law in New York.
- People need human rights.
- [Narrator] She had a high profile career
defending vulnerable communities from the most powerful foe
in her time, the US government.
- If you don't put your government to the task,
then you get our Constitution being used as toilet paper.
- I'm gonna release the defendant on his own recognizance.
(crowd cheering)
- [Narrator] Black Panthers like Dhoruba Bin-Wahad;
Puerto Rican nationalists, hacker Jeremy Hammond.
- Freedom, freedom now.
- [Narrator] Her focus was attacking abuse of power
by defending its victims.
But no case required as much dedication or attention
as Attica.
- There is no justice in America.
What empowers you is the fight for justice.
(audience applauding)
- [Narrator] When she died in 2015, she left a legacy
as a fierce defender of human rights,
a lawyer who changed the face of jury selection forever,
and a mentor to a new generation of radical thinkers.
She also left me a box that she had guarded for decades.
It was an archive with hundreds of photographs
and over 60 hours of videotape
containing the most damning evidence
remaining from the Attica trials.
The state of New York had declared this material lost
decades ago, but as lead counsel in the 26-year civil phase,
Fink figured out where it was hidden.
This archive proved allegations of wanton murder
and abuse by state police,
and was a cornerstone of the $8 million settlement
in the civil trial, the largest ever granted to prisoners.
- [Elizabeth] We needed the evidence,
and it became clear to me
that they were going to destroy it.
- [Narrator] So, how do you have it now?
- [Elizabeth] I stole it.
- [Narrator] From?
- [Elizabeth] New York state.
I didn't steal it.
I shouldn't say that.
I expropriated it from them,
as the chief counsel for the prisoners,
who were the plaintiffs.
We're at this point right now,
where they are refusing to admit they have all these files,
and they are lying about what they have.
And it's all gonna be blown up because I took it all.
- [Narrator] The archival photos and videos
used in this film are from the Fink collection.
They have never been available to the public.
- [Elizabeth] I mean we did this huge trial
and everybody wants to ignore it because it proves up
what we know to be true,
which is that it was a massacre, and they did it on purpose.
(intense music)
I should probably go back.
In seventh grade, I was called Khrushchev's daughter.
Okay?
In ninth grade, I was thrown out of school for a day because
I surmised that Francis Gary Powers was a spy.
And my teacher went nuts on me and suspended me from school.
Now, the next day, when it was announced that he was a spy,
he had to apologize,
but trust me, he never forgave me for that.
I was famous for being leftist in high school.
You know, I sounded like my mother,
I talked like my mother,
and I went in there and I made a scene.
She was the head of the Eastern Parkway chapter
of the American Jewish Congress.
When I say Jewish, I mean Jewish communists.
You always gotta understand communist,
'cause my parents didn't do Judaism at all.
My father left the party
immediately after marrying my mother.
My mother didn't leave the party until 1952.
My mother was into the race issue, always.
We used to go down to Florida every year.
We used to drive down in the car.
And we used to go into a restaurant
in South Orangeburg, South Carolina, and we'd order.
And about 10 minutes before the food would come,
my mother would beckon over the waitress.
Say, "Oh, do you serve Negroes here?"
"Oh, no ma'am, don't you worry about a thing.
We don't let no niggers in here."
And we would then have to get up and leave. Okay.
So that was, we didn't eat much on the way down to Florida.
(Elizabeth laughs)
On one level, you're always embarrassed.
But I always, on another level,
I always admired her ability to do that.
She taught me how to fight, politically.
She was the most enlightened person of her age I ever met.
The whole struggle for Black liberation was so profound.
Those pictures, I mean, you see them,
those lynching pictures,
with all those white people looking at those bodies.
I mean, ugh.
(slow somber music)
The thing about Emmett Till was people for the first time
had to look at it, and it was unbelievable.
After all, he was 14.
And then everything else, you know, Little Rock.
And then, when you put it together with Nazism,
and say, "Well, if you let this happen,
if you're not fighting against this,
you ain't no different than them."
(slow somber music)
I was taught that the struggle for Black people
for freedom and justice in this country
was the most important thing I could be a part of.
That it was my responsibility as a white person,
to support and do everything I could.
And that people had to get together
and organize together to change their lot.
I was taught that it's everybody's obligation
to join the movement.
- I think it's better to be aggressive at this point.
It seems to me that it is both historically
and sociologically true that privileged classes
do not give up their privileges voluntarily.
- When I went to Reed College, I joined SDS,
but that wasn't my thing.
I became involved in student government.
And I became a member of the Community Senate.
And then I became Student Body President
and head of the Judicial Board.
And then I came out of Reed and my father died,
which was a terrible thing for me.
And I had to run his business.
And my mother certainly didn't want me to run his business.
My mother wanted me to be a leftist lawyer.
And so she was gonna facilitate that.
But, in August of 1968, (laughs)
me and a friend named Ken Linden drove to Chicago
for the Democratic convention.
We were not there to demonstrate.
We were there to watch.
- [Crowd] Peace now, peace now, peace now, peace now.
- We walked out of the hotel and walked into Lake Shore Park
or whatever, and all of a sudden we're overtaken
by National Guardsmen with bayonets and rifles.
So, to make a long story short,
we're caught up in this thing and it's 8:06 at night
on the corner of State and Grant, and I'm right there.
And I look at the cops and they go, "You ready?"
And they charged.
(tear gas explodes)
(slow haunting music)
First of what happened is that they had one charge,
and then the second charge, Sidney Peck walked over to them,
who was the leader of the demonstration,
and was gesticulating, "Why did you just do that?"
They were beating everybody.
And they beat him to a pulp down there and dragged him away.
And then everybody started, there was this police riot.
(tense haunting music)
Okay, so,
at 8:06 p.m. on August 28th, 1968,
I became a different person,
because then my whole thing kicked in about, you know,
being the child of Jews right after Nazism.
And when you have this kind of thing you've gotta fight.
And as a result of that,
I became an active, principled and full-time leftist.
(tribal drumming music)
(rapid ticking)
- In America, Black people are treated very much
as are the Vietnamese people, or any other colonized people
because we're used, we're brutalized,
because they have their orders to do so.
And, just as the soldiers in Vietnam
have their orders to destroy the Vietnamese people.
- [Elizabeth] There was the Black Panther Party,
it was all there.
- [Group] The pigs are gonna catch hell. Off the pigs.
No more--
- It was Huey and all that, and then there was Bobby Hutton,
and then, it just escalated from there.
Attica was just the end of it.
You had all the people, you had Martin killed.
You had Malcolm, you had all of that.
Then in 1969, you had Fred Hampton.
- I'm the Deputy Chairman of the state of Illinois
Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton.
- This is where our Chairman had his brains blown out
As he was laying in his bed sleeping at 4:30 in the morning.
- Started with the gun, still on single fire,
brought it all the way across the wall again.
- Fred Hampton, 21 years old, and a member of a militant,
well-known militant group, was murdered in his bed,
probably as he lay asleep.
- I mean, they were at war.
There was all this stuff, there was stuff in LA,
you know what I mean?
So you were looking at that kinda shootout all the time.
And...
- Good morning, Vietnam and welcome back to part two
of the "Dawn Buster."
- Your country was at war, and all these people
from your country are out there killing all these people.
- There's a woman running, so they shoot her down,
and I couldn't imagine why she's running.
After all, we only raped three women in the last village.
And we killed an old man over there too.
- And doing this unbelievable stuff to them.
- I shot her about five or six times.
And I went there and turned her over
and there was a little three-month-old baby.
- Which you got to watch on television everyday.
- So I think I killed about 18 to 20 people.
- [Interviewer] How did the guys look
when they were doing this?
- It was like they were having a lot of good time.
- As far as resistance is concerned,
we didn't encounter any resistance whatsoever.
- The fire bombing of villages.
- After we swept through the village, we turned around,
went back through it and burned all the buildings.
- [Interviewer] Now, to destroy everything in the village
means to destroy the people.
- Right.
- The slaughter of children.
- We figure that the babies, when they grow up,
they will be VC anyway.
So why give 'em the opportunity to grow up?
- All of this, constant.
- We didn't believe that this would be such a
publicity stunt.
We felt that this had been happening many times before,
and it'd probably been happening many times since.
- And the people that they're fighting,
you support with every fiber of your being.
I mean really, every fiber of your being.
And that is heavy.
- [Announcer] President Johnson, meanwhile, let it be known
that the FBI is closely watching all anti-war activity.
- You know, at a certain point in the 60s and everything,
everybody was in the streets, it was really revolution,
and they hated it.
And so they had to do something about it.
And what they did was mass incarceration.
They took the entire underclass and they imprisoned it.
- America's public enemy number one in the United States
is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat this enemy,
it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.
I went to law school because I wanted to be a lawyer,
but I certainly didn't wanna go to law school.
It was boring as hell.
The reason why I went to Brooklyn Law School
is 'cause it cost $1,500 a year.
- [Narrator] Were there are a lot of women in law school?
When was it, I mean--
- Oh, no.
There were 150 people in my class.
And 15 of them were women.
In a year, 50% of the women had been flunked out.
Everybody would snicker when the women came.
You would be called on to give your cases or whatever.
The women only were called on for statutory rape,
all sexual and everybody would be (muttering).
I had gone to law school, but I had chosen the revolution
many years before.
So I went to law school to represent people
who took radical action.
And I got to do that.
- [Narrator] Among the first radical actors Fink represented
were the Attica Brothers, a group of almost 1300 men
who were connected by the Attica prison rebellion.
She started by learning the details of the case
and comparing their stories to the narrative
being developed by the state.
- Truly, Attica is every prison, and every prison is Attica.
- [Narrator] In October, 1971, the state of New York
convened an investigative committee
to study the causes and outcomes
of the Attica prison rebellion.
The McKay Commission produced a three-volume
written report, as well as a documentary film
that aired on public broadcasting stations.
The McKay Commission film was among the material
declared by the state of New York to be quote
"lost or missing," unquote.
But Fink had a copy on VHS that they were unaware of.
It has not been available to the public
for more than 40 years.
- I think Attica brings to mind several things.
The first is the basic inhumanity of man-to-man.
To people, be they Black, yellow, orange, spotted, whatever.
Whatever uniform they wore, that day tore from them
the shreds of their humanity.
- I'm Robert McKay,
Dean of New York University School of Law,
and Chairman of the Special Commission on Attica.
43 people died at Attica in September, 1971.
39 of them in the attack that retook the prison,
four others during the insurrection.
The commission believes that to understand the uprising,
one must understand the nature of Attica.
Therefore, an essential part of our report
is a study of the structure and operation of Attica prison.
- [Narrator] Attica sits on 53 acres
of rural Western New York, near Buffalo.
It's four cell blocks form a 600-foot square
around recreation yards.
A 30-foot wall,
two feet thick and sunk 12 feet into the ground,
with 14 gun towers, surrounds the entire prison,
creating an enclosed world with its own standards,
economy, and government.
- [Elizabeth] New York produces a lot of criminality.
Murder Incorporated, Dutch Schultz, all that,
they weren't in the Feds, they were in the State.
Up the river, that's Sing Sing.
They only began to mass incarcerate Black people
after the war.
And really, when the civil rights struggle became.
Before that, they had a system which held them in place.
- [Narrator] Prisons in New York state are called
correctional facilities, but what they provide is custody.
Guards are called correction officers,
but their work is the routine of confinement.
They operate Attica's security machine,
and that doesn't leave much time for correctional work.
In any case, few of the officers have had much training
in these skills.
- [Elizabeth] Correctional officer doesn't have any skill.
All he does is sit and watch people and beat 'em up.
Watch 'em when they walk, watch 'em here, watch 'em there.
It's like a being a teacher without teaching.
- [Narrator] correctional officers, the commission found,
have in the main chosen this work for job security,
not because they want to rehabilitate criminals.
- [Elizabeth] Attica was this terrible place.
It was run by this hideous warden, Vincent Mancusi.
It was upstate New York. All white rednecks.
It was totally segregated.
- [Narrator] Most officers first come to know Blacks
as convicted criminals, not social equals,
and racism affects some officers' judgment.
- They tell you when to get up in the morning,
when to go to chow, when to go to sleep at night,
when to go to movies, when the go to the yard,
when to come back from the yard.
Do you know the frustration I'm going through
and I'm a good inmate?
Just being incarcerated.
Incarceration is hell, I don't care what anybody says.
Can you imagine you not being able
to just express an opinion?
You know the first thing they'll say is,
"I don't wanna hear it.
When you got an opinion, I don't wanna hear it."
Huh? I'm a man.
I committed a crime, but I'm a man.
And I'll be a man when I leave Attica.
- People were paid 56 cents a day.
You get a roll of toilet paper a month.
And you know, you had to work in the metal shop
at 108 degrees,
and they'd only let you have a shower every two weeks.
I mean, the food was terrible.
- [McKay] Commission found prison food to be unappetizing
and not up to nutritional standards,
even though the basic ingredients were of good quality.
- The healthcare, the doctors,
Williams and Sternberg, were Nazis, Nazis.
I mean, I could go on.
- [Narrator] In October, 1970, inmates at Auburn prison
were told they couldn't hold a Black Solidarity Day meeting.
They held it anyway.
Believing reprisals were to be taken against them,
they made guards hostages.
They released the hostages after they got a promise
of no reprisals.
Despite the promise, several of the alleged leaders
of the protest were shipped to solitary at Attica.
- [Elizabeth] And had the shit kicked out of them.
That was the point.
They were promised no physical reprisals
and then they beat the hell out of 'em.
- [Narrator] When released by a court order,
they told Attica inmates a story of betrayal.
- In the spring of '71, they sent a manifesto,
saying we really need changes here.
And they took it from George Jackson and Folsom.
These were all people out of the city,
and they were revolutionary, they were radicals,
many of them, and they knew everybody was angry
because not two weeks before they had put on
a prison-wide protest, when George Jackson was murdered.
And they came into the mess hall,
and no one took any food and no one ate.
And mass action by convicts, ooh, makes people very nervous,
very upset, so they were gettin' scared.
- [Narrator] Inmate Lanny Boone was there.
- By noon, everybody knew what was going on.
- What was the reaction of the correction officers
to this kind of an organized demonstration?
- Then were uptight, to say the least.
- It got away from them because of Russell Oswald.
- [Narrator] Russell Oswald told the commission
he took over the prison system
at a time of mounting tension.
- Who was head of the department of correctional services,
and he was a liberal.
And he was a real white boy liberal.
And he was trying to be diplomatic.
He had known that there was trouble at Attica,
and he was supposed to come and visit it.
And he came, and he got waylaid by his wife being sick.
And he left a tape.
- [Russell] Many of you have voiced confidence in me,
and in the directions I have talked about,
and I appreciate this.
I'm certain you realize
that change can't be accomplished overnight.
- And this was on the seventh.
And, everybody had to listen to Osward telling them
that he was a good guy and that he was gonna do this.
"I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna,"
and it made everybody even more angry.
On September 8th, everybody was gearing up for football.
These two guys were on the A block team,
Ray Lamorie and Leroy Dewer, they were white and Black.
And they began to practice, sparring,
and the guards went nuts.
And they broke it up and they thought it was a whole thing,
and everybody got uptight.
You know, the guards had to pull back.
And that was a big thing.
That night they came and took Ray and Leroy up to the box.
And everybody on the company went nuts.
This guy, William Ortiz, threw a soup can
and hit Curtiss, who was the lieutenant,
right on the forehead.
- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
- [Elizabeth] Very bad.
- [Narrator] The day's events left officers uneasy
about what might happen the next day.
- For some time, we've all been concerned about this trouble
that was brewing in the prison.
You could feel it in the air.
- So the next morning they keep locked him,
which is they closed his cell door
and they weren't gonna let him out.
But as they were going out to breakfast,
somebody flipped the switch, and Toriano went out too.
So already, we're into revolution here.
There was a confrontation right at the A yard entrance,
which is halfway in that long corridor
between them and Curtiss.
And they took over, and they grabbed Curtiss.
And, they all converge on Times Square.
There was the central area, which is square,
called Times Square, and that controlled all the prisons.
And if you got in and out of that,
you had control over everything.
And, one of the gates broke.
- [Narrator] Shortly thereafter, about 25 inmates
from this group rushed the Times Square gate
they had just come through.
They shook it and shoved at it.
Officers behind the gate had no reason to expect
that it wouldn't hold.
- [Elizabeth] Unbeknownst to everybody, the gate,
the A gate is defective.
It's very old and there's 45 people pushing
and screaming, with sticks and rage.
- [Narrator] A faulty bolt snapped,
and inmates poured through, attacking the officers.
- [Elizabeth] And they beat the three cops.
They give Quinn a big-time concussion, which kills him.
They fracture his skull, was actually what they do.
And, a lotta people hit him.
Lotta different people.
- [Officer] A guard named Melvin or Melville
was on this post
when the incident first started.
Arm is pointing to a hand print on the wall,
imprinted in blood.
We can see
patches of blood on the floor.
- No one, inmate, correction officer, or prison official,
could've known that one of the Times Square gates
was held by a weakened bolt.
Many years earlier, two pieces of steel
were badly welded together, and the weld covered with paint.
Had the gate held, it is possible that the uprising
would have been contained.
- Did you have any understanding as to whether
there was a policy as to what to do in those circumstances?
- There had been a riot plan of sorts,
which all supervisory officers
were to familiarize themselves with.
But it pertained largely to a single area,
an isolated area where a disturbance might occur.
It didn't provide for a institution-wide problem.
- [Questioner] Was that plan ever communicated
to the officers?
- I don't know. Not to my knowledge.
- [Narrator] When the inmates broke into the metal shop,
they took the guards and civilians working there hostage,
and ordered them to strip.
- [Elizabeth] There were civilians throughout the prison,
who are not correction officers.
- [Narrator] This is the area from which
a large group of hostages was taken.
- [Elizabeth] They were account,
the supervisors and the fore people in the metal shop,
the people who knew how to do metal work,
welders and stuff.
- [Narrator] Word was passed for the inmates
to take their captives to D yard.
- Then, once everybody got in the yard,
then the politics took over.
Attica was a riot, it began as a riot
and it immediately turned into a rebellion.
It was a political time.
People were political, everywhere.
There were political movements within the prison.
People couldn't stand the conditions.
- Although the Commission recognizes
that many inmate grievances were justified,
the Commission condemns the taking of hostages
as a means of obtaining redress.
But unless the dehumanizing quality of inmate life
is eliminated by meaningful reform,
inmate frustrations are bound to find their outlet
in future prison riots.
- Shortly before 9:00 a.m. this morning,
the time set aside for visitors to the prison,
a violent disturbance broke out
in four of the five cell blocks.
Prisoners took over, over a thousand prisoners took over,
we'll do it again.
Well damage to prison buildings
will no doubt be repaired in time.
As far as restoring order to this facility,
that's another story.
- [Elizabeth] Now in the laundry,
we have Frank "Large Brown" Smith.
- And Big Black is not a political person.
He's a hustler.
He's charismatic, he's terrific in many ways,
but he is, you know, he's a hustler.
He was huge, a big guy.
And by the time he was eight, he was in trouble.
He never really went to school.
He never really learned grammar
or how to write or any of that.
He just didn't have any, you know,
'cause he was out on the street hustling.
When he was 12 years old he got busted,
and he gets outta that one.
They bust them again and they give them a choice about
whether he wants to go to prison or go into the Army.
So, he enlists into the Army and he becomes an MP.
Then they ship him to Korea.
And he doesn't see any reason why he's here at all.
And all these people are shooting at him.
Right. You know?
And he didn't like it at all.
So, he came back, he sold reefer, mostly.
He was a junkie from the Army, of course.
And then he was hustling,
and he got involved in this crap game with some others,
and some shit went down and
they called the cops.
They got busted, and he refused to rat on his co-defendant,
and he got 15 years.
And, he's one of the leading hustlers in the jail.
He's got an institutional pass.
He does the laundry for the warden.
And he had this one guard, Tony Sangiacomo,
who was his outside bringing-er in.
Right. You know?
And the riot started, the laundry fell,
and he's about to walk to C block
and not get involved in this rebellion.
'Cause he don't want this shit.
And just as he was doing, someone ran over to him,
and said "Man Tony's busted, they got Tony,"
his main guy, Sangiacomo.
So he turns around and goes into the yard.
And Tony's got his arm broken, and he's a mess.
And Black goes over to Tony and says, "Man, don't worry,
I'll take care of it."
And he becomes the head of security,
to determine who's gonna get out, who's not gonna get out,
and everything else like that.
The next morning he gets Tony out. Okay?
'Cause he's got a broken arm.
And then he starts to listen to the whole thing,
and he gets turned on by it.
- [Narrator] As head of security, Big Black formed a circle
of disciplined Muslim inmates to protect the hostages
from the constant threat of inmate reprisal.
He immediately arranged for the release of injured hostages
so they could receive medical care.
- [Narrator] One of the first actions of the inmates
in D yard was to release seriously injured hostages.
At the same time the inmates asked for
and got medical supplies and the doctor
for their own casualties.
- [Elizabeth] You know, it's a violent place, prison.
They did a very good job, as best they could,
to keep it contained.
The Muslims did that incredible thing
of guarding the hostages.
- [Narrator] By this time they were under protection
of a Muslim security guard,
protection that would remain firm for four days.
- [Reporter] Have you been treated all right?
- Yes, I have so far, I've been treated very good.
- There was no brutality, no beating on us
or anything like this.
There were threats yelled at us from outside the perimeter.
But the security people that were
in charge of keeping us safe, did a real good job
as far as protecting us.
- [Officer] In the center of our picture,
is men distributing baseball bats to the other prisoners.
Time is 2:18 p.m.
- Everybody was thinking politically
because the head of the Muslims
was the murderer of Malcolm X.
He was the chief Iman at Attica prison.
His name is Thomas Hagan, Thomas X. Hagan.
And he's the murderer of Malcolm X.
That's what he did, he murdered him.
And Thomas, they understood that they couldn't use Thomas.
So, you know, that even though he was
the head of the Muslims, and dealing with everything,
they couldn't put him forward.
So they selected a young brother named Richard X. Clark,
and he became that person.
And the leaders stood up, the older people.
Black was older than everybody.
Roger Champen was older than everybody.
Herbert Blyden was, and everybody was political,
and they wanted to make a point.
- [Reporter] As far as the prisoners are concerned,
do they have weapons and such
that they're holding hostages with?
- Our information is that none of the prisoners are armed.
However, they are holding hostages,
I think just by weight of their sheer strength.
But as far as we're concerned at this point,
they are not armed.
- [Narrator] Troopers took firing and observation positions
on cellblock roofs.
One of them was assigned a small television camera,
and he recorded what he saw on videotape.
- [Officer] Time is 1:55 p.m.
We're on the roof of C block,
looking at a detail of .270 marksman,
with instructions to clear the catwalks upon command.
- [Narrator] By Friday morning,
the police thought they had enough men to take the prison.
They chafed at the delay caused by
Oswald's determination to negotiate,
and they watched inmates build defenses and weapons.
- [Officer] More activity in the central area.
Apparently for further barricades and such.
- Sergeant Cunningham, now, would you give us a message
for Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
- I certainly would.
One of the recommendations is, and if he says no, I'm dead.
- The thing about Rockefeller
is that he knew how to delegate.
And he had delegated Oswald.
And Oswald was trying to be a liberal,
and hear what people had to say.
Mancusi, who was the warden,
would have sent in and killed everybody.
If it had been at Coxsackie or somewhere, but Attica's far.
So, by the time they got there,
Oswald had made the decision to negotiate,
and hadn't called the troopers in.
And once negotiations, then the brothers took over
because they already had their negotiating,
they had this, they at that, and they had 39 hostages.
But meanwhile, he would go and say one thing to them
and then say another thing to the press, and they had TVs.
So they saw and they knew.
- [Narrator] Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald
was escorted to a negotiating table in D yard
where he agreed to an extensive list of demands
for both immediate and systemic relief.
- I earlier promised you there would be no reprisals.
- [Narrator] The main sticking point
was a demand for amnesty by the men in the yard,
who were afraid all 1,200 of them would be charged
for the beating death of officer William Quinn.
Commissioner Oswald did not believe he had the authority
to grant the amnesty.
Plus, he had demands of his own.
- When will you release the hostages?
- He expected them to be grateful to him, and they weren't.
Hmm-mm.
So he did this thing, and he let negotiators in.
- We urgently demand immediate negotiations
through William M. Kunstler, attorney at law,
588 ninth avenue, New York, New York.
- [Officer] Presently entering is Bobby Seale.
On the extreme right, as they walk towards us, our right,
is Professor Schwartz, Arnold Kunstler,
Bobby Seale in the black coat, and two of Seale's entourage
on the extreme right.
- [Narrator] By late Friday, 33 observers had arrived.
One was Tom Wicker of the New York Times.
- We had continuing discussions from the beginning
as to precisely what we should do,
what role we should be playing, were we to view ourselves
as representatives of the prisoners?
Were we view ourselves as representatives of the state?
Were we purely neutral go-betweens?
Were we in fact negotiators?
Events soon settled that. We had to be, more or less.
- And then when the negotiators came,
you had all those flamboyancy.
And you had flamboyancy number 101, right?
And he was Mr. Press.
He understood how to deal with the press
better than anybody I ever saw.
- You gotta negotiate for an amnesty.
But that means you have to sit down and have to work out
a real amnesty.
- He was a German Jew.
His father was a doctor, his grandfather was a doctor.
Everybody were doctors.
He went to Yale, came in second. He was second in his class.
Then he went into the Army and he was a major.
And he was in the Army of occupation in Japan.
He went back to Columbia Law School
and he was in the same class
of all these famous people together.
And became an estates lawyer.
And he was a liberal. He was a member of the NAACP.
And it was like '58,
and he was going to Jackson, Mississippi.
And he became a civil rights lawyer.
And mostly became Martin Luther King's lawyer.
So, you had Bill Kunstler and Herman Badillo
and all these people, and it became a scene.
- [Reporter] Why did the inmates ask for you people?
Why are they asking for the Huey Newtons, Herman Badillos,
Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker.
Why are they doing that?
- They want to be just, they want to be assured
that if there is an agreement
that the agreement will be kept.
They want to be assured that there is some mechanism
for enforcing whatever changes exist in the regulations.
And I think it's a wise idea.
- Power, unity!
- [Narrator] There were close to 1,300 men in D yard.
More than half of those interviewed told the Commission
they had not wanted to be there, but couldn't leave.
Inmates made rules against using drugs,
fighting, and homosexual relations.
Some of them built defenses or looked for food and fuel,
but a large number, probably the majority,
hung back and did nothing.
Most of them lined up twice a day for mess call.
- [Reporter] How do the inmates feel
about the current situation?
- A group of us were in with the inmates,
we met with them, we had 2 1/2 hours.
Some of the people are here.
But we really have nothing to say about it,
except they are firm in their demands, and that's it.
- It was Bill's finest hour, Kunstler, in some ways,
and one of his stupidest.
No one told the Attica Brothers
that they were gonna be murdered.
They didn't tell them that there were all these
crazy white people outside, filled with race hate,
and all of them are gonna be armed to the teeth.
And there's no question that they're gonna
blow you people away.
- [Officer] Time is 8:10, September 10th.
- [Narrator] As negotiations stalled,
Governor Rockefeller decided to rely on the exhausted
and increasingly agitated state troopers,
who'd been taking shifts waiting outside the prison walls
for three days.
- [Elizabeth] It was cold up there.
They could've worked something out.
They didn't have to murder people that way,
but they wanted to.
They wanted people to see what happens when you rebel.
You know, that they were prepared to kill you,
and not only kill you, but kill anybody.
All those white people, they were fodder.
- [Narrator] You said earlier that you think
the warden would have done that (snaps) day one.
- Yeah, they did too.
- [Narrator] Do you think Rockefeller
would have done that day one if he would've had the choice?
- The Rockefeller thing, he was just horrified
that these people thought they had any right to oppose him.
And that's one of the main reasons why he killed them all,
just like his father did, in Ludlow.
(somber haunting music)
I mean, who were you?
You're scum. I'll show you.
I have all the power.
The cities had blown up.
And they wanted to show everybody what happened.
"You think we're not gonna blow you away?"
I mean, Black didn't think they were gonna shoot.
He thought that they were gonna come down
and bust some heads and fuck everybody up,
and that would be it.
And that is what the National Guard wanted to do.
That's exactly what they wanted to do.
They wanted to come out of a helicopter,
come into the middle of the yard, have them gas everybody,
and take over the yard.
They thought that they could do whatever,
and they weren't allowed to.
- [Officer] These are some reinforcements coming in now.
- [Elizabeth] Here you have a captain in the state police
who runs a barracks in Batavia, New York.
The only thing they do up there is run up and down
the highway and arrest people for driving.
- [Narrator] A principle task of the state police
is highway patrol.
They are not ordinarily assigned to military operations.
- All right, go right around to the supply truck
and pick up the shotguns and rifles.
- [Man] On the double, let's go.
- [Elizabeth] I mean, they understood what the climate was.
- It's a situation in which lives are at stake.
And my own personal opinion is that if lives are at stake
and have any meaning to anybody, that there oughta be
a serious reconsideration by the state.
If the state takes the position
that the guards' lives are expendable,
then the state is going to cause the murder of many people.
- [Elizabeth] Anybody would know what was gonna happen.
Those people were crazed.
All they did was sit around the prison.
They had nothing to do.
There was no discipline, and they were all lied to.
- There has been some of the prison personnel
severely injured here this morning.
And we certainly don't wanna see any of our people hurt.
- [Elizabeth] So there it is, right there.
Everything he said was a lie.
They knew full well that there was no one injured,
and that they were lying.
The meet force, they knew no one had a gun.
- Your instructions are
that your weapon is not to be taken
nor are you to be taken.
- [Elizabeth] They chose the state police,
even though the National Guard knew what they were doing,
and the state police had no clue.
- [Officer] The hostages are on catwalks
with knives at their throat.
- [Officer] Time is 9:45 a.m.
(gunshots popping)
- [Elizabeth] This was a wholesale murder.
Attica took it to a different level.
(helicopters buzzing)
The head of the state police was on vacation
in Bolton's Landing, New York.
So there was absolutely no reason for him to be there
other than to keep himself away from this shit.
He wasn't in Europe, he was in Bolton's Landing.
(helicopter whirring)
They all had gas masks, and there was no way to communicate
through the gas masks.
There's this incredible testimony from the second in command
of the state police.
This guy was a moron, and he comes out onto the catwalks
and they're shooting,
and there's no reason for anybody to shoot anybody.
And he's running up and down trying to get people
to stop shooting, but there's no way to communicate
because no one could talk to each other
'cause they have gas masks on.
- [Officer] The hostages can't be seen now.
- [Elizabeth] I mean, they did everything wrong.
(gunshots popping) (deep somber music)
They were all in a hostage circle in the middle,
and someone began to run during the assault,
and they all turned and fired at him with their shotguns,
filled with double-aught buckshot,
with an indiscriminate spread of 50 yards.
And that's why they killed all the hostages.
They didn't register any firearms.
They told everybody to put tape over their name tags
so you couldn't tell who was shooting.
They told people to fight back.
And they told blah, blah, blah.
What they wanted was what they got.
I mean, the best thing you could call it
is depraved indifference for human life,
but it was more than that.
4,500 rounds of ammunition.
Can you imagine? Nobody had a gun.
(gunshots blasting)
None of them had guns.
That's lot of people, 39 people.
- [Elizabeth] No one ever saw anybody resist.
Nobody resisted. One person, Tommy Hicks.
They beat him to a pulp and killed him, right there.
Gregory Wildridge fired 10 rounds of his shotgun.
And when he was asked why he fired those shots,
he gives some absolute lying justification
for the first four.
And the remaining six,
his reason for firing them was quote, verbatim, quote
"To keep up the noise."
(helicopter fluttering) (slow somber music)
- [Elizabeth] Aldo Barbolini was a state trooper,
and he killed Kenny Malloy in cold blood with a pistol,
with a handgun.
You look at the pictures, they speak for themselves.
He blew his face apart.
And what he did was witnessed by Gerard L. Smith,
who testified about it.
So Barbolini killed Kenny Malloy and he killed Robinson.
And he had a weapon that he had brought himself, a shotgun.
And he went back to his commander
and he handed him the shotgun.
He says, "I took this off an inmate."
They knew that he was a goddamn liar,
and that the weapon, it did not come from an inmate.
He had brought it himself,
and that he had murdered these two people in cold blood.
And did they arrest him for murder? No.
What did they do? They let him retire.
So, that's Aldo Barbolini.
Clore and Virgamini, they were sent in by the warden
of Auburn Correctional Facility,
Robert J. Henderson, a swell guy.
They killed D'Archangelo.
They killed Monteleone,
who were the two guys who were killed on the catwalks.
- [Man Over Speaker] Surrender peacefully.
You will not be harmed.
(helicopter fluttering)
- [Elizabeth] Santiago Santos clearly,
was following the instructions
that were given from the helicopter.
He had his hands over his head like this,
and he was walking to the nearest trooper.
And what happened?
He got murdered. He got shot and killed.
And so when he fell, he fell with his hands over his head.
Now, that didn't look good to them.
Before rigor sets in clearly,
so that's like two, three hours before rigor comes in,
they move his hand and they put a scissor.
So you think like, he's reaching for a scissor. Great.
- [Man Over Speaker] Surrender peacefully.
You will not be harmed.
- [Elizabeth] And then, there's Kenny Robinson,
who's shot without a weapon.
There's nothing near him.
He was clearly sitting on this big old seat,
and they shot him and it fell,
he fell, it fell over him.
And the next thing you know, he's got a big sword.
- [Man Over Speaker] You will not be harmed.
Clasp your hands on top of your head
and move to the outside of the D block corridor.
- The action now under way,
was initiated with extreme reluctance,
only after all attempts to achieve
a peaceful solution failed.
To delay the action any longer
would not only jeopardize innocent lives,
but would threatened the security
of the entire correctional system of this state.
(slow somber music)
- [Narrator] The assault on Attica lasted six minutes
and took the lives of 39 inmates and hostages.
- [Elizabeth] This is all only for the hostages.
They had an ambulance for every hostage,
and they had nothing, nothing for the prisoners.
Dr. Michael M. Baden, chief pathologist
of the New York State Police, who conducted the autopsies,
come in and testified that if there had been
proper medical care at least eight people could have lived.
I think it's 10, including, but not limited to Sam Melville.
He was shot by Vincent Tobia, who was a member
of the bureau of criminal investigation
in the New York State Police,
in the same place that L.D. Barkley was shot.
Collapsed his lung and he bled to death.
- We are men.
We are not beasts, and we do not intend to be driven
or beaten as such.
- [Elizabeth] He was 19, and he was in Attica
for a probation violation for joyriding.
- If they had only waited till today,
there would be now 40 or 41 people still alive
in this universe of ours.
They would not wait because these men were expendable.
Guards, prisoners had no meaning in the scheme of things
of our white totalitarian world.
- [Reporter] How did they kill the hostages--
- [Man] Let him finish.
- Well, several had their throat slashed.
I don't have all the details on it.
I understand one had a chest wound that he died from.
And, I don't have all of those details.
- When you read the front page of the New York Times,
it's a scream, it is.
I mean, they have 'em fighting hand by hand in the blocks,
for four hours.
(Elizabeth sighs)
- [Narrator] The press accepted Houlihan's report
of slashed throats, but the next day
County Medical Examiner John Edland announced the truth.
- The first eight autopsies were on the cases
identified to us as hostages.
All eight cases died of gunshot wounds.
- He was this conservative Republican, and he was a doctor.
So, they brought all these bodies to him,
and he says, "Oh these were all shot,"
right, nobody's, what're you talking about?"
- There was no evidence of slashed throats.
There was one single cut in the back of one of the necks.
- And, they totally attacked him
and destroyed him, actually.
They totally tortured him.
Wouldn't let him drive the car.
They were pulling him over, the whole nine yards.
- When the autopsy record was complete,
it became known that all the dead hostages
were killed or fatally wounded by shots fired
by the assault forces.
No hostage was castrated or sexually molested.
There were no safeguards to minimize the risk of injury
to hostages and to un-involved and unresisting inmates.
While the warnings against indiscriminate fire were issued,
the plan allowed individual troopers
to use their own discretion about firing their weapons.
Many troopers carried shotguns with ammunition
that scattered lethal pellets
in such a way that unintended targets
would almost certainly be hit when troopers fired
into the crowded, confined space of D yard.
(slow haunting music)
- [Woman] I have Governor Rockefeller for you, sir.
- Hello? - There you are.
- [Rockefeller] Mr. President.
for the courage you showed and the judgment
in not granting amnesty.
It was right, and I don't care what the hell the papers
or anybody else says.
I don't care what they say,
I think that you had to do it that way,
because if you would've granted amnesty in this case,
it would have meant that you would've had prisons
in an uproar all over this country.
- [Rockefeller] That's right.
- [Nixon] And you did the right thing.
It's a tragedy that these poor fellas were shot,
but I just want you to know that's my view.
And I've told the troops around here
they're to back that right to the hilt.
- [Rockefeller] Well, aren't you great, Mr. President.
I only called you because I wanted to alert you
that we were going in.
- Right. - And when we went in,
we couldn't tell whether all 39 hostages would be killed
and maybe two or 300 prisoners.
And that's a pretty big, you know.
- [Nixon] Yeah, mm-hmm.
- [Nixon] How many, I only got the report this morning.
What is the latest report?
How many people--
- [Rockefeller] Seven hostages were killed.
- [Nixon] Seven hostages were killed?
- [Rockefeller] Yes, these were the guards.
- [Nixon] Those were guards, seven.
- [Rockefeller] It appears now, Mr. President,
as though quite a few of those were killed prior to this.
In other words, that they'd been dead.
- [Rockefeller] The hospital.
- [Nixon] The hospital can prove that.
- [Rockefeller] Oh yes.
- [Nixon] They can find out how long a guy's dead.
- [Rockefeller] That's right and it's a Catholic hospital,
so it's outside of our jurisdiction.
- [Nixon] Right, tell me this, is this a,
are these primarily Blacks that you're dealing with?
- [Rockefeller] Oh yes, the whole thing
was led by the Blacks.
- [Nixon] I'll be darned.
Are all the prisoners that were killed Blacks?
Are there any whites?
- [Rockefeller] I haven't got that report,
but I have to, I would say just offhand, yes.
- [Nixon] Yeah.
- [Rockefeller] We did it though
only when they were in the process of murdering the guards,
or when they were attacking our people
as they came in to get the guards.
- [Nixon] You had to do it.
- [Rockefeller] And otherwise we recaptured
all the cell blocks and so forth without shooting a shot,
and no troopers were wounded.
One of them, well, one of them was in the leg.
- [Nixon] Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Only one trooper was wounded, good.
Good, good, good. - That's right.
It really was a beautiful operation.
- [Nixon] Well they must've really been,
I would, I, you, you, you can certainly
tell your people there, whoever they are,
your other troopers, that I have great admiration for that.
That's an efficient operation.
- [Rockefeller] Well that's wonderful of you to say.
- [Nixon] Well, we back 'em up.
Now, by golly, we're not gonna have any of that.
We just can not tolerate this kind of anarchy.
- [Narrator] As soon as the shooting stopped,
every surviving inmate was forced to crawl across
the muddy ground into the middle of the yard.
They were stripped naked and funneled one by one
into the cell blocks, where they were beaten
by a gauntlet of state police troopers and prison guards.
Big Black was described as a leader of the rebellion,
despite his role protecting the hostages.
He was singled out and tortured for hours,
receiving injuries that would haunt him
for the rest of his life.
- [Narrator] For the surviving hostages,
the ordeal was over.
For the inmates, another ordeal was beginning.
The assault reduced the D yard world to wreckage,
and inmates had lost any ground they gained
at the negotiation table.
Whether they took part in the insurrection or not,
the inmates faced correction officers and state troopers,
many of them anxious for revenge.
Medics were among the first outsiders
to reach the wrecked yard.
Major John Cudmore and his men watched what happened
to inmates after the shooting stopped.
- They were in a position of having surrendered,
hands-on-head, were coming down and were very forcefully
being forced down the steps.
Were forced to lie down and low crawl across there.
Apparently the method employed to get them to lie down
was to hit them with a club across the knees,
or in several instances, not too disguised attempts
to hit them in the genitalia was made.
- You had those personnel there
from the heartlands of America with a very difficult job,
with inadequate training,
and in the light of what happened in there,
their knowing that their brother employees were in there,
and their lives have been threatened continuously,
they knew some of 'em were injured.
Of course, it's human and understandable
that they were under grave stress and anxious,
and had strong feelings about it, sir.
This is only reality.
- As an administrator in this field,
had there been a history after these prison disturbances
of officers losing self-control
and taking it out on inmates?
- This is a concern, a common concern and problem.
- Although officials were aware that high emotions
among troopers and correction officers
might result in unnecessary violence to the inmates
during and after the assault,
no one took responsibility to prevent reprisals.
Almost half of the inmates from D yard suffered bruises,
lacerations, or broken bones, as a result of such reprisals.
- I would say that
we felt that Mr. Mancusi and Mr. Vincent would handle this.
We had given orders, we presumed it would be carried out.
- And he lied. He lied to these people.
They asked him the question,
did he know about the gauntlet
and the beatings and whatever?
And he says, no, he didn't go into the yard.
That's a lie.
He went into the yard about 10, 10:30. He saw it all.
And he was forced to tell the truth in the trial
around the killing of Hubert Jones, one of the cops.
And he had lied to McKay.
He had lied to, on his deposition,
he had lied in the grand jury.
I mean, in our case, we brought that up.
He got held to trial and he died the day after.
(helicopter fluttering drowns out man speaking)
When I graduated from law school,
And, what else could you do?
But ABLD was it.
The Attica Brothers Legal Defense,
which was the mass defense office convened
to defend the 63 people who were accused of crime
as a result of the Attica prison rebellion.
I had told them that I would give two weeks of my time.
Now, I was full of shit, and I knew I was full of shit,
because I borrowed my mother's car
and put the dog in the car.
So, you know, but I had to give myself an out.
I got up there on July 4th, and on July 5th
I walked into the office at about nine o'clock
in the morning, and I was commandeered
by Frank "Big Black" Smith, who interviewed me for an hour,
and then by Dennis Cunningham,
and I fell in love with both of them.
I mean, they were amazing, both of them.
They were really into the fight.
And so that was it.
I never left.
The same people who killed everybody, the state police,
they were the primary investigators
from the time of the rebellion and when it was over on
September 13th, until February of 1972,
they controlled all the evidence, they controlled everybody,
and they destroyed everything.
They returned 38 indictments
against
61 prisoners,
charging them with
1,485 felony counts.
The state troopers and the guards who killed 39 people,
they were never prosecuted.
In March of 1974,
they convened a second grand jury
because they decided, four years later,
that everybody on the first grand jury
had ties to Attica prison, and therefore couldn't be fair
in evaluating anything.
Of course, we had raised this as an issue,
on November 1st, 1971.
And we were thrown out of court.
My colleagues, my comrades, Michael Deutsch,
and Dennis Cunningham.
The major employer of Wyoming County is Attica prison.
There are only white people in Wyoming County,
even though they're listed as one of the largest
third world populations in upstate New York.
Because there are 1800 Black people there.
That they're all incarcerated
and have no right of franchise, we won't speak on.
- [Court Reporter] Raise your right hand, please.
Do you solemnly swear that the testimony
you're about to give will be the truth, the whole truth,
nothing but the truth, so help you God?
- I do.
- [Narrator] In 1974, Attica Brothers Legal Defense
filed a $2.8 billion civil suit
against the state of New York for damages,
on behalf of 1,281 inmates.
After years of delay by the appointed judge,
pretrial discovery depositions got underway in 1991.
These tapes are from that deposition.
They've never been available to the public.
- George Alexander Shorts, Jr.
- Yes.
- In Attica's prison.
- I was hit.
- I was kicked in the side, the back, and the buttocks.
- My head was into the dirt.
- I was kicked in the side, I was kicked in the hip,
kicked in the back.
- [Interviewer] Any inmates being kicked in A yard?
- I don't recall that.
- I was hit in the testicles.
- A shotgun.
- I couldn't really say.
I knew I was hit.
I was hit, what, you know, when you're hit like that
you're not trying to count.
You're scared to death.
I wetted on myself.
I was hit in the head, the back, my arms, trying to block.
And the lip.
- Face, yes.
- Yes, I did.
- No. They had taken them and stomped on 'em.
- Then my glasses was taken off me, stomped.
You were forced under gunpoint
to crawl the length of the yard on your knees and elbows.
I was told to take off all of my clothes.
And I was hit, and told to "Run, nigger."
- And he put the gun to my head, cocked the gun,
and said, "Nigger, I'm gonna kill you."
And that's when I started pleading for my life.
- There was a correction, two correction officers was there,
telling me the same thing, "Run, nigger, run."
And that's exactly what I did.
- And I was told, "When I hit this door with this stick,
nigger, you better start moving."
And when he hit the door, I started moving.
- [Interviewer] Did you hear what kind of language
was being uttered in that yard?
- Emphatic language, "Get over there, get down, move along,"
that sort of thing.
- [Interviewer] Did it have after it words such as "nigger?"
When he said, "Get down there."
- No, I didn't hear that. - Move along.
- If I did I'd report it to you.
- [Elizabeth] And then the gauntlet, 50 correction officers
and sheriff's deputies, they lined the corridors
with their sticks and clubs and two-by-fours
and rifle butts, and plenty of broken glass.
And they had all these naked people, and one-by-one,
they made them run through it
while they got beaten with clubs
all the way up the stairs into the cell.
(slow eerie music)
- [Former Inmate] They were kicking, and saying,
"Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving," kicking,
"keep moving."
- Bobby Seales is not here now.
Where's your Black power?
- Well, as I was being put in the cell,
I was hit in the back of the head with a billy club
and thrown in the cell on the floor.
- Whoever beat me, they came in the cell,
told me to put my hands against the back of the wall,
and with their rifles, broke my toes.
- Broke my toes.
He said, "Nigger, you don't wanna run across our glass,"
and that's when he broke my toes.
"You'll run it next time."
- The same thing that I went through downstairs,
I had to go through upstairs.
Every time they came out and take a count,
I had to have my head on the bars.
- Yes they did, for that eight hours.
- He called me nigger.
"Nigger, put your head on these bars and you keep your head
on these bars, nigger, when I come through."
And I was hit on the head.
- No, he didn't.
- I was working in the hospital that afternoon
and I was assigned to get four men to form a litter team
and to walk through the hallway from the hospital
to the BHZ or reception center.
And as I walked in, I got the door a quarter of a way
or halfway open, and I saw correction officers,
five, six, or seven, I wasn't exact,
bending over, beating on somebody that was on the floor.
And they told me to shut the door
that I wasn't allowed into that room.
- And again, while I was in the cell,
they were having standing counts.
They would come around every 10 or 15 minutes
and say, "Count."
And it got to be the point
where I couldn't stand up anymore, I was just too tired.
So I told 'em, I said, "Look, I'm alive,
but I can't stand up."
The guy told me, "Well nigger, if you don't stand up,
get on your knees and pray."
I said, "I'm not gonna do that either."
So, I think it was two correctional officers,
they came back with a,
I think he was a state trooper with a very large gun.
It looked like a .357 Magnum, stuck in my cell,
and told me to get on my knees, nigger, and pray.
"You gonna die, right now."
So he pulled the trigger, but there was nothing in the gun.
Just a loud noise.
And, I regurgitated for about 15 or 20 minutes,
and they thought it was quite funny.
Then after I did that, then I start crying quite badly.
Not because I was scared, I was just angry.
I said to myself, "If I just get my hands on one of 'em."
Like I say, it's hard for me
to go over some of these details.
- They made me take my clothes off, hit the ground.
And then they crawled the whole length of the yard,
over to A block door.
And just before I was going to,
I was in line waiting to go through A block door,
a correctional officer picked me out and put me on the side
of A block corridor, on the outside.
And he laid me down on the ground
and put a shotgun shell on my knee.
And he told me if that fell, I was dead.
And I laid there for what seemed like hours.
The officers that were up on the catwalk above me
were throwing cigarettes down on my stomach.
The officer that was over by me
would pick them up and burn me with them,
kick me in my ribs.
As soon as I got to the top of the third floor,
I was kicked in the testicles,
and I went back down the stairs head over heels, one flight,
and then I was made to get up
and they beat me up the stairs again.
- My back, head, neck, arms, shoulders, legs, kidney area.
And I was urinating blood.
I was beaten and laid in the cell for 11 days
before I got any medical attention.
Stuck rifles inside the cell bars, pulled the trigger,
and told me I was dead.
- From September 13th, 1971, until November, 1972.
- Yeah. It's not a time to forget.
- Well, it's hard for me to recount
things that happened in A block.
It's hard for me to recount things that happened in A.
It's hard for me to recount things, I get very angry.
And this anger has caused me a lot of problems.
I have problems dealing with authority figures,
have problems dealing with policemen.
And when I do encounter it, I get quite angry,
because I can still see people that I knew
with their eyes blown out and their heads blown off.
- [Elizabeth] Michael Smith got shot four times,
and by 10 o'clock, or 10:30,
he was already in the operating room being operated on.
So by 10:30, they knew he had been shot.
He's the person who
Black was supposed to have emasculated
and shoved his testicles in his mouth.
And that was the excuse they used to torture Black.
And they told that story at 12:30, one o'clock
in the afternoon.
And then they torture him, and do all this shit to him.
And, there he is.
Big Black.
- I was made to crawl after I was knocked to the ground.
Pushing, kicking, calling me all kind of niggers,
telling me to walk, telling me to run.
Drug, dragged.
- They took me to...
(slow ominous music)
You wanna break? Take some water?
(deep ominous music)
- Took me and they made me lay on the table in the yard
and they beat me in my nuts.
Threatened me and dropped cigarette butts on me,
and hot shells on me and spit on me.
- [Attorney] Hold on, slow down.
- [Court Reporter] Hot what, I'm sorry.
- Shells. - Okay.
- Tell me they was gonna cut my testicles
and my genitals out.
(tense somber music)
(fists slam)
(tense somber music)
That's what was happening to me.
- Long time.
Three to six hours, all day.
- Under my chin, yes.
- Yes.
- Off and on I'd move and try and get 'em off me,
and the cigarettes off me.
A bunch of times being beat,
called a bunch of names 'cause my legs was dead,
they was numb, I couldn't walk.
They finally drug me, put me the hallway,
and I had to go through the same thing
everybody else was going through,
because I was about the last person out of the yard.
They made me run through the gauntlet.
Made me crawl through the gauntlet.
- It was in A corridor.
Somewhere in that afternoon.
- I've been struck a lot. That's all I was was struck.
As I got to the entrance to HBZ building, I was beat again.
This happened, my wristes--
- My wrists.
And my body, my legs was spread eagle on the floor,
and they're played with my genitals with gun butts
and nigger sticks that they was calling, pick handles.
And played Russian roulette with a shotgun at my eyes.
Made me open my eyes, made me look up in it.
A headache, my back was hurting, my legs was hurting me,
my arms was hurting me.
I was a mess. My mind was messed up.
I couldn't hold anything on my stomach.
I urinate blood for two years after Attica.
- Yeah, to the lawyers.
Nobody else would listen.
- [Narrator] In 2001, after 26 years of struggle,
the Attica Brothers were awarded $8 million
of the 2.8 billion they sought.
The money was divided among the survivors
according to the severity of their injuries,
most receiving a few thousand dollars.
Big Black went on to work with Liz Fink as a paralegal,
hounding her to pursue the civil case to expose the truth
of the retaking of D yard.
He was a substance abuse and suicide prevention counselor
who was known to take desperate clients
into the home he shared with his wife, Pearl.
At the end of his life, he was pushing for compensation
for the families of the guards
who were murdered on that day.
In recognition of his injuries,
Big Black received the largest individual payout,
for $125,000.
Fink was proud of their accomplishments,
but she did not consider the settlement justice.
She went on to represent hundreds of people
in the New York prison system
through the worst years of the Rockefeller drug laws.
- These were huge prisons, they still are.
They're still all, every one of them is still in existence
with thousands of people in them.
And these huge walls, right? Horrifying.
Green Haven, which is about 60 miles from New York City.
Comstock, which is on the Vermont New York border.
Dannemora, which we all know is up
right next to Canada.
Auburn, which is the second oldest prison in America.
Huge, in the middle of town.
This monster prison.
Wall, gun towers, the whole nine yards of it.
Same town as the Harriet Tubman house. (laughs)
And Sing Sing, which is right up on the Hudson.
And last, but certainly not least, Attica State Prison.
Attica was not the worst.
It was the next to the worst.
The worst is Dannemora State Prison in Clinton, New York.
And all you have to do is look at the stuff
that just happened as the perfect example
of how the prison system has not changed.
- [Reporter] Matt and Sweat escaped
from the Clinton Correctional Facility
in Dannemora, New York on June 6th.
- What does New York state do?
It blames the prisoners, beats the shit out of them,
waterboards people, and you have the governor
of the state of New York going and blaming the prisoners,
and saying he knows that the corrections people
had nothing to do with it.
And of course they are the ones
who had something to do with it.
And they, by definition, have to.
- [Reporter] The two men had inside help
facilitating their escape.
Joyce Tilly Mitchell, a supervisor
in the prison tailor department, arrested and charged
with helping them break free.
- The New York state prison system
is a race-based conspiracy.
Here you have all these prisoners, they can't vote.
And Clinton County counts them.
They get money from both the feds and the state
for having a minority population.
All the Black people who live in Plattsburgh,
they're all in that prison,
and they don't vote.
- I am strongly in favor of the death penalty.
I'm also in favor of bringing back police forces
that can do something instead of just turning their back.
Because every quality lawyer that represents people
that are in trouble, the first thing they do
is start shouting police brutality, et cetera.
The problem with our society is that the victim
has absolutely no rights
and the criminal has unbelievable rights,
unbelievable rights.
- All those people are my age, they're my generation.
And they decided that they had a big problem here
that they had to control.
And they were gonna make sure it wouldn't happen again.
And the first thing they sort of said,
a free press doesn't help things at all.
And if you let cameras in there to show everybody
what's happening, this is not progressive for you.
They lost any sense of ethics.
So they've created this situation
where you have the life that we all have here.
- [Instructor] The correct grip is obtained
by placing the leather thong over the right thumb
in this manner.
You say you'd like to see a practical demonstration?
- [Child] They hurt my mommy!
- [Instructor] Remember as police officers,
we may only use that amount of force necessary
to make an arrest.
And the amount of force must not be disproportionate
to the degree of resistance offered.
This technique is advocated when you are in close quarters
and the assailant has indicated he has the ability
to make a dangerous attack upon your person.
Your counter should be direct to the solar plexus area,
then quickly to the collar bone.
- Put your hands behind your back!
- And if he's still aggressive, then up under the chin.
That's it, solar plexus, collarbone, and up to the chin.
Next man.
(adventurous orchestral music)
That's the idea.
But to master this technique takes practice.
So gentlemen, let's begin.
- The jury in the Los Angeles police brutality trial
has just reached its verdicts.
The four police officers were found not guilty.
- Not guilty. - Not guilty on all counts.
(gunshots blasting)
(man screams)
- [Instructor] While accuracy is certainly essential,
delivering a shot first is paramount.
Tactical speed shooting teaches both.
An alternative method of firearms training,
speed shooting is gaining recognition
as the next logical step.
(gunshots popping)
- Shooters, ready.
- [Instructor] The program is also available
to state and local law enforcement officers,
with a basic training prerequisite.
- [Officer] That looks like a bad dude, too.
Could be on something.
(gunshots blasting)
(sirens blaring) (police radio chatter)
- Hey!
(gunshots popping) (Philando screaming)
- [Woman] Hey, you just killed my boyfriend.
(gunshots blasting)
- [Instructor] The overall program is organized
around the concept of domination.
- [Elijah] I can't breathe, can you stop?
- [Instructor] Dominate the opponent.
Dominate the situation, and dominate all visual areas.
These skills translate into a safer,
more controlled officer, who is less likely to overreact,
or worse, under-react to the situation.
- [Eric] Don't touch me.
(officers talking at once)
- All right, we've got him, he's down, he's down.
- [Officer] Let me see your hands, buddy.
- [Officer] Put your hands behind your back.
- [Eric] I can't breathe.
I can't breathe.
- [Officer] You aren't gonna breathe in my face.
Just get up.
(George groaning)
- [Officer] What do you want?
- I can't breathe.
- [Elizabeth] It is all about oppression.
- I can't breathe sir.
- And greed and racism.
(George groaning loudly)
(daunting strings music)
Okay, thank you.
- Thank you.