PROGRAM

Roosevelt House is pleased to welcome Heather Ann Thompson, the author of  Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, a new and definitive account of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice. Thompson, who has written on the history of mass incarceration as well as its current impact, for The New York Times, The Atlantic and elsewhere, will be in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the National Book Award-winning bestseller Between the World and Me.

On September 9, 1971, nearly 1300 inmates took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. They held guards and civilian employees hostage, and during the next four days and nights negotiated with officials for improved living conditions. On September 13, the state abruptly ended talks and sent hundreds of heavily armed state troopers and corrections officers to retake the prison by force. Thirty-nine hostages and prisoners were killed, and close to one hundred severely injured. In ensuing weeks, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners. For decades afterward, instead of charging any state employee who had committed murder or carried out egregious human rights abuses, New York officials only prosecuted the prisoners and failed to provide necessary support to the hostage survivors or the families of any of the men who’d been killed. Professor Thompson explores every aspect of the uprising and its legacy from the perspectives of all of those involved in this forty-five year fight for justice: the prisoners, the state officials, the lawyers on both sides, the state troopers and corrections officers, and the families of the slain men.

We hope you will watch the live stream of this important discussion about civil rights, prisoner rights, institutionalized violence by police against people of color, and the state of prisons in our nation.