Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies.

Tip of the Spear

Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

Orisanmi Burton

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Orisanmi Burton

Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-520-39631-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-39632-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-39633-3 (ebook)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE. THE LONG ATTICA REVOLT

1. Sharpening the Spear

Strategies and Tactics of Revolutionary Action

2. Black Solidarity Under Siege

Three Terrains of Protracted Rebellion

3. Attica Is

Revolutionary Consciousness and Abolitionist Worldmaking

PART TWO. PRISON PACIFICATION

4. Gender War

Sexual Revenge and White Masculine Repair

5. Hidden War

Four Strategies of Reformist Counterinsurgency

6. The War on Black Revolutionary Minds

Failed Experiments in Scientific Subjugation

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without support from a vast network of ancestors, elders, teachers, mentors, colleagues, and friends, nor without the raging fire fueled by our enemies.

Profound gratitude goes to Jalan Burton, whose love, encouragement, and sacrifice throughout the entirety of this process kept me going. And to my children—Z, M, and O—who teach me new things about life each day. Thank you to Aukram and Nefertiti Burton for setting me on my path and showing me how to use my Ori. Gratitude to my family, who laid the foundation for me to do this work.

Thank you to all the childcare providers who took care of my babies while I worked on this project.

This work was nurtured and enriched by a community of scholars and comrades: Charles R. Price, Dylan Rodriguez, Damien Sojoyner, Sarah Haley, Savannah Shange, Joy James, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Emani Davis, Jack Norton, Maya Berry, Manissa Maharawal, Zoltan Gluck, Sarah Ihmoud, Mubbashir Rizvi, Delio Vasquez, Willie J. Wright, Bianca Williams, Ryan Jobson, Ashanté M. Reese, Garrett Felber, Amaka Okechukwu, Stuart Schrader, Ilana Feldman, David Vine, David Kaib, Heath Pearson, Megan French, Michael Bolds, Toussaint Losier, Roberto D. Sirvent, Robin D. G. Kelley, Alvaro Reyes, and Dorothy Holland.

Thank you to the staff at the University of California Press, especially Kate Marshall, Chad Attenborough, Julie Van Pelt, and Catherine R. Osborne. Thank you to my colleagues in the Anthropology Department at American University and to my former colleagues in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of the District of Columbia.

This book would not exist if Kyung-Ji Rhee hadn’t hired me to work at the Prison Moratorium Project all those years ago. Thank you, and to Eddie Ellis, Chino Hardin, Divine Pryor, and the Center for NuLeadership on Human Justice and Healing.

Additional gratitude goes to Jared A. Ball, Patricia J. Williams, Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Dan Berger, Samar Al-Bulushi, Judah Schept, Matt Birkhold, Jared Ware, Monica Kim, Juli Grigsby, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Shanya Cordis, James Kilgore, Dána-Ain Davis, Shaun Lin, Karanja Keita Carroll, Kazembe Balagun, Micol Seigel, Christopher Harris, Amanda Huron, Matt Hooley, Susan B. Hyatt, Michael Hull, Amy Jordan, Kareem Rabie, Barbara Ransby, Leila Pourtavaf, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Powerful, Adam Bledsoe, Phillip B. Williams, Mariame Kaba, Victoria Law, Derecka Purnell, Che Gossett, Kiese Laymon, Chinua Thelwell, Harmony Holiday, Sara Kaplan, Charmaine Chua, Angélica Cházaro, Nicole Fabricant, Christina Hanhardt, Akinyele Umoja, Vincent Joos, Traci Curry, Chris Tinson, Carlos REC McBride, Catherine Besteman, Bertin Louis, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Liz Gaynes, Perry Zurn, Deborah Boehm, Darrick Hamilton, Kristin Doughty, Joshua Dubler, Ashon Crawley, Ericka Edwards, Jeremy Levinson, Shana Redmond, Ben Rubin, Elif Babul, Jasmine Syedullah, Amy Jordan, Michelle Bigenho, Kara Lynch, Stevie Wilson, Corey Green, Richard Jackson, Justin Hosbey, Peter Redfield, Karla Slocum, Connie Wun, Christina Heatherton, Jordan Camp, Jean Dennison, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Lilly Wong, Josh Myers, Mali Collins, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Alice Green, Brandon Proia, Claude Marks, Ain Grooms, Shelia Wilson, Brenda Tapia, Clarence Washington, Sheila Washington, Angela Craghead, Khary Lazarre-White, Zahara Duncan, Charles Curtis, Chuck Holden, Junauda Petrus, Paul Grant, Tim Lovelace, Daisy Lovelace, Victorious Hall, Malik Duncan, Hanifa Hakim, Aichi Kochiyama, Akemi Kochiyama, Stephen Hines, Susan Wilcox, John Chenault, Preston Smith, Lynda Pickbourn, Valerie Caesar, Mark Swier, Abby Vaughn, Eris Johnson-Smith, Coco Killingsworth, Joan Morgan, and Ted Barco.

A number of people helped with my research: Sam Menefee-Libey, Maia McCall, Farah Afify, Jade Woods, Delande Justinvil, Bethany Zaiman, Miho Watabe, Shannon Clark, Penina Meier-Silverman, Kathy Kaib, Brad Schreiber, Colin A. Ross, Greg deGiere. Thank you to the various librarians, archivists, records managers, and court clerks who helped me pull this off. Special thanks to the American University librarians, particularly the Interlibrary Loan staff who indulged my exploration of various rabbit holes.

I sharpened my analysis in dialogue with a number of intellectual networks: The Critical Prison Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Freedom Scholars, the Palestinian American Research Center, Rochester Decarceration Initiative, the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, the Association of Black Anthropologists, the Association of American Geographers, the Freedom Archives, the Abolition Collective, Pan-African Community Action, the Carceral Subjects Workshop, Black Power Media, and Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.

My research received material support from the Association of Black Anthropologists, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the UNC-CH Anthropology Department, the American University College of Arts and Sciences, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the UNC-CH Institute of American Research, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Thank you.

Last but certainly not least, many thanks to movement elders who have nurtured my political and intellectual development: Queen Mother Moore, Yuri Kochiyama, Muhammad Ahmad, Alkamal Duncan, Dhoruba bin-Wahad, Masia A. Mugmuk, Hassan Gale, Kwando M. Kinshasa, Kathleen Cleaver, George Prendes, Basir Mchawi, Tony Menelik Van der Meer, Daniel Sheppard, Tyrone Larkins, James Killebrew, Kareem C’Allah, Laura Whitehorn, Sekou Odinga, Robert J. Boyle, Ashanti Alston, Jalil Muntaqim, Larry White, Tanaquil Jones, Denise Oliver-Velez, Jihad Abdulmumit, Blood McCreary, Mae Adams, Joseph Jazz Hayden, David Gilbert, Kathy Boudin, and so many others.

Introduction

On August 18, 1973, Queen Mother Audley Moore, a stalwart Communist and Pan-Africanist revolutionary, traveled to Green Haven Prison and delivered a remarkable keynote address. A video of the event shows stylishly dressed Black men, women, and children seated in rows of folding chairs, standing in small groups, eating, laughing, talking, and embracing. ¹ Were it not for the massive concrete walls encircling the gathering, one might easily mistake it for a typical picnic or celebration. However, the peaceful and bucolic scene belied the profound violence simmering just beneath the surface. The inaugural years of the 1970s were among the most explosive and lethal in US prison history, due in no small measure to militant rebellions that ruptured carceral institutions across the nation. The two-year anniversary of Attica, the most infamous of these conflicts, was less than a month away. Hundreds of Attica Brothers—the incarcerated rebels who seized the prison and endured the state-orchestrated massacre that followed—had been transferred to Green Haven, and many now gathered to hear Moore speak.

Standing before a modest podium, Moore explained that Green Haven’s imprisoned men were enduring re-captivity. Offering an analysis made popular by her political mentee Malcolm X, she argued that prison walls made visible a condition of incarceration that is constitutive of Black life in America. ² Black people are a captive nation; the physically imprisoned had therefore been captured doubly so. Moore then explained that it was not the captives, but the White Man who was the real criminal. She reminded her audience—comprised of people variously convicted of robbery, assault, rape, murder, and drug-related crimes—that none of them had ever stolen entire countries, cultures, or peoples, or sold human beings into slavery for profit. Although some of them had tried to imitate the White Man, she continued, they had never really stolen and neither had they ever really murdered. Have you taken mothers and strung them up by their heels? she asked. And took your knives and slit their bellies so that their unborn babies can fall to the ground? And then took your heel and crushed those babies into the ground? . . . Have you dropped bombs on people and killed whole countries of people, have you done that brothers? Given that American empire is constituted through apocalyptic violence and incalculable theft, Moore argued that crimes committed by the human spoils of war were necessarily derivative of the organized crime of the state. ³

Moore explained that as a student of Marcus Garvey and a veteran of the Black liberation struggle since the 1930s, she had accumulated valuable insight into the science of white supremacy. With the horror of the Attica massacre fresh in the audience’s mind, she told the appalling story of her grandfather’s lynching, explaining that prisons function in tandem with other tactics of white patriarchal domination. The aim of the White Man’s science was to denature African people: to crush their spirits, destroy their cognitive autonomy, and transform them into obedient negroes with no knowledge of their history or will to resist. Moore likened this process to the taming of lions, who can be caged and conditioned to purr like kittens at the crack of a whip. She concluded her address by enjoining the captive population—the formally imprisoned as well as the nominally free—to reject this oppressive science, to nurture a sovereign Black consciousness, to embrace armed struggle, and to rely on each other for the battles that lay ahead. For only then would the captive nation be able to decisively liberate itself from the prisons ensnaring it.

Queen Mother Moore’s unconventional analysis unsettles common-sense notions of crime, violence, imprisonment, the state, politics, science, temporality, and the idea of the human itself. Her narrative method dislodges these concepts from criminology, sociology, anthropology, and other liberal formations of knowledge, repurposing them for Black revolutionary ends. By theorizing Black prisoners as re-captives and situating prisons within the longue durée of European colonialism, she forces a reckoning with non-linear, fractured, and cyclical understandings of historical movement. ⁴ Her visceral rendering of gendered racial violence disrupts past and present attempts to construct the Attica massacre—during which state actors slaughtered at least thirty-nine people and sexually tortured hundreds more—as aberrational or exceptional. Rather, without ever mentioning it directly, she calls attention to the resonance between this recent spectacle of violence and supposedly bygone regimes of chattel slavery, racial apartheid, and settler colonialism. Moreover, her argument that the White Man’s allegedly objective science involves methods of taming Black rebellion is suggestive of concurrent efforts by CIA-affiliated behavioral psychologists, physicians, and others to neutralize political radicality by chemically, surgically, and electronically altering brain function. ⁵ Conveyed during a moment in which the struggle behind the walls was taking on a less combative posture, Moore’s oratory challenged the state’s authority to criminalize and incarcerate Black communities, while affirming the captives’ right, indeed their duty, to struggle against the carceral world. These ideas, thematic concerns, and political imperatives prepare us for the narrative that follows.

Tip of the Spear argues that prisons are war. They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency. But they are also domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation. The book’s major tasks are threefold. One, I analyze what I term the Long Attica Revolt, a genealogy of Black radical and revolutionary struggle that emerged among New York’s captive population during the early 1970s. Two, I illuminate what I call prison pacification, a campaign of racist and political repression, white supremacist science, and organized violence advanced by a network of state actors variously located within penal hierarchies, police agencies, foreign theaters of war, counterinsurgency think tanks, universities, the FBI, and the CIA. Three, I examine how the protracted collision of these projects gave rise to new formations of consciousness, politics, sociality, gender, and being, as well as new—which is to say renewed—technologies of racial-colonial domination, dehumanization, and extraction.

The war of which I write is fundamentally asymmetrical, not only in terms of each side’s capacities and methods, but also in terms of their goals. Through prison pacification, state actors wage a war of conquest on a subject population as part of broader efforts to accumulate capital and preserve the dominance of White Man. Their mode of combat combines siege warfare and counterinsurgency warfare. Through siege warfare, an antagonist surrounds an enemy fortification and institutes blockades on the flow of resources in an attempt to starve the surrounded population into submission. ⁶ In this context, to starve must be understood capaciously as the calculated denial of the material, social, cultural, and political nutrients necessary for reproducing defiant Black life and consciousness across generations. Counterinsurgency, according to the US Army, is a style of warfare that involves military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency. ⁷ As will become clear, the planners and administrators of this carceral siege aimed to crush the Revolt by deploying a range of techniques, both hard and soft, across these terrains of intervention.

In contrast to this carceral warfare project, the Long Attica Revolt was not a war of conquest or accumulation. Against carceral siege, revolting captives waged a people’s war, a counter-war, or what exiled Black revolutionary Robert F. Williams called a guerrilla war of self-defense. ⁸ Popularly characterized as a war of the weak against the strong, guerrilla warfare involves irregular, small-scale attacks that aim to disrupt the social order, raising the cost of business as usual to a level that is unsustainable for the ruling authority, forcing them to relinquish control. Within and against captivity, rebels employed diverse methodologies of attack: political education, critique, protest, organizing, cultural production, litigation, subversion, refusal, rebellion, retaliation, hostage-taking, sabotage, armed struggle, and the intimate labor of care. ⁹ Like Moore, they saw prison walls not as boundaries between freedom and unfreedom, but as material demarcations of different intensities of captivity, vulnerability, and rebellion.

Attica was, and is, a multiracial structure of Revolt led by people who self-identified as Black. However, the Blackness they claimed was as much, if not more, a collective political designation as an individual identity. Through this rubric, Black skin is insufficient for Blackness, as Moore’s derision for Black-skinned negroes makes clear. For decades, combatant-theorists and politically engaged academics have conceptualized political Blackness as a mode of consciousness emerging from a collective historical experience of oppression and struggle. ¹⁰ Attica erupted out of this context, a historical moment in which people whose African ancestors were enslaved in what became known as Latin America increasingly embraced their African heritage. ¹¹ Moreover, conditions of extreme carceral duress coerced some imprisoned and destitute whites into Black modalities of rebellion: Authority itself may be going down a fast track toward the Niggerization of everyone, explained a white Attica survivor. ¹² Forged within cauldrons of racial, sexual, and class oppression, the Long Attica Revolt threatened the existence of prisons, the social order, and the very coherence of White Man, a coercively universalized paradigm of human being. ¹³

Contrary to most academic scholarship on prison-based movements and rebellions, Tip of the Spear decenters incarcerated peoples’ formal demands to improve prison conditions. Though struggles over access to decent food, clothing, shelter, medical care, visitation privileges, humane parole policies, and so on are an important site of political contestation, these appeals constitute the prison movement’s minimum demands: calls for bare survival amid genocide. ¹⁴ Investigations of prison insurgency tend to focus on this rational and pragmatic class of demands, while ignoring, dismissing, or downplaying calls to tear down the walls and free all political prisoners as unrealistic, hyperbolic, immature, or too extreme. Moreover, as Dylan Rodríguez has shown, even these minimum demands, which tend to be articulated in the form of the petition to the state, are routinely analyzed in unsophisticated ways that circumscribe the horizon of incarcerated people’s ambitions to a desire for full incorporation within existing regimes of citizenship, rights, and humanity. ¹⁵ I am not arguing against the common refrain that incarcerated people just want to be treated as human beings. In many cases this is certainly true, but in others, it is the conception of the human itself that is seen as the problem. ¹⁶ As the dominant way of interpreting anticarceral struggle, the focus on external demands on the state narrows the scope of people’s actual desires and facilitates the mystification of prison abolition’s revolutionary and anticolonial origins.

Tip of the Spear argues that the Long Attica Revolt was itself a demand. Uttered through what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously termed the language of the unheard, ¹⁷ this riot, this rebellion, this revolutionary upheaval was an internal demand, a call to arms directed not toward the state, which did not have the capacity to comprehend or satiate the rebellion’s most fulsome desires, but toward allied communities across prison walls and beyond US territorial boundaries. The content of this maximum demand was the abolition of prisons, the abolition of war, the abolition of racial capitalism, the abolition of White Man, and the emergence of new modes of social life not predicated on enclosure, extraction, domination, or dehumanization. In the pages that follow, I carefully excavate incarcerated people’s protracted and often fatal struggles to realize their most unruly, unreasonable, and irrational demands. In doing so, I reframe our understanding of Attica and Black rebellion more broadly.

At the tail end of our conversation, Che Nieves, the former Minister of Education for a prison-based formation of the Young Lords Party and a veteran of the Attica rebellion, articulated a version of the maximum demand with rare clarity. We had covered the highs and lows of his life of struggle behind the walls: the relentless brutality of prison existence, the trajectory of his political radicalization, the ecstasy of achieving the rebellion’s illegal freedom, and the unspeakable horrors of the massacre he survived. Like most of the interviews I conducted while researching this book, it was a heavy discussion that was filled with rage, tears, laughter, and the wonderment that surfaces when someone rediscovers a lost thread of memory that had lain dormant for decades. As we prepared to go our separate ways, I thanked Che for entrusting me with his memories and analysis. He responded: Listen, all I could say is, we brothers, man. We need each other. It’s not only me, but you. That’s what keeps us going. Exchange, it keeps the spirit going, and it keeps us moving toward freedom. The more you acquire, the more I acquire. And without you, it’s not me. You make me and I make you. ¹⁸

Che’s poetic reflection illuminates the abolitionist ethical philosophy at the core of the Revolt. Though immediately triggered by carceral repression and violence, Attica signifies a positive demand that exceeds normative frameworks of the political and challenges hegemonic norms of individualism that are at the heart of capitalism, patriarchy, and white Western humanism. Decades before the term entered the popular lexicon, where it has been diluted and co-opted, Attica rebels engaged in a praxis of abolition, generating abolitionist knowledge, theory, and practice amid conditions of carceral war. They not only imagined and dreamed a world without prisons, but put their bodies and lives on the line to materialize their vision in the face of determined opposition. The shape of the world they began to build in place of what they began to tear down was not predetermined. Rather, it was improvised through the unfolding of the Revolt, a collective movement toward freedom. Theirs was a freedom that was not only material and political, but cognitive and metaphysical, a freedom nurtured within and between people who came to understand themselves as new kinds of beings for a new kind of world, a freedom that could not be granted, that could only be seized. The Long Attica Revolt, in other words, is abolition. It is a paradigm and a blueprint, imperfect to be sure, but invaluable nonetheless, for creating an abolitionist world.

Che’s assertion that the power of our principled brotherhood exceeds the sum of its parts points to another major theme of this book: manhood, masculinity, patriarchy, and gendered life under domestic warfare. Tip of the Spear focuses on struggles enacted by people incarcerated in prisons designated for men, who by and large understood incarceration as a process that attacked their manhood, and who engaged in rebellion as a humanizing and indeed a masculinizing process. ¹⁹ As such, it analyzes the complex ways that claims to manhood are constructed, contested, and violently negated in the process of struggle, and shows that the content of the manhood proclaimed by the rebels was radically different from that enacted by their captors. Across years of learning with and from progressive, radical, and revolutionary Black men who rebelled within and against the racist and patriarchal state, I have learned that a gendered struggle, a struggle to redefine manhood itself, to create an ethical and life-giving manhood, was (and is) indispensable to this Revolt. ²⁰

MAKING THIS BOOK

Tip of the Spear is my response to an intergenerational assignment that Eddie Ellis and others gave me nearly a decade ago. I met Ellis in 2009 while facilitating political education workshops with the Prison Moratorium Project, an organization he helped establish after spending twenty-three years behind the walls. In 2014, when I began conducting research for what evolved into this book, I interviewed Eddie, hoping to learn about his life as a journalist for the magazine The Liberator, his role in the Harlem Black Panther Party, his experience in Attica during the rebellion, and his work as part of the Green Haven Think Tank, a prison-based formation whose research influenced multiple generations of activists, scholars, and policymakers, often in unacknowledged ways. ²¹ During our interview, which lasted upward of six hours, Eddie shared his feeling that he and those with whom he was in community had failed to theorize, document, and contextualize the movements they led behind prison walls. We have never been able to use the tools of academia to demonstrate that our analysis is a better analysis, he said. ²² He then suggested that perhaps I could play that role, that I make it my mission to use the resources of academic scholarship to rigorously elaborate a genealogy of knowledge production that today largely remains criminalized, pathologized, and intentionally hidden from public view. It was a transformative interview in many ways, but unfortunately it was our last. Ellis died of cancer shortly after that conversation.

The arguments and narratives that follow are the result of intensive research in institutional and personal archival collections combined with repeated, extended, and open-ended oral history interviews I conducted with more than sixty people, most of them Black and Latinx men and women who participated in radical social movements within and beyond prisons between the 1960s and the 1990s. As such, this work extends a legacy of anthropological research carried out in service of anticolonial, liberatory, and abolitionist projects. ²³ It operationalizes scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s insight that non-academics are critical producers of historiography: that not only do such subjects engage in concrete struggle to transform material reality, they also strive to define the very terms under which some situations can be described. ²⁴ It also builds on the work of theorist Cedric Robinson, who shows us that to contend with Black radicalism on its own terms, we must unshackle our analytical frameworks from the cognitive prison of (white) Western rationality and refuse to impose knowledge paradigms developed to justify the current social order upon movements that aim to unmake that order. ²⁵ Generated by deep and long-term relationships of trust, my analytical method takes the Black radical epistemologies, narratives, and modes of argumentation of those with whom I am in community as both a point of departure and lodestar. Moreover, it employs an ethnographic approach to historical narration in which I, the reflexive authorial subject, remain present in the story, thinking and theorizing with the protagonists of this struggle to collectively scrutinize the meanings of key ideas, decisions, tensions, and events. ²⁶

It is this relation of accountability to the intellectuals and combatants of this undeclared war, both living and dead, and to the ancestral traditions that nurtured them, that distinguishes this book from previous treatments of Attica and from the growing body of academic scholarship on Black radicalism within and beyond prisons. ²⁷ The dominant understanding of Attica as a four-day event that was confined to a single prison and primarily aimed to ameliorate oppressive conditions is facilitated by interpretive practices that prioritize knowledge yielded by state sources over knowledge produced and archived by rebels. ²⁸ In contrast to the imperatives of this counterinsurgent historiography, Black radical ways of knowing constitute the primary sources of this study. To gather these sources I have pursued, excavated, and analyzed the recollections, letters, treatises, manuals, journalism, testimony, and even the rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories generated by people who understood themselves, and were understood by the state, to be revolutionaries. ²⁹

The Long Attica Revolt names a protracted accumulation of rebellion that circulated within and beyond New York prisons for at least thirteen months prior to what ultimately culminated in Attica prison between September 9 and 13, 1971. As Trouillot asserts, The historical narrative within which an actual event fits could precede that event itself, at least in theory, but perhaps also in practice. ³⁰ Indeed, the narrative practices of the people I spoke to troubled coherent, linear, and bounded notions of the Attica rebellion. Rather, these figures narrated their involvement in multiple rebellions, both large and small, some preceding the September rebellion in Attica, others emerging in its wake, some confined to a single prison, others dispersed across multiple carceral sites: city jails, state prisons, mental institutions, urban streets, foreign territories, and so on. From this perspective, Attica functions as a metonym for a temporally, geographically, and politically diverse structure of Revolt to which many roots and branches connect and extend in different, sometimes contradictory directions. So said Gary McGivern, imprisoned in Green Haven when Attica erupted, who authored a poem claiming, Attica is our heritage and our beginning. ³¹

My decision to organize this book around the paradigm of war arose from listening to movement elders and taking what they had to say seriously. We are the tip of the spear, wrote Jalil Muntaqim in a letter to me years ago. A veteran of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA) who, in the early years of the 1980s, was accused of attempting to foment another Attica, Muntaqim had been incarcerated for over four decades on a range of intensely politicized charges, including a conviction for the assassination of two New York City Police Department (NYPD) patrolmen back in 1971, a conviction that was facilitated by the FBI’s anti-Black Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). I was captivated by this phrase, which is commonly used in military parlance to refer to combat forces deployed to penetrate an enemy’s first line of defense. Initially, I interpreted it as a reference to the leading role that politicized prisoners have played in challenging the state. ³² That is, I interpreted the statement as a historical claim. It later occurred to me that in using this martial idiom, Muntaqim could also have been pointing to the location of incarcerated people behind enemy lines, such that their effective organization could catalyze movements beyond the walls. In other words, maybe he was deploying this phrase as a tactician, much like Frantz Fanon was when he wrote, It is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. ³³

However, there is a more chilling possibility. The war paradigm means that it is also possible to interpret Muntaqim’s statement from the point of view of the state. This would make incarcerated people, and especially incarcerated Black revolutionaries, the tip of a counterinsurgency spear that has pierced through the front line of its opposition on its way toward striking a more essential target, us. As a story about war, Tip of the Spear mobilizes these various interpretations of the term, analyzing the cutting edge of carceral struggle as seen from both sides of the blade.

CARCERAL WAR

As soon as all this became clear to me and I developed the nerve to admit it to myself, that we were defeated in a war and are now captives, slaves or actually that we inherited a neoslave existence, I immediately became relaxed, always expecting the worst, and started working on the remedy. ³⁴ George Jackson offered this reflection from Soledad Prison in a 1967 letter to his mother. Six years earlier, an eighteen-year-old Jackson had been given an indeterminate sentence of one-year-to-life for robbing a gas station at gunpoint. It was behind the walls of the California prison system, where racism was in its pure state, gathering its forces, pulsing with power, ready to spring, that Jackson mutated into a revolutionary. ³⁵ He studied martial arts, read voraciously, co-organized underground formations of resistance, became Field Marshal of the BPP, wrote incisively and prodigiously, and engaged in physical combat against the state. ³⁶

Jackson’s insight about the relationship between prisons, war, and slavery is a useful point from which to begin our examination of carceral war. Dominant understandings of prisons as neoslavery are typically grounded in critical interpretations of US jurisprudence. ³⁷ For activist scholars and politically engaged academics, two primary sources have been particularly influential: the exception clause in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime, and Ruffin v. Commonwealth, the 1871 case in which the Virginia Supreme Court declared incarcerated people slaves of the state. I am sympathetic to neoslavery arguments that cite these sources, particularly when slavery is understood as a violent relation of domination that often involves, but does not require, the exploitation of labor for profit. ³⁸ I myself was politicized through this mode of historical narration, that compelled me to embrace abolition as the only ethical response to slavery. However, as I researched this book, I grew increasingly critical of this approach—not of the neoslavery analytic per se, but of how its alleged basis in law is endlessly deployed, as though slavery exists because the law allows it to.

George Jackson’s assertion that Black people are captives and slaves not because of law, but because we are historical Prisoners of War, invokes the paradigmatic rationale for slavery. ³⁹ This rationale is embedded within classical liberal theory, the philosophical substrate of capitalist social relations. Against the dominant understandings of liberalism as a political order that expands peace, political philosopher Mark Neocleous argues that liberalism is a self-conscious doctrine of a war exercised in permanent fashion against rebellious slaves, antagonistic Indians, wayward workers, and of course, the criminal more broadly defined. ⁴⁰ Analyzing the thought of classical liberals like John Locke, an investor in the Royal African Company, he finds that claims about the liberal state’s power to punish are drawn from international theories of war, in which criminals are beasts who have declared war on the state and slavery, an appropriate response to criminality. ⁴¹

Decades before the 13th Amendment and Ruffin v. Commonwealth, the so-called Antelope case of 1825 enshrined the link between war and slavery in US jurisprudence. Deciding on the legitimacy of the transatlantic slave trade, which had already been formally outlawed, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, a slave owner, wrote that it was universally accepted that the victor might enslave the vanquished and that slavery is a legitimate result of force. The state of things which is thus produced by general consent, cannot be pronounced unlawful, he continued. ⁴² The Antelope case established the sanctity of property over the supposedly natural right of liberty and shows how the basis of neoslavery lies in war, not law. Rather political and economic elites weaponize law as the continuation of war by other means. ⁴³

Enslaved Africans argued that slavery is war. When you make men slaves, wrote Olaudah Equiano in 1789, you compel them to live with you in a state of war. ⁴⁴ Critically, however, slavery represents a particular moment in the life and death cycle of war, a moment in which one antagonist has imposed their will with near totality upon the other. I say near because regimes of domination are never total, riddled as they are with contradictions, fissures, vulnerabilities, and what fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs called loopholes of retreat. ⁴⁵ Antebellum plantocracies lived in constant fear of rebellion, a term that etymologically means the renewal of war. To rebel is to repudiate the master/slave relation and inaugurate new movements toward freedom, to create ruptures and breaches through which repressed ways of knowing and being overrun violently imposed boundaries. This is why throughout the Western Hemisphere, self-organized formations of Black rebellion—maroon resistance, general strikes, slave insurrections, urban rebellions, prison revolts—often take on an overtly martial character. ⁴⁶

Prison pacification names a historically specific articulation of this permanent war, one that was forged amid tectonic shifts in US political economy during the second half of the twentieth century. Black radical intellectuals like James Boggs understood that something drastic was coming. In 1963, this Detroit autoworker saw that technological changes in industrial production—computerization, automation, and offshoring—were ensuring that more and more workers would find themselves without meaningful ways to make a living. For Boggs, this raised a critical question that would only intensify as the years wore on: What would happen to those whose labor was no longer needed by the capitalist system? ⁴⁷ In her 2007 book Golden Gulag, abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers an answer. She shows that beginning in the 1970s, state actors and bourgeois elites pursued the prison fix as a solution to the compounding crises of capitalism. They usurped state capacity that could have been used to expand the social wage, instead deploying it to criminalize and cage what were deemed surplus populations. As Gilmore explains, this move amounted to the abandonment of one set of public mandates in favor of another—of social welfare for domestic warfare, if you will. ⁴⁸

Tip of the Spear zeroes in on the political dimensions of this war, which began in the so-called free world then erupted through prison walls. In July of 1964, four months after New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed the nation’s first stop and frisk law empowering police to question and detain anyone reasonably suspected of criminalized activity, a rebellion erupted on the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn. ⁴⁹ Sparked by a lethal act of racist police violence, it was among the first of hundreds of urban uprisings that shook US cities between 1964 and 1972. ⁵⁰ Inspired by the anticolonial struggles sweeping Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Black radicals in the United States sought to harness this energy into an organized force for overturning the status quo. ⁵¹ In doing so, the framework of Civil Rights was increasingly supplanted by revolutionary nationalism, the idea that Black and other racially oppressed groups in the United States constituted domestic colonies, and that national liberation and socialist revolution were the correct path forward. ⁵² Although the strategy of nonviolence was never as hegemonic as anointed histories of Black struggle make it out to be, ⁵³ revolutionary nationalist formations positioned self-defense and armed struggle as central to their praxis. As BPP cofounder Huey P. Newton wrote in 1967, An unarmed people are slaves or subject to slavery at any given moment. ⁵⁴

A constellation of repressive state agencies responded to these developments through counterinsurgency strategies developed in global laboratories of empire. Local police red squads like the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation in New York hunted radicals under the pretext of law enforcement. ⁵⁵ In August of 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched Black Nationalist-Hate Groups, a project collected under COINTELPRO that infamously deployed a range of illegal methods to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black radical organizations in general and the BPP in particular. ⁵⁶ Days later, the CIA inaugurated Operation CHAOS, a lesser-known initiative that aimed to sever links between social movements in the United States and those