Word: attica
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Wicker went to Attica as a writer who had asked a few searching questions about his society, but who essentially was loyal to and protective of that society. He came away from Attica's tragedy shaken, stirred, and aware personally for the first time of the depth of racism that lay in his Southern upbringing, of the inhumanity of prisons, of America's reliance on violence as the ultimate recourse, of the power of guns to dictate men's actions...
...Before Attica he had experienced only twinges of these feelings, as when he saw the tanks grinding through his town. Even at the first road-block on his way to Attica, he felt only a momentary shock when he noted the excessive weaponry--sidearms, rifles, shotguns, tear-gas launchers--that the sheriff's deputies and state troopers were carrying...
...shocks multiplied. There was Captain Henry Williams, tactical commander of the state police at Attica, whose "narrow black tie had an air about it of woe to the hippies." There was the initial police response to the observers' committee--rigid indifference--as if they were only a formality to be gotten through, one more time-consuming nicety, like warning an arrested man of his rights, before the inevitable business at hand could be attended to by armed and empowered patriots. The indifference quickly turned to hostility, as the observers kept trying to avoid violence and began to sympathize with...
...STORY WICKER tells of America's prisons adds yet another sorry dimension to the Attica tragedy. The Quakers in the late 1700s had the notion that offenders should be locked alone in cells, day and night, so that, in such awful solitude, they would have nothing to do but ponder their acts, repent and reform. By 1825, New York had begun an entire penal system that combined individual cells and total silence with floggings, hard labor in fields and quarries, undeviating routine, and subsistence level food and shelter. As the first warden of Sing Sing had said, "Reformation...
MALCOLM X ONCE said that American society itself was a prison for blacks, and Wicker recognized that racism in himself. He had usually managed to compensate for it--but compensation wasn't enough in D- Yard of Attica Prison. A Time To Die has its only joyful moment when Tom Wicker conquers his racism at least for a moment: embracing a young black inmate, he said, "We're gonna win, brother," and they were two human beings solidly together and Wicker was "free at last, free at last, thank God." But when he turned to leave he saw police...