Word: attica
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prison rebellion at Attica, N.Y., was part of a siege of domestic violence that began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and continued in a demoralizing blur through the deaths of R.F.K., Martin Luther King, the flames of Newark and Watts, the bashing by (and of) war protesters, the torn victims of radical bombings, and the savage abbreviation of young lives at Kent and Jackson State...
Wicker's involvement at Attica was anything but narcotic. Shortly after the rebellion began on Sept. 9, 1971, he was asked by prisoners to join a 37-man committee of observers to mediate and publicize their fight for better conditions and safeguard them against reprisal. Five days and 43 lives later, Wicker returned to Washington a haggard, angry and sad man-but a man who no longer was hesitant about using power "to force," as he says, "elementary humanity upon even greater power...
...Time to Die is both his attempt to re-create the experience in every detail, combined with an examination of the morality and responsibility of the observer in times of action. It is a book of extraordinary tension. There are the 1,500 Attica inmates, flushed with their initial victory yet frantic with the knowledge that their moment of freedom is doomed by the authorities' unchallenged power and willingness to kill them. The heavily armed guards and state troopers poised over D-yard, where the uprising was encamped, were inflamed by false rumors that the hostages were being beaten...
...York Congressman Herman Badillo, another observer, contributed the most famous and most pertinent summation of what eventually happened at Attica. "There's always time to die. I don't know what the rush was," he said, after six minutes of uncontrolled shotgun and rifle fire had killed ten hostages, 29 inmates, and left more than 80 wounded...
...Amnesty. Like many other witnesses, Wicker believes that the bloodshed and the brutal reprisals by guards and state troopers would have been postponed and possibly avoided if only New York State's Governor Nelson Rockefeller had agreed to come to Attica. At the time, Rockefeller said he did not believe he had the constitutional power to grant blanket amnesty to the rebels-especially since one of the guards had already died in the hospital after his skull was fractured at the beginning of the riot. In Rockefeller's action-a euphemistic order to "reopen the institution"-Wicker sees...