Word: blyden
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...chaos of the Attica uprising last September, one of the most extraordinary characters to emerge as a convict leader was a scarred but eloquent West Indian named Herbert X. Blyden. Last week his lawyers appeared in a Manhattan federal court for a new round in Blyden's long battle to overturn his 1965 robbery conviction. TIME'S James Willwerth visited him in prison and reported Blyden's tale of his continuing war with...
Herbert X. Blyden, 35, describes his life as "the story of a lion who is not really a rebel-study the history of the lion and you will get the message." He was born, he notes, under the sign of Leo. That was in St. Thomas in 1936. His family was "lower middle class," he says, and it came apart when he was three. An aunt raised him, along with 13 of his cousins, and he turned into a troublemaker. "I was sent to a house-you know, for incorrigible boys. Evidently they saw Attica in advance. But they didn...
...Tallahassee, Fla. ("Wow, did I.run into some racism down there!"), he began to organize the inmates. The result was a "miniriot" and a transfer to Lewisburg, Pa. "I've got to praise the system there," he says. "I was able to get a lot of reading done." Blyden's discoveries included Schopenhauer, Santayana and Hermann Hesse...
Free once more in 1956, Blyden went to New York, where his father was a partner in a gas station. He and his brother Leroy helped out, but after an argument with their father they took $150 out of the cash register. "We worked there," Blyden argues now. "This was stupidity, but it wasn't robbery." He was 20 at the time, and he received five years as an adult offender...
...Blyden who read off the list of prisoners' demands to the outside mediators at the meetings in cell block D. Ironically, the day that the rebels first met with the negotiators, a letter from Blyden to one of them, State Senator John Dunne, was floating unread through the mails. It contained a restrained appeal for an official inspection tour of Attica. "We have been trying to apprise the public and the news media of conditions for some time, to no avail. Your assistance in these most serious matters is urgently needed...