Reckoning with the Artifacts of Attica: What Was Found, What Wasn't, and Why It Matters

In the early afternoon of September 13, 1971, Americans across this country sat stunned as they tried to process the news that came over their car and kitchen radios. The dramatic negotiations that had been playing out for days at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, those between the nearly 1,300 prisoners who demanded improved conditions and state officials from nearby Albany, had somehow just ended with literally hundreds of those prisoners riddled with bullets. As unfathomably, many of the hostages there, all state employees, also now lay in that prison either dead or dying.

Had these same Americans also been told that mere hours later governor Nelson Rockefeller would place the New York State Police (NYSP), the very same body whose troopers had gone in guns blazing in this disastrous retaking, in charge of collecting all of the physical evidence that would be used to ascertain who was responsible for this carnage, they might well have been appalled.

But they were never so informed. Indeed, every media story that followed the retaking of Attica focused remarkably little attention on the NYSP, nor, even more startingly, on the horror wrought by the extraordinary amount of buckshot and bullets, including ammunition outlawed by the Geneva Convention, that its troopers had shot into so many bodies, in such a confined space, in such a short period of time (leaving a scene so gruesome that one deeply shaken physician likened it to a "Civil War painting").¹ Instead, media coverage focused the public's attention on the prisoners—those "animals" and "barbarians" who, according to state officials, not only slit the throats of those inside, but also had even castrated

New York State Police photograph of D Yard at Attica in the aftermath of the retaking of the prison. Police investigators combed through the debris in search of weapons and other evidence of potential criminal wrongdoing on the part of the rebellious prisoners. new york state archives

men and buried them alive. This was, it turned out, a complete and utter lie. But it was a lie that would forever cast a shadow over Attica and the story of what actually happened there.

And, so, when the New York State Police suddenly announced in 2011 that it had cleaned out a thirty-foot Quonset hut where a substantial amount of Attica "evidence" was stored, and that it was willing to donate those items to the New York State Museum and Archives, the news was greeted with excitement and gratitude. For so many who had lived through that traumatic day of September 13, 1971, and especially for those who had lost loved ones in the assault on the prison that morning, the release of these items offered new hope that questions about what had gone so wrong there, questions that had plagued them for literally decades, might finally be answered. For years, Attica's survivors and their families had felt that their lingering questions as well as their shared trauma had been utterly ignored if not outright dismissed by the state of New York, and these artifacts held at least the promise of some desperately needed closure.

But even if one had not lost a brother, son, or father at Attica, or had no direct connection to this terrible place or this now-infamous event, news of the "turning over" of these long-gone artifacts was still most welcome. The truth was that even by 2011, other than the fact that there had "been a riot there," the story of what exactly happened at the prison back in 1971 remained murky for most Americans. And, importantly, this inability of Attica survivors to get straight answers from state officials as to why so many people had to be hurt and killed at this prison on September 13, 1971, and the nation's collective ignorance regarding why this event had even happened at all, were related and also hardly coincidental. Both stemmed from the fact that even though forty years had passed since...