The Minimum Demands

The Attica Liberation Faction's "Manifesto of Demands & Anti-Oppression Platform" was an attempt on the part of Attica's captives to avert rebellion. Submitted to Commissioner Russell G. Oswald and other functionaries within the state government on July 2, 1971, the document is the product of a political call and response between organizer-intellectuals within the burgeoning radical prison movement. In fact, the manifesto can be said to represent an emerging national consensus within the movement around a set of minimum demands for the humane treatment of incarcerated people. Unfortunately, on the fifty-year anniversary of the Attica Rebellion, these minimum demands still have not been met, as evidenced by the National Prison Strikes of 2016 and 2018, in which incarcerated people throughout the United States cited the Attica Rebellion as a source of inspiration and mobilized around many of the same points.

Herbert X. Blyden, a member of the Nation of Islam who would eventually be elected as a spokesman for the Attica Rebellion, was the primary force behind this document. It is, in fact, a revised version of an identically titled manifesto authored and issued in late October 1970 by Black and Latinx captives in California's Folsom Prison. Blyden obtained a copy of the Folsom Manifesto from his wife, while she visited him in the Manhattan House of Detention (a.k.a. the Tombs), an infamous bastille in downtown Manhattan. At that moment, he and hundreds of others in the New York City jail system were enduring intense repression and reprisals in retaliation for a series of protests, strikes, and rebellions they had recently waged across the city's jail network. From this struggle they issued a set of demands that denounced the racist brutality of the administration, as well as the court system, which held most of them in jail for months and even years without trial.

Shortly thereafter Blyden landed in Attica, where he became involved in ongoing efforts to develop revolutionary consciousness and political organization. Although he had the ability to craft an original set of demands, Blyden chose to revise the Folsom demands, perhaps in order to build toward a united prison movement. His copy of the Folsom Manifesto became palimpsest. Blyden went through each line of text, excising phrases and

Cover page to The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto produced by the Attica Liberation Faction. new york state museum collection

adding new ones in the margins, ensuring that the new document spoke to the specific conditions of captives in New York State. He also added the conclusion, which in part reads: "We do not know how the present system of brutality has been allowed to perpetrated [sic] in this day of enlightenment, but we are living proof of its existence and we cannot allow it to continue." These words, which emphasize the agency and responsibility of the captives to end their own oppression, were lifted from the demands that Blyden helped author and submit to the state during the Tombs Rebellion.

The "Manifesto of Demands" included as part of The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto. new york state museum collection

By tracing the discursive and tactical links between prison struggles in California and New York, we are able to apprehend the continuity of struggle between putatively discreet sites and moments of rebellion. Blyden excised a paragraph from the Folsom Manifesto that expresses support for an accompanying labor strike that California captives were organizing. In its place he wrote, "There is no strike of any kind to protest these demands, We are trying to do this in a democratic fashion." In fact, Attica's captives had already withheld their labor in an effort to win concessions. Just over a week before the Tombs rebellion, 450 Black workers in Attica's metal shop halted their production of cabinets, tables, and lockers and were brutalized and transferred to other prisons as a result. "Trying" is underlined to stress that one way or another, penal authorities would be forced to consider the captives' demands.

On November 2, 1970...