In his meticulously researched and fascinating Tip of the Spear, Dr. Burton sets himself apart from the great majority of books and films on U.S. prisons that primarily focus on prison conditions, guard brutality and efforts at reform.
Rather, the author emphasizes the political nature of prison rebellions. Prisons are “domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject … white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy, freedom and liberation.”
With such a thesis the reader should not expect a litany of brutality and injustice followed by reform. Dr. Burton argues that the resistance inside prisons is an integral part of the struggle against white supremacy and for Black liberation beyond the walls.
Moreover, although he uses the term “prison abolition,” Dr. Burton is careful to point out that the term, as used in the book, means the elimination of the social conditions that feed the prisons. It diminishes the revolutionary significance of what he terms the “Long Attica Revolt,” he argues, if one focuses on reform rather than societal change.
Dr. Burton draws his lessons from the most rebellious time in U.S.prison history: the New York State and City prison rebellions of the 1970s. Dr. Burton labels this period as the time of the “Long Attica Revolt,” which spanned New York State and which existed before and after the September 1971 rebellion at Attica State prison.
Fueling the Rebellions
Influenced in part by the wave of militant political activity of organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party in the late 1960s, captives in New York State and New York City prisons became increasingly politicized. They began to see jails as tools of white supremacy and social control.
Fueling this feeling were the arrests in April 1969 of the leadership of the New York Black Panther Party known as the Panther 21. Most were held on exorbitant bail and housed in city prisons.
Over the next several months, social prisoners and Black Panther defendants organized each other, placing the struggle over prison conditions in the context of the anti-white supremacist movement in the streets.
When negotiations with prison authorities failed, inmates at several city prisons rebelled and seized hostages. These include rebellions at the Tombs in lower Manhattan, Branch Queens in Long Island City, and the Queens House of Detention.