Big Black Review

I was born a year after the Attica Prison massacre* so I obviously don't have any direct recollections of the events at the time. I was also too young to recall when Dog Day Afternoon came out and threw the chant of "Attica! Attica!" into pop culture. Consequently, I'm mostly familiar with the events through third-hand parodies that use that chant as a cultural touchstone. I'd learned enough to know Attica was the name of a prison and that there was some kind of incident there where inmates were treated horribly, but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge going in to reading Big Black: Stand at Attica.

What actually happened in Attica is relayed in Big Black: Stand at Attica. The story comes from Frank 'Big Black' Smith, who was a central figure in the events. Although he himself died in 2004, he had been working with writer Jared Reinmuth since 1997 to get his story out in various forms, and Reinmuth continued working with Smith's widow afterwards. So while the graphic novel itself (drawn by Améziane) was made after Smith's death, it draws heavily on his own words and experiences, and provides a direct view of what happened inside Attica's walls.

The story was hard to read. Not because it was written poorly, but because of its brutal honesty about how awful the prison was. The prisoners' revolt was initiated in part because the corrections officers were literally beating other prisoners to death. There was such rampant racism in place that officers were actively looking for any excuse to mistreat the prisoners. Often that was beatings, but it also included starvation and isolation. Through a stroke of fortune, they were able to take over the prison facility and basically just demanded they be treated like human beings. Governor Rockefeller sent in troops to slaughter them, and prisoners such as Smith were then tortured by the officers for days afterwards. And the entire time, the media was fed lies about how the prisoners were killing hostages and threatening to overrun the nearby towns. It was only the honesty of the coroner (who continued to going to the press insisting the slain officers died of gunshot wounds -- wounds that could not have been inflicted by the unarmed prisoners) that people began to understand the truly heinous treatment the prisoners were being subjected to.

The sheer depths of depravity that the guards sank to, that Governor Rockefeller -- and indeed President Nixon himself -- not only condoned but actively endorsed, that the media casually neglected to investigate... it's absolutely horrible. I hate our prison system as it stands today; I can't imagine how staggeringly bad it must have been in 1971.

But as painful as it can be to read, this story needs to be shared. Because here in 2020, we like to think we're better than we used to be. That we've overcome a lot of the problems that were fought against during the Civil Rights Movement. But there's a lot of this still out there. You see people complaining about treatment from ICE? They're doing the exact same shit. But to get a sense of what they're stonewalling away from reporters today, I think it's relevant to look at what kinds of things they did in the past. I can almost guarantee the same horror stories are happening right now, and we're just not hearing about them.

The storytelling is really solid. They make the unusual challenge of telling things somewhat out of chronological order, with most of it couched as a series of flashbacks. This can be tricky to juggle for readers, as they try to remember where/when they are during different parts of the book, but it's handled well here, and I never got any sense of confusion from that perspective. There were a couple of individual figures that were drawn similarly enough that it was a little difficult to distinguish one from another on occasion, but that was generally rectified fairly quickly in the dialogue.

I liked the approach overall. I find that many biographic and/or historical narratives are so intent on making sure they remain accurate that the story becomes more illustrated prose than comic. But things flow smoothly here with a lot of (I expect invented) dialogue to ground the story more directly. Some of the public pronouncements -- things that showed up on the news or came out as prepared statements -- seem to be pulled from actual source material, and provide more authenticity. Particularly to the blatant attempts by the government and prison officials to snow the public.

The events that occurred in Attica probably aren't going to be taught in any social studies class. We're far enough removed from the original events that most everyone directly involved is dead. But these problems still haunt our overcrowded prisons and other detention facilities. I suspect the biggest learnings people got from the Attica Prison Massacre were how to better conceal mistreatment, and how to manage the PR better if it's discovered. (See the fallout from the Abu Ghraib torturing for evidence of that!) So despite the difficulty in reading through Smith's story here, I think Big Black: Stand at Attica is well worth reading so we all know what to be on the look out for in our prison system.

* This incident is more commonly know as the Attica Prison riot, but I take the term "riot" to be propaganda. The prisoners did NOT riot. The incident was, by any factual accounts, very orderly and controlled. Until the police came in and start shooting anything that moved... including their own. Nine officers were killed and one was wounded by their own gunfire. This incident was about police lashing out of sheer hatred, indiscriminately killing anyone who was even in the vicinity of a Black person. The Attica inmates were armed only with sticks and pipes, and were gunned down by officers who were embarrassed by their own inadequacies. Big Black: Stand at Attica doesn't refer to this as a massacre, but that's absolutely what it was.

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