Attica: the story behind the bloodiest prison riot in US history
Mention Attica and an iconic moment from Dog Day Afternoon is often top of mind. In Sidney Lumet’s powder-keg film from 1975, Al Pacino’s bank robber turned hostage taker yells “Attica! Attica! Attica!” in a standoff with police. He riles up the gathered crowds and wins sympathy for his predicament by invoking the tragedy that occurred just a few years ago, when inmates took control of Attica correctional facility in a fight for their humanity, keeping trigger happy police at bay outside the prison walls for four days.
There is so much to say about that Dog Day Afternoon scene, where a white man invokes a prison rebellion led largely by Black and brown men to win the support of fellow white onlookers, subsequently supplanting the harrowing real life event in cultural memory.
Consider Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry’s Attica an act of reclamation, then. Their powerfully empathetic, insightful and riveting documentary – airing on Showtime just over 50 years after the Attica rebellion – chronicles the events that began as a fight among inmates and guards, and immediately exploded into an incredibly organized coup with prisoners taking control of the prison and demanding national media attention.
Prison staff were taken hostage but kept safe under the protection of Muslim prisoners. The inmates also set up security details for the news cameras that were invited inside to listen to testimonies of brutality and inhumane conditions and the back-andforth negotiations for a peaceful resolution that never came. The doc, made up of archival footage and interviews with inmates, lawyers and journalists on scene, also skillfully weaves in the cultural fabric that led to what is still the bloodiest prison rebellion in US history.
“What happened inside Attica resonated with what was happening outside Attica in 1971,” Curry told the Guardian on a Zoom call alongside Nelson. She explains that many of the inmates at Attica included members of radical groups like Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Young Lords, who would educate fellow prisoners and spread the spirit of activism that was prevalent across the nation during the Vietnam war. Curry, who began her collaborations with Nelson as a producer on a handful of recent projects before stepping into a co-director role on this film, adds that Attica was resonating with the reality outside her own Brooklyn apartment while they were making the film in 2020.
“It really crystallized what this film was all about, watching George Floyd protests happening outside my window,” says Curry. She talks about witnessing police descending on protesters from her apartment. She compares Donald Trump’s attack on peaceful protesters near the White House to York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s political opportunism while handling Attica. She compares the disregard for life and humanity in Attica to the early days of the pandemic in US prisons, where Covid-19 outbreaks ravage the incarcerated population. “Attica is an invitation for us to reconsider a lot of what we’re willing to allow the state to do in our name today.”
Attica, the film, also feels like a continuation and cumulation of the documentaries Nelson has been making for more than three decades. Whether directing on his own or collaborating with others, Nelson has been building a tapestry that captures so many vital stories in African American history and daily life.
“I would feel very strongly that people should make films about the communities that they’re from and
something that they know about and get into in a deeper way,” says Nelson, who was 20 when Attica happened. “I remember the utter shock and devastation when it ended up the way it ended up.”
Nelson is speaking from his office in Harlem, with the multiple Emmy and Peabody awards he accumulated over the years strategically framed around him. I can also spy the National Medal in the Humanities he received from Barack Obama way in the back.
Nelson’s first film, 1989’s Two Dollars and A Dream, was a biography on cosmetics entrepreneur Madame CJ Walker, the first female self-made millionaire. That story bears a family connection to the film-maker. Nelson’s grandfather FB Ransom was Walker’s attorney and the general manager of her enterprise. His mother, A’Lelia Nelson, became the company’s president for a time. Nelson’s film-making career essentially began with a story in his DNA before expanding out. He made biographies on Marcus Garvey and Miles Davis along with docs that celebrated Black press, activists and colleges. His most recent film, the Netflix documentary Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy, covered the institutional failures behind the crack epidemic that led to the mass incarceration of so many Black people.
Nelson’s films also have a tendency to speak to each other. His 2014 documentary Freedom Summer, about a 1964 drive to encourage African American voter registration, ends with civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael yelling “Black Power!” And his follow-up film, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, coincidentally begins with the same chant. But that’s an unintentional consequence of chronicling the African-American experience throughout a century and stumbling on echoes and overlaps. These stories simply don’t exist in a vacuum. “What we have gone through, what we’re going through in this culture, is all tied up together,” says Nelson. And so it goes that the stories of institutional failures, passionate activism and Black self-determination featured in Nelson’s past work are also elements in Attica, which in many ways feels like a compelling, all-encompassing microcosm of America.
There’s another element to the Attica story that resonates today. The protests and racial reckoning of the past year happened because a young woman named Darnella Frazier stood by and recorded George Floyd’s murder. Her act of witnessing mobilized the country.
The cameras served a similar function at Attica. The inmates, Nelson reminds, called the media and their TV cameras into the prison. They did that so the nation could hear them speak their truth and the cameras can serve as witness. “They thought that if the news media came in and filmed it, they would be protected,” says Nelson, “and thank God they did.”
His documentary is built from all that visceral, on-the-ground footage from fifty-years ago, continuing the act of witnessing the inmates pushed for back then. “It makes us able to tell the story of Attica in a way that we can’t in any other prison uprising in this country. We could tell the story of Attica when we could see it.”
Attica is now out in US cinemas and will air on Showtime on 6 November with a UK date to be announced