28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series
For the final week of our 28 Days of Black Liberation program we will be looking at the Long Attica Revolt and the role of prisoners in the Black Liberation Struggle using Orisanmi Burton’s book Tip of the Spear.
During spring of 2024 the GDC Abolitionist Working group did a collective study group around this book and it had an enormous impact on us and our work with imprisoned comrades. Burton’s book drives home the idea that prisons are war, and that prisoners are a vanguard of the struggle, placed behind enemy lines, but also uniquely positioned to “catalyze movements beyond the walls”. He writes that prisons are “state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency. But they are also domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation.”
Over the course of the next week we will dig into the backdrop of intense global anticolonial struggle in which the Long Attica Revolt arose, the protracted struggles within the carceral system of New York that define the Long Attica Revolt beyond the four days in September 1971. We will explore the Attica commune – the Abolitionist Worldmaking during the course of the rebellion – the collective labor, social organization, gender identity, and political struggle around both the minimal demands concerning prison conditions, as well as the maximum demand toward allied communities across the prison walls and beyond US territorial boundaries. The content of this maximum demand was the abolition of prisons, the abolition of war, the abolition of racial capitalism, the abolition of White Man, and the emergence of new modes of social life not predicated on enclosure, extraction, domination, or dehumanization.
We will close out the week by looking at the legacy of the Long Attica Revolt, both in terms of inspiration for our continued revolutionary struggle, as well as the legacy of prisons as the laboratory for repression and counter-insurgency. On Friday we will host a benefit show to raise money for Detroit Jericho and highlight the continuing struggle to free political prisoners and prisoners of war.