28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series
Orisanmi Burton refers to prison as war. And prisons were only one facet of the ongoing war during this period. The Long Attica Revolt took place against a backdrop of international anti-colonial struggle across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. In the United States the Black Freedom Struggle came up against the limit of nonviolent civil disobedience. After the murders of Malcolm X, MLK, Fred Hampton, and so many more – the struggle took on a more militant character with mass urban rebellions shaking cities from LA to Detroit – and the return of a movement of armed struggle in the the belly of the beast.
For more than a decade revolutionary military struggles had successfully ousted colonial powers – one after another. The US was currently being defeated by the Vietnamese communists, with substantial internal defections and fraggings of officers. Some of the rebellious Black GI’s would return to the US and offer their experience and military training to the Black Liberation Army (BLA).
Between 1971 and 1973 American police killed nearly 1000 Black people. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was exposed in 1971. They had used covert measures to turn Black Panther Party members against each other, and participated in multiple direct and indirect frame ups and assassinations of key organizers.
In response to this escalating repression much of the movement turned toward armed struggle. Throughout 1971 BLA units attacked police in NYC, San Francisco, and Atlanta, partially in response to the murder of George Jackson and the raid on the Republic of New Afrika. After the murder of students at Kent State and Jackson State by police and national guard troops – anti-imperialist bombs went off on college campuses numbering in the hundreds.
This was the soil out of which the Long Attica Revolt grew.
