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The Attica Commune
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series Over the course of the Long Attica Revolt, imprisoned comrades confronted the dehumanizing conditions and horrific treatment of the carceral system. Tip of the Spear encourages us to understand that paired…
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The Long Attica revolt
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series Between Oct 1970 and the Attica Rebellion Sept 1971 the carceral system of NY was shaken by a series of escalating rebellions where incarcerated rebels fought back, captured hostages, communicated revolutionary…
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Setting the Stage for Revolt: The Context of the Long Attica Revolt
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…
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Exploring the Long Attica Revolt
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…
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Housing Then and Now – From 1947-2025
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series In the roughly 80 years since the Hickman case, not much has changed. We read the descriptions of housing conditions in the poor, Black neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1940s –…
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Ohio Street Trial
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series The inquest into the ten deaths on Ohio Street would involve five public hearings, only two of which would take place before the murder trial of James Hickman, but the horrendous…
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Courts are not Instruments of Justice
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series Banks and real estate & insurance companies had so influenced the political power in the city of Chicago (as elsewhere) that David Coleman, despite merely being a small landlord with no…
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Paper was Made to Burn, Coal and Rags, Not People
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series Property owner Mary Adams and landlord David Coleman avoided court till the last hearing, then tried passing blame on “irrational” tenants. But the surviving Hickmans and several other tenants all testified…
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Under Capitalism, Renting is a Death Sentence
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series The first three chapters of People Wasn’t Made to Burn set the stage for the housing conditions that were killing tenants in Chicago in 1947 — the conditions that killed James…
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People Wasn’t Made to Burn
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series “At 11:30 p.m. on January 16, 1947, a fire began in the center room of the attic at 1733 West Washburne Avenue, a turn-of-the-century four story-brick building on Chicago’s Near West…