A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the
revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements
and transformed prisons.
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons
are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book,
Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a
criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions
in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt
illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated
tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform,
and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to
eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.
Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied
on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral
history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the
intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led
the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison
movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip
of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of
prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of
counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black
life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.