With the recommendation by my sports politics professor, and seeing that it was a rose scholar event, i decided to attend Heather Ann Thompson’s discussion about her book documenting the Attica prison uprising in 1971. While the talk provided great information about the uprising, one of the main lessons learned could be applied to our current day life.

One of the interesting points made by Thompson was about the obstacles she had to overcome in order to start working on the book. She said that a lot of the information regarding the incident was not permissible for the public to see and that she had to get special permission in order to look at it. This leads into the problems with how the information regarding the incident has been blurred. The uprising started because the prisoners were demanding better conditions and the stop to abuse and they took hostages. After negotiations fell through, the state police was then sent to take back the prison. One of the images from the presentation slides that stood out to me was where there was a group of state troopers ready to storm the prison and one of them was looking back towards the camera looking almost afraid and skeptical. Like “something bad is about to happen”- foreshadowing.

In reality, during the uprising many of the prisoners were shot and killed or hit with tear gas (keep in mind that most of them were unarmed). What the public heard through the media was that the prisoners were the ones who escalated the events and caused the killings. On the front page of the NYT, there was a headline and story regarding the uprising that apparently had no corroboration. This informed what i took away most from this talk. The main lesson that i took away from this talk was that you have to read everything with a grain of salt and always be skeptical/questioning- look at all of the facts. There is alot of “fake news” and “alternative facts” swirling around the media nowadays and it is important that we do not rush to conclusions. It is worth it to take the time and find out the truth.