Last week, I had the opportunity to hear Heather Ann Thompson speak about her book “Blood in The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy”. Previously, I had heard the term Attica thrown around occasionally but never actually knew the context, so I was intrigued to learn more.

What I hear in that lecture hall was truly sickening. On September 13, 1971, prisoners at Attica Prison staged a revolt and held hostages in order to negotiate and attain basic human rights that they had been denied, things as simple as sufficient food and water. After a false hope of meeting these demands, state police arrived and killed prisoners and hostages alike. Those left alive were subsequently humiliated and tortured.

This is not the story the public had heard, however. After careful crafting and, how Thompson described, “various meetings in the pool house to get everyone’s stories straight”, the public was informed that the prisoners were responsible for the dead after days of riots in the prison. In the process of writing this book, Thompson described the obstacles she encountered in gathering this information because of how warped the records continue to be and the misinformation that persists about what really happened on that September day.  It’s stories like these that have me questioning what other events in our history the government has manipulated in order to save face.