Today’s episodes of Making Contact and Pushing Limits are preempted by special programming for KPFA’s 2025 Winter Fund Drive.

For four days in September of 1971, prisoners revolted, taking over the institution that incarcerated them in upstate New York. By the time the dust settled in Attica, 33 prisoners and 10 guards or staff had been killed – notably all but one guard and three prisoners were killed by law enforcement gunfire when the state violently retook control of the prison. While the Attica rebellion has become fairly widely known, our guest has written a powerful book that reframes that rebellion not as a singular uprising, but as one important piece that contextualizes a series of rebellions by prisoners, engaging in tactics that include counter-violence, against the violence of the white supremacist capitalist framing of our society itself, asserting that US prisons are literal sites of war. Our guest is Orisanmi Burton, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, who describes this framing in his book as the Long Attica Revolt, or in description, “revolutionary struggle for decolonization and abolition at the site of the US prison”. His book is called Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Prisoners in, at least New York, Florida, Michigan, and California, have been banned from reading it under fears that it may itself incite rebellion. That’s a claim that our guest today rejects.

FUND DRIVE SPECIAL – Pledge $120 and receive Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton. 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.

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