September 29, 2024
To Whom it May Concern,
The purpose of this letter is to address the intensifying effort on the part of prison officials to prevent incarcerated people from reading my book—Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (The University of California Press, 2023). The book is currently banned from prisons in several states, including New York, Florida, Michigan, and California, where it was “placed on the Centralized List of Disapproved Publications” and is now considered “Contraband,” meaning imprisoned people found with it in their possession can be punished. Decisions such as these are why prisons have been deemed the most restrictive reading environments in the United States.
Tip of the Spear is a work of historical ethnography that builds on over a decade of painstaking research. Its primary argument is that prisons in the United States are best understood as technologies of domestic warfare masquerading as apolitical instruments of crime control. The book demonstrates that in response to the urban rebellions of the 1960s and the growth of antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist organizations like the Black Panther Party, state actors at various levels of government weaponized prisons as part of a broader counterinsurgency against the possibility of radical social transformation within and beyond the United States. It shows that rather than debilitating these movements, as the state had expected, the resulting increase of politically active prisoners precipitated new movements that evolved behind prison walls. It is in the praxis of this imprisoned struggle that the roots of contemporary prison abolition politics are to be found. Conversely, it is in the state’s attempt to transform the prison into an instrument capable of crushing this movement and destroying this knowledge that a key impetus for massive growth of the prison system after 1970 can be found.
The primary setting for the book is the New York State Prison system during the 1970s which allowed me to offer a radical re-narration and retheorization of the well-known, but poorly understood, Attica prison rebellion of 1971. While Attica is typically framed as a four-day rebellion by incarcerated people for improved prison conditions, I stretch the temporality and geography of the rebellion and recover its revolutionary, anticolonial, and abolitionist dimensions. I also show how in order to neutralize this incarcerated prison movement, prison administrators, or what I call “prisoncrats,” integrated colonial theories of counterinsurgency into the normalized routines of prison management. In doing so, I show that a primary driver of prison expansion, reform, and innovation and thus a primary driver of US historical and political development is an anti-Black and antiradical imperative.
I reject the notion that my book “advocates … lawlessness, violence, anarchy, or rebellion against governmental authority,” or that it “incite[s] disobedience,” as was claimed in a memo from New York prison officials who rejected the book from Mohawk Correctional Facility. A close reading of Tip of the Spear will reveal that it advocates only that people think in radically different ways about the historical role of prisons in US society. It is deeply revealing, however, that you so readily confuse advocacy of unorthodox forms of thought with the promotion of violence, for it lays bare the totalitarian impulse at the core of your enterprise.
What disturbs you is not the book’s alleged advocacy of violence as such, but how it explicates the primary source from which the vast majority of prison-based violence flows: the state. The prisoner-led rebellions of the 1970s that you interpret as “violence” erupted within a pervasive atmosphere of racist and political repression, systematic dehumanization, psychological warfare, sexualized terror, and medicalized torture carried out by a broad network of state actors who were operating with near total impunity. This is attested to by copious and well-cited evidence. I invite you to engage my sources, and as you do, to think about why only certain forms of harm are coded as violence.
While it does not advocate rebellion, Tip of the Spear refuses to denounce, condemn, and pathologize the imprisoned Black militants of the 1970s, many of whom at various moments not only advocated but actively engaged in “lawlessness,” “violence,” “anarchy,” and “rebellion against governmental authority.” This too is the source of your dismay. Against the tendency to flatten and pathologize prison rebels as manic “extremists,” I narrate them as highly intelligent and rational beings who were thinking strategically about the role of violence, not only in the maintenance of their subjugation, but also in their collective political struggle within and against one of the most repressive institutions of the racist capitalist state.
What you call “violence,” I call “counterviolence”: a countervailing force exerted by people whose only other option was to allow themselves to be abused and destroyed with little to no opposition from communities beyond the walls. As jailhouse lawyer Martin Sostre wrote in a law review article from 1972, “The Attica Rebellion was the result of recognition, after decades of painful exhaustion of all peaceful means of obtaining redress, of the impossibility of obtaining justice within the ‘legal’ framework of an oppressive racist society which was founded on the most heinous injustices: murder, robbery, slavery.”
In line with Sostre’s productive rethinking of justice, I cannot help but reflect on the irony of the fact that your charge that Tip of the Spear advocates violence emanates from a site of institutionalized violence named after a Native American tribe whose land was stolen by the US government and whose members are the historical victims of the state-orchestrated crime of genocide. The counterviolence of oppressed people is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the violence prisons perpetuate. As historian Walter Rodney explains, “Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
I was much more impressed by what Florida prison officials had to say when they rejected my book. In capital letters, they wrote: “BOOK DEPICTS PRISON AS A RACIST INSTITUTION DESIGNED TO REPRESS BLACK COMMUNITIES AND VOICES.” Arguing this point was indeed one of the major tasks of my book. I marshaled a considerable amount of archival research to demonstrate that in 1971, in the wake of a massive rebellion at Attica Prison and the state administered massacre that followed, prisons began to integrate international techniques of counterinsurgency warfare into their normal operation. As Florida officials seem to have recognized, not only do these techniques target Black populations (communities), they also aim to eradicate Black radical theories, narratives, and ideas (voices). Your censorship of my book attests to the ongoingness of these historical imperatives.
The above acknowledgement notwithstanding, I take exception to the second and final sentence of the Florida official’s explanation: “MAY LEAD TO RIOTS OR INSURECTION [sic] WITHIN THE PRISON.” This claim is consistent with a centuries long tradition whereby those who enforce systems of domination attribute discontent, protest, and rebellion to “outside agitators.” Just as plantation owners of the 18th century employed this discourse to explain slave rebellions, and segregationists employed it to explain Civil Rights and Black Power mobilization, prison officials employ it to explain prison resistance movements. For example, during Vincent R. Mancusi’s 1971 testimony regarding Attica, the beleaguered warden attributed the rebellion’s cause, in part, to “radical literature and propaganda.” Building on similar “evidence” two years later, Missouri Congressman Richard H. Ichord bemoaned before an audience at a conference of the conservative Daughters of the American Revolution, that “revolutionary literature is flooding prisons today [and] … possibly as a consequence, prison violence is accelerating at an alarming rate.” Note the mental gymnastics needed to celebrate the so-called revolution of American slave owners against the British Crown while simultaneously demonizing the Black antislavery revolution in America.
What disturbs you is not the book’s alleged advocacy of violence as such, but how it explicates the primary source from which the vast majority of prison-based violence flows: the state.
Notably, Congressman Ichord was then acting as chairman of the House Internal Security Committee—which had recently changed its name from the House Un-American Activities Committee—the Cold War institution that infamously criminalized and harassed countless people accused of harboring communist sympathies. By recycling the well-worn “outside agitator” trope, you reveal the prison’s role in reproducing anti-Black racism and antiradical hysteria, mutually reinforcing ideologies that that constitute what Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelley terms “The Black Scare/Red Scare.” Furthermore, your rationalization for censoring my book is a facile attempt to abdicate your responsibility for creating environments conducive to rebellion, and to obscure the fact that oppressed people have the capacity to comprehend and develop effective responses to their own oppression. So said Richard X. Clark, an elected spokesmen of the Attica rebels, who challenged Mancusi and Ichord’s assertions, proclaiming, “I’ll tell you what caused the riot at Attica: Attica … The conditions that existed there made it inevitable.”
Your censorship of my book must be understood within the broader context of an intensifying US-based propaganda war that is aggressively silencing critical, internationalist, and anti-imperialist perspectives. Examples include but are not limited to: the brutal, nation-wide repression of pro-Palestinian voices and activism; the various school and library book bans and curriculum restrictions enacted as part of the coordinated right-wing attack on so-called critical race theory; the suppression, demonetization, and banning of left voices from YouTube, Meta, and other social media platforms; the persecution of the “Uhuru 3”—Florida-based activists whose organizing for Black self-determination was smeared with the false charge that they were acting as “foreign agents.”
Many frame these curtailments to free speech as a threat to democracy and as evidence of rising authoritarianism that could, at some future moment, take hold in the United States. In contrast to this view, imprisoned Black radical intellectuals like George L. Jackson have long argued that “fascism is already here.” Jackson and others did not see the prison-based rituals of censorship, violence, exploitation, and white supremacy as exceptions to the norms of liberal democracy. Rather, they saw them as a distillation, the very essence of society that was founded on genocide and slavery and that continues to be ruled by monopoly capital. Under such conditions, elite control over the flow of knowledge is imperative. “The [modus operandi] of the fascist arrangement is always to protect the capitalist class by destroying the consciousness, the trust, the unity of the lower classes,” Jackson wrote in Soledad Brother, which is also considered contraband in prisons throughout the United States. You honor me by placing my book in such esteemed company.
The real issue is not that my book may incite riots, but that your hold on power is so fragile, so tenuous, so devoid of legitimacy that mere words on a page may be enough to make your cages of concrete and steel go up in flames. Given this reality, you are right to censor my book. But I want to let you in on something. The thesis of Tip of the Spear was not invented in a library. To the contrary, it was developed through archival and oral history methods that center the consciousness of imprisoned Black revolutionaries like Martin Sostre, George Jackson, the Attica Brothers, and many others. The text is an act of radical recovery that stitches together previously discredited and imprisoned formations of knowledge and reads them against official narratives.
This means that while most of the people in your cages may not be privy to all of the history the book lays out, they will certainly be familiar with the notion that prisons are a domain of war because this is something I learned from them. Incarcerated people did not need to read Tip of the Spear in 2016 or 2018, when they collectively challenged governmental authority by organizing National Strikes to coincide with the anniversaries of George Jackson’s August 21, 1971, assassination by California prison authorities and the Attica rebellion three weeks later. Your efforts at censorship are futile because they both misrecognize the source of the knowledge contained in the Tip of the Spear and overestimate your capacity to effectively control ideas and behavior. As political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal explains, “A people can never acquiesce to the state’s imposition of mental contraband.”
In fierce opposition,
Orisanmi Burton 
Featured image: “Attica : we are not beasts, and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such” by Young Socialist Alliance via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.