The following edited remarks were made on a Sept. 2, 2021, live broadcast, “50 Years of Resistance: Black August & Attica,” sponsored by the Prisoners Solidarity Committee of Workers World Party. Moorehead is a Workers World newspaper managing editor and a member of the PSC.  For many rev

I want to quote from a commentary written by WWP’s First Secretary, Larry Holmes, back in 2016: “The significance of the Attica uprising as a prison rebellion transcends prison. It was almost the Black Liberation Movement’s Paris Commune, of 100 years before in France, in 1871.

“Attica was spontaneous but to the extent that it was led, it was organized by revolutionaries — highly political individuals who considered themselves Marxists, Maoists, Black liberationists. They organized committees for food, for negotiations.

“Their demands included: Prisoners should be considered workers. The workday should be eight hours. Prisoners should have the right to form a union. Prisons should be made to conform to New York state labor laws, including wages and workers’ compensation for accidents. Prisoners should have access to vocational training, union pay scales, union membership.”

The prisoners also demanded that they be granted asylum to an anti-imperialist country.

The lessons of Black August and Attica are not just about the past but the present and the future. Their legacies today are about resistance and fightback against capitalism that apply to so many fronts, be they Black Lives Matter, the climate crisis, evictions and more. Their legacies are about freeing all political prisoners and shutting down all aspects of mass incarceration.

When Attica martyr, L.D. Barkley stated that Attica is the sound before the fury of all the oppressed, he was referring to the multinational voices of workers using rebellion to be visible and heard then, but also now with the global working class that will one day take its rightful place as being the gravediggers of capitalism.

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