by NANCY HANOVER
Nixon-Rockefeller tapes praise bloodbath—“A beautiful operation”
Conditions at the prison, built in 1931, were notoriously brutal. Medical attention was often denied. The food was bad and sanitation non-existent. An all-white force of prison guards abused the inmates, predominately African-American and Puerto Rican, and deliberately provoked racial animosities.
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Many of the young men incarcerated in New York prisons had been influenced by the rise of black and Puerto Rican nationalism and organizations such as the Black Panthers and Young Lords. These oppositional currents were fed by the failure of the civil rights movement to effect any real improvements for the majority of minority youth. This was the period of the Vietnam War and convulsive events such as the assassinations of Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) and, less than a month prior to the Attica rebellion, Black Panther member George Jackson (August 21, 1971).
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