In the first few pages of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, Orisanmi Burton sets the tone with Queen Mother Moore’s 1973 speech from Green Haven Prison. Moore explains that imprisoned Black people are experiencing re-captivity. Similar to how Frantz Fanon understood that culture is developed out of anticolonial struggle, Burton argues that the Long Attica Revolt—not just the famous uprising of 1971, but also the state repression and resistance that led up to it and followed in its aftermath—fostered a new ontology of Blackness, a humanism that isn’t defined by European modernist definitions. Even more than the demands of the captives themselves, the Long Attica Revolt was a call for unity and a demand to struggle side by side to end war, capitalism, white supremacy, and other forms of state domination worldwide, behind and beyond the walls of the prisons.
Our sense of the Attica Revolt has primarily been shaped and limited by state and “official” archives. In contrast, The Tip of the Spear is spearheaded by conversations with movement elders and Attica rebels such as Eddie Ellis and once imprisoned revolutionaries including Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Jalil Muntaqim, who wrote to Burton that “we are the tip of the spear” (9). In addition to his ethnographic method that is built on deep trust, being in community with the captives, and Black radical epistemologies, Burton supports his narrative argument through an analysis of progressive journalism generated by media outlets such as the Village Voice, The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Palante, and The Black Scholar.
Additionally, he includes contemporary and archival interviews, archival footage and photographs of protestors, and even mainstream journalism from sources such as The New York Times. Burton’s relation to the moral and ethical grounding of his research is what separates his work from previous work on Attica, which Burton in turn places within a genealogy of the Black radical and revolutionary tradition, not just a separate four-day event that left 43 people dead.
Throughout the book, Burton offers significant evidence that resistance was demonstrated through art and cultural production. When framed as a war, propaganda happens on both sides. For the rebels, the purpose was to shape the prison movement narrative, to archive resistance efforts, to gain support from the outside, and to organize within the jails and prisons. Literary techniques and cultural tools— including poetry, autobiographies, letters, speeches, visual art, and photography—were dominant modes of their artistic practice. Burton spends considerable time on the use of prison letters: a lost art form, but ideal for this liberation struggle. These letters were a way to communicate with family and friends and to shape public narrative by being published in leftist media outlets. Some of these letters were written in blood, demonstrating how vital letter writing was to the individual and collective voice. Beyond letter writing, the rebels organized through the creation of manuals, manifestos, and a handwritten newspaper called the Inmates Forum, which had an estimated circulation of 200 at its height (8).
At length, Burton analyzes how the rebels “enacted an insurgent counter-humanism” (63). Burton cites Sylvia Wytner’s work on humanism, stating, “a new genre of human being was not determined in advance but was, rather, actively produced through the process of collective struggle” (52). Additionally, he returns to Frantz Fanon’s theory that anticolonial struggle leads to a death of the colonized being and opens up a new human horizon: “a new humanism is written into the objective and methods of struggle” (53). With this theoretical grounding, it is clear the rebels sought freedom, but not just from the carceral systems; they also struggled to define a new type of humanity, one that is counter to the Western construction of the human and the Other. The rebels deployed their abolitionist worldmaking writing praxis to create “counter narratives, counter archives, and counter memory” that would disrupt the portrait that they are just violent beasts, rather than men who are worthy of existence beyond their captivity and subsequent violent dehumanization.
For example, Burton writes about Leon, who was known as the “Writer for the People” and who uses an autopoetic writing technique that traces his personal evolution into a revolutionary, similar to George Jackson and Malcolm X. The term “autopoetic” (a blend of autobiographic and poetic) implies that Leon’s writing is both creative and self-reflective, while also merging artistry with political consciousness. This autobiographic prose was used by many captives in their letter writing praxis (theory in practice) which charted their own understanding of being nonhuman and transforming into a “spiritually conscious being” while also also carrying the weight of an active tool toward liberation.
In Prisoners Call Out: Freedom, Leon writes that “revolution has to be within the body of the person—that the revolution is a process of rearranging one’s values—to put it simply, the death of the nigger and the birth of the Black Man after coming to grips with being proud to be one’s self” (62). The em-dashes and interjection of phrases like “to put it simply” show Leon’s thinking in the process of development, not constrained by formulas or genres established ahead of time. The writing is in this way highly personal, at the same time that the emphasis on “one’s values” and “one’s self” points to an impersonal subject position—“one”— that others could inhabit alongside him, in the truly collective spirit of a “revolution.” It matters, too, that this subject position of Black Man, rendered in capitals unlike the racial epithet that is converted into it, announces a proper name, the recognition of a human being. For Leon, one becomes human through revolutionary spiritual development. This marks not only a shedding of personal oppression but also a collective rejection of anti-Blackness. To be Black and captive is to develop a “second sight”—an awareness that sharpens one’s perception of the world’s systemic violence. “Coming to grips with being proud to be one’s self” resonates with W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness, a struggle to reconcile selfhood with external oppression. Meanwhile, the notion of a “spiritually conscious being” signals transcendence beyond material captivity, aligning with Black radical traditions that frame emancipation as mental and spiritual decolonization—a concept central to Fanon’s work and to Wynter’s new “genres of human being.”
While some traditional artforms were practiced inside and outside the jail and prisons, Burton makes clear that other creative modes of producing and being are worth researching and theorizing beyond the visual and textual evidence. His methods and epistemological approach included the “sounds, silences, and rhythms of rebellion beyond the body, what Saidiya Hartman called black noise” (69). To name a few of these creative modes: the transformative power of changing one’s name; the art of oath taking; a sound that reinforces a commitment to a collective; and political theatre practiced by the rebels, knowing they could not win with outright violence against a resourcefully superior enemy. Burton includes these cultural productions to demonstrate that the rebels were abolitionist world makers, envisioning a world where all oppressed people were free, not just themselves.
Much of this text centers narratives that have been erased or invisible, even contemporarily. In Chapter 4, Burton covers a particularly undertheorized experience of Black men: the awful truth of sexual violence used against Black men under white supramacy, especially in the aftermath of the Attica uprising. He argues that sexual violence against the captives was in line with fetishizing Black flesh and in response to shifting power dynamics (even for the short period of time) that disrupted the white man’s dominant position. Burton argues that “the massacre was a collective act of sexual revenge, that aimed to punish the rebels and defend the racial breath within normative masculinity” (120). Furthermore: “The reconquest of Attica was a ‘parade,’ a ‘sport,’ a contest to see who among the mob could most completely obliterate, dominate and possess the Black male form. The lens, like the gun and the nigger stick, was simultaneously an instrument of violence and a tool of sexualized play” (136). Joining a tradition beginning with Ida B. Wells of framing lynching as a historical tool of sexual violence, Burton understands the photographic public display of the denuded Black body in Attica, and the use of castration, as tools for the aesthetic of racial terror.
In many ways, The Tip of the Spear is itself a kind of letter: Burton is writing to and for the Attica Rebels, current captives, and movement leaders within and beyond the prison walls. This includes abolitionists today, who can now look to Burton’s book as a model for how to do rigorous and grounded research that does not compromise his subject. This is a masterclass for academics and scholars to not liberalize revolutionary history. Moreover, in the epilogue, Burton reinforces that the war is not over. The Long Attica Revolt continues through contemporary organizations such as the Jericho Movement, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Black Men Build, jailhouse lawyers, and many other revolutionary formations. The Long Attica Revolt also continues because of the ongoing repression and pacification such as the creation of dozens of Cop Cities in the U.S. Burton offers a timely and important framework for how prison rebellions—and the culture they produced—are a method of analyzing and resisting state repression for today’s social movements.
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Ekundayo Igeleke