Tales from The b.a.SKET: Black Art Sketches for the Contemporary Art Lover

By D. Amari Jackson

This week, we reach into the b.a.SKET and pull out the United States of Attica…

On the morning of September 9, 1971, an historic explosion occurred, one that would shake the nation. Not the kind produced by dynamite or some form of carefully planted incendiary device, but a human explosion ignited by weeks of high tension between inmates and guards at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York. Prompted by the predominantly Black inmates’ ongoing and unanswered demands for such bare necessities as soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, bedsheets, and working toilets, the prisoners took 30 prison staffers hostage for five days to negotiate better living conditions while appealing to media, lawyers, and elected officials.

Tragically, one of the largest prison uprisings in American history ended on September 13 with 43 men dead including 33 inmates and 10 correctional employees mostly killed by law enforcement when the state stormed the prison shooting hostages and inmates alike. The event would prompt international protest and increase demands for prison reform and inmate rights around the globe.

Acclaimed artist and activist Faith Ringgold would protest as well. No stranger to pointing out injustice, the then 52-year-old Faith Ringgold produced the compelling lithograph, United States of Attica, 1972,  paying homage to the deceased inmates and mapping the historical American injustices that contributed to the horrific event. In her piece, she includes enslavement, major wars, Japanese internment, Native American genocide and forced relocation, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, among other relevant events.

For Ringgold, the bloodshed consuming the map depicts how violence and death have ever been integral to American culture and identity.

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Amari Jackson is a creator, author, TV/web/film producer, and award-winning journalist. He is author of the 2011 novel, The Savion Sequence; creator/writer/coproducer of the 2012-2014 web series The Book Look; writer/coproducer of the 2016 film Edge of the Pier; and current writer/coproducer of Listen Up! on HBCU GO/Roku TV. He is a former Chief of Staff for a NJ State Senator; a former VP of Communications & Development for the Jamestown Project at Harvard University; and a recipient of several writing fellowships including the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the Independent Press Association. An active ghost writer, song writer, martial artist, and journalist, his writings have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional publications.

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