Frank Smith was the coach of Attica’s football team before he emerged as a leader of the rebellion. Smith, known as “Big Black,” organized security for the inmates during the uprising, and many of his players guarded hostages.

After the raid, when authorities already had control of Attica, police and corrections personnel tortured Smith. Smith testified that they—some apparently under the mistaken impression that he and other inmates had killed hostages—beat his testicles and played Russian roulette against his head. He said that the officers jammed a football under his chin: “they kept telling me that if it dropped they was going to kill me.”

Frank Smith interviewed in documentary ‘Ghosts of Attica’ (2002)

Letters and possessions

Inmate letters, 2011. Photo: John Carl D’Annibale, Times Union

In August 1971, one month before the uprising, prisoners calling themselves the Attica Liberation Front wrote to Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald with a manifesto of demands and a letter: “We hope that your department don’t cause us any hardships in the future because we are informing you of prison conditions. We are doing this in a democratic manner; and we do hope that you will aid us.”

Inmate meeting, 1971. Photo: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Those writings formed the core of the inmates’ demands during the four-day uprising. Inmates and authorities negotiated many of the points, but the state never accepted the most important one—amnesty from prosecution and reprisal — and finally decided to take Attica by force.

Inmates surrender, 1971. Photo: UPI / NYT

As the dust and gas of the raid cleared, troopers and corrections officers reasserted complete control. As Frank Smith testified, this meant beating and torturing several survivors.

Police also took control of personal effects—items belonging to guards like Ray Bogart, as well as inmates, living and dead. Joe Watson of Prison Legal News writes that troopers collected “personal letters to prisoners from their children, hundreds of photographs recovered…from the cells of slain prisoners, notebooks containing stories of prison life at Attica and copies of prisoners’ legal records.”

Personal effects of Rafael Vasquez, 2011. Photo: NYS Museum.

Rafael Vasquez was one of the 29 inmates killed by police; they catalogued his effects the day after the raid and locked them up for the next 40 years. In 2011, the Times Union photographed two items that reportedly fell from Vasquez’s pockets the day he died: a New Testament printed in Spanish and a color portrait of a young girl.

Inmate barracks and barricades, upended after the raid. Photo: Attica Revisited project / Elizabeth Fink

Waiting for the state

People trying to make sense of Attica hoped that objects like the ones featured on this page would help tell the story.

Researchers, families, and the rest of us are waiting now, hoping that these pieces of ‘general contraband’ don’t stay lost on the battlefield.