Blood in the Water

by Thompson, Heather Ann

  Whatever the rest of America may have thought, there was one group of people that was outraged by both the actions and the inaction of the state: family members of the prisoners at Attica. At the same time that Dr. Edland was being attacked for his autopsy findings on the hostages, many of the children, parents, and partners of the prisoners still had no idea whether their loved ones were alive or dead, injured or well. The state had yet to communicate with them in person, or even to release a list of the casualties. Their indignities and trauma would continue.

  26

  Funerals and Fallout

  In the days and weeks that followed the retaking of Attica prison, the volume of calls from “the worried relatives of Attica prisoners who [had] heard no word on whether their loved ones survived” continued to jam the switchboards at the prison and at DOCS in Albany.1 Even Dr. John Edland initially hadn’t any idea who most of the prisoners were on the slabs in his morgue. Recognizing that these were people with families who would want to know the fate of their loved ones, though, Edland had fingerprinted each of the bodies “for identification to be made on that basis.”2

  Edland was one of the few state employees who felt that these men needed to be treated humanely in death. When a DOCS official finally released “a full list of inmate casualties with their backgrounds” to the media outside Attica on September 16, indicating the crime each slain man had been convicted of after reading his name, according to reporters, “Prison guards threw up clenched fists…[and shouted] ‘White Power.’ ”3

  Still no one from the state of New York ever contacted the families of the dead prisoners by phone or personal letter to tell them the fate of their loved one. Most had to hear this terrible news over the radio and only then because Howard Coles, a popular African American radio personality from Rochester, had decided to dedicate his popular broadcast to providing his listeners with whatever information the DOCS released about the dead as soon as it was made available.4 This was how Laverne Barkley finally found out what had happened to her son. For days she had been trying to reach someone at the prison for word of L.D., and when she got nowhere with state officials, she decided to drive across town to the headquarters of FIGHT—the social justice organization run by minister Franklin Florence, one of the observers—to see if she could get him to help her. But before she ever got to the office, while she was still circling the street looking for a parking space, she heard her son’s name being read over the radio.5 Her young daughter Traycee, who was sitting next to her in the passenger seat, watched in great distress as her mother almost lost control of the car, pulled over, and collapsed in grief.6 Now that L.D. was dead, Mrs. Barkley berated herself for never having taken his complaints about his treatment at the prison seriously enough. Just before the uprising L.D. had said to her: “You can’t imagine what it is like here….I know that there is a possibility that I shall never leave here alive.”7

  Other parents had their own burdens of guilt. The grief-stricken parents of Lorenzo McNeil felt that they were in some way responsible for the death of their twenty-nine-year-old son because they had actually “persuaded him to give up his parole and return to prison for the last 18 months of his sentence” so that he would be guaranteed to keep away from trouble on the outside and be able to start fresh when his time was over.8 Talking to reporters as she sat in her home in Queens, his mother recounted how he had “tried to keep a job, but every time they would find out he was a convict they would fire him….We were afraid he would go out and steal some money again and it was better to send him back again than to let him do that….We thought we were doing the best thing at the time.”9 Elizabeth Durham, the mother of twenty-year-old slain prisoner Allen Durham, was also grieving deeply, and also feeling that her son might still be alive if she had acted differently. Allen had just written to tell her that “he was taking up a trade in tailoring and did not want to be transferred from Attica until he finished,” and she hadn’t tried to talk him out of that decision.10

  And then there were the families that didn’t get the news via the newspaper or radio, but received notification via telegrams that eventually came from the prison. As one such notification read: “REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND RAYMOND RIVERA NUMBER 29533 HAS DECEASED. THE BODY REPOSES AT THIS INSTITUTION.”11 As late as September 18, some inmate families had still received no notification.12

  Even having official confirmation of a son’s, brother’s, or husband’s death at Attica did not necessarily mean closure for many family members because it remained unclear where their loved one’s body was or when the state was going to release him for burial. Arranging for funerals was thus most difficult. It wasn’t until the afternoon of September 17 that Vincent Mancusi sent Dr. Edland a telegram finally authorizing him “to release all bodies in your establishment to the authorized undertakers,” and then it took still more days before the bodies arrived at the places where they would be prepared for interment.13

  Plans were made to send the bodies of Samuel Melville and Barry Schwartz to Parsky Funeral Home, L. D. Barkley’s remains were to go to Latimer Funeral Home in Rochester, and other prisoner bodies to other places such as N. J. Miller’s funeral parlor and Hauner Funeral Home. However, for seventeen dead prisoners still at the morgue there was no clear idea where they might go to be buried.14 The Fortune Society had advised Mancusi that it would gladly “bury any inmates not claimed by family or anyone. Please advise,” but the superintendent was not at all eager to talk about the logistics of prisoner funerals with this organization or any other.15

  Once L. D. Barkley’s mother learned of her son’s whereabouts, she began planning his funeral, which turned into a community-wide memorial and celebration of his life. The event took place on September 20, and it brought the area around Rochester’s AME Memorial Zion Church to a standstill.

  The old red-brick church in the midst of an urban renewal project in Rochester’s black community was crowded by a “throng of more than 1,000” overflowing into the surrounding streets, which were jammed with residents who had come to pay their respects to L.D.16 Canon St. Julian Simpkins from St. Simon’s Episcopal Church presided over the service, the congregation sang spirituals, including “Oh Freedom,” and three powerful eulogies lauded L.D. as “a martyr to end man’s inhumanity to man.”17 The congregation was reminded that L.D. had been in Attica only for a parole violation, and that the original “crime” for which he had been on parole consisted of forging a money order for $124.50.18 Many local luminaries, including one of the Attica observers, minister Raymond Scott, president of Rochester’s FIGHT, gave passionate speeches about Attica and L.D.’s struggle for human rights in that prison. At the conclusion of the service a hearse at the head of a long motorcade took L. D. Barkley’s body to Mount Hope Cemetery for burial.19

  Four days later the streets of Brooklyn, New York, were teeming with thousands of people who hoped to pay their respects to other prisoners killed at Attica.20 Before the funeral began at the Cornerstone Baptist Church, a sea of people surrounded the coffins of the six men as they were carried through the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant.21 Inside the church, the walls vibrated with the thunder of impassioned speeches. People were gripped with anguish and fury as the service proceeded. But outrage trumped all other emotions when the church officiants announced to the assembled crowd of mourners that the burials could not take place as planned. They had just been ordered to send three of the bodies back to the medical examiner’s office in Rochester “because of a dispute over their identity.”22 At noon the bodies of three men were removed from the church as the crowds looked on from the packed sidewalks, wondering if the indignities would ever cease.23

  Mourners raise the Black Power salute at L. D. Barkley’s funeral. (Courtesy of the Associated Press)

  Hearses bearing the bodies of six Attica inmates process through Brooklyn, September 25. (Courtesy of The New York Times)

  Other prisoner funerals took place with far smaller crowds and much less fanfare
. For some of the prisoners who’d been killed at Attica, there was no ceremony. Like the Fortune Society, other community groups in New York City felt they had to do something about this, and a number of groups came together for a series of meetings at Westminster Presbyterian, the church of Rev. C. Herbert Oliver. Reverend Oliver was a Brooklyn activist, known among African American and Latino parents in this neighborhood as a supporter and former chairman of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Experimental School District. Oliver wanted to find a way to bury the unclaimed dead of Attica. As he explained, “the men who laid down their lives at Attica did a great service to me, you, the city, the state and the world.” Oliver and another Ocean Hill–Brownsville activist, Sonny Carson, helped jump-start fundraising for those burials.24

  Soon additional organizations and individuals began raising money to help those prisoner families who wanted to bury their loved ones but had no money to do so. The Urban League of New York and singer Aretha Franklin held a big fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on behalf of victim families.25 Student groups at various schools around the country also collected donations. Students from Cornell University managed to “collect $700 for families of deceased riot victims.”26 To the surprise of several prisoner families, the Gannett Newspaper group in Rochester included them when collecting funds for victims’ families in its Lend-a-Hand program. Out of a total of $21,000 that was contributed for the families of those slain at Attica, however, the fund gave only $1,964 to three prisoner families and the rest went to the families of hostages.27

  The families who had lost a guard or civilian employee at Attica were just as grateful as the families of the inmates for the financial help they received, and in many cases they were just as needy. Many of the wives and children of the prison employees who had been killed in Attica had been plummeted into poverty by the loss of the sole breadwinner in the family. Edward Cunningham, one of the guard hostages, was survived by his wife and eight children. Funds came to the families from a variety of sources, including other COs who contributed to the “Attica Family Memorial Fund.” The families of William Quinn and nine of the slain hostages—Elon Werner, Ronald Werner, Elmer Hardie, Edward Cunningham, Herbert Jones, John Monteleone, Richard Lewis, Carl Valone, and John D’Arcangelo—were so grateful that on September 29 they took out a full-page ad in the local paper to thank “all who offered us aid and assistance.”28 “As people said to us,” they wrote, “ ‘We have no words to express our grief.’ We now say to you, ‘We have no words to express our gratitude.’ ”29

  The first funeral to be held for a prison employee victim of the uprising was William Quinn’s on September 15 at St. Vincent’s in the village of Attica. Afterward, as his family sobbed and the community grieved alongside them at the gravesite, many also expressed their anger that Russell Oswald was nowhere to be seen at this commemoration of Quinn’s life and his service to the state of New York. When asked why he had not attended the funeral, Commissioner Oswald said, rather sheepishly, that it was because he thought “there might have been resentments.”30 The following day John Monteleone was buried, leaving five children behind.

  An honor guard of four hundred men marches through downtown Attica for William Quinn’s funeral. (Courtesy of the LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

  Just as with some of the prisoners’ funerals, some of the funerals for the slain guards were delayed because of ongoing controversies about the cause of their deaths. The funeral of Richard Lewis was delayed when his body was sent back for a second autopsy, this time by Michael Baden.31 And even though the funeral of John D’Arcangelo was held as planned on September 16, in Auburn at St. Mary’s Church, his body was then returned to the Farrell Funeral Home to be examined by Dr. Siegel.32 In some cases these delays meant that no family members were able to be present when the burials finally took place.33

  September 17 was the day of the largest number of funerals for the slain hostages, when five men were buried: Elmer Hardie, Herbert Jones, Ronald Werner, Elon Werner, and Edward Cunningham. “From early morning until late afternoon…there was scarcely a moment without a funeral, a cortege or a graveside ceremony in progress,” wrote a local reporter, and these commemorations “brought prison guards and police men from Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and around New York State to stand silently in ranks, saluting the coffins as they passed from funeral home to hearse, from hearse to church, from church to cemetery.”34 Those who drove down Route 98 to attend the funerals would have seen a road lined with “flags at half-mast in solemn tribute to the sacrifices made by the employees of the Attica Correctional Facility.”35 Local stores were closed to honor the killed hostages, and many posted “small signs printed in black ink, saying: ‘In respect, closing Friday, Sept. 17.’ ”36

  The day of mourning ended in the late afternoon at the gravesite of Herbert Jones, who had left behind a twenty-month-old daughter.37 All of the funerals that day had been extremely emotional, but people were particularly struck by the senselessness of the death of Elon Werner—a humble man who had not been a guard but a senior accountant at Attica, and “was regarded by many…as a nonpareil, a man of gentle demeanor, quick to help others.”38 No one could make sense of his having died a violent death. Emotions had also run high the day before at the funeral of Carl Valone, where the clergyman who presided over the graveside ceremony at St. Joseph’s cemetery delivered a fiery speech in which he “warned that major prison upheavals would recur in New York State prisons unless a separate institution was opened for inmates he described as ‘hard core revolutionaries.’ ”39

  The very last hostage funeral was not held until October when correction officer Harrison Whalen, after clinging to life for more than three weeks, finally died of his gunshot wounds. Whalen’s passing increased to ten the number of guards and civilian employee hostages who had been killed because of the state’s assault on the prison.40

  Carl Valone’s funeral (Courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle)

  Yet in all the weeks that had passed since the Attica uprising, and even after so many men had been laid to rest, no one from the state had ever come to explain to the families what had happened.

  Ann Valone was so desperate to understand the circumstances of her husband’s death that in October 1971 she made the quite extraordinary decision to write a heartfelt letter to former observer William Kunstler—whom most of Attica’s townspeople reviled as a radical troublemaker—asking him, as someone who had been on the inside and seen so much firsthand, if he could help her to know what had gone so terribly wrong.41 To her surprise Kunstler responded with his own emotional letter, trying, he said, to address “the very perplexing questions you raise,” and to do his best to let her know how he felt “about the tragic events of last September.”42 Kunstler wanted Ann Valone to know that he, and all of those who had served “on the so-called negotiating committee wanted desperately to settle the controversy without further bloodshed. As varied as we were, we became convinced on Sunday that, had the Governor come and had we been given a few more days, we could have hammered out an agreement satisfactory to all sides. In fact, the only reason I insisted that Bobby Seale come was to aid us in convincing the inmates that proposals that were accepted by the commissioner on Saturday, as watered down as they were, were the best we could hope to get for them.”43

  Kunstler closed his letter by asking for her aid in calling for greater prison reform in America because, then, “not only will men like your husband be far safer than they are now, but they will surely find their jobs infinitely more rewarding and creative than they can possibly be under present conditions. Instead of supervising resentful, desperate inmates, they will be associating with men and women who at least feel that they possess some shreds of human dignity and who can see some hope for themselves in the future.”44 Whatever she decided, though, William Kunstler wanted Ann Valone to know that he grieved for her and he believed, in his heart, that together they could “do something, no matter how small or insignifican
t, to change places like Attica so that the pain you are now enduring, which must be duplicated in more than forty other homes, will never press down on any other human being,” and so that “no person will ever have to write again a letter such as you have written to me.”45 He signed off, “In sorrow and hope.”46