Purchase Tip of the Spear here. All proceeds go to Muni Gaza.
A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons, Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s.
The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls. Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle.
Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons--not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.
"Meticulously researched and fascinating. . . . By placing the prison struggle as part of a domestic war, this book makes an enormous contribution to efforts to fight against prison expansion and for true abolition."
-Against the Current
“A fresh and urgent interpretation of the meaning of Attica. . . . Burton has crafted a masterpiece that, as much as any single book can, shows the way forward for a new generation of activist-scholars, agitators, revolutionaries, and other partisans of human liberation, to redeem the dead and build a new society in their name.”
-Los Angeles Review of Books
