65 pages • 2 hours read
Heather Ann ThompsonBlood in the Water
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Heather Ann Thompson
The author of Blood in the Water is a historian currently working at the University of Michigan. She completed her PhD at the University of Princeton. Thompson herself encountered many of the problems of state secrecy and cover-ups that she draws attention to in the text during her research for this work. She was continually denied access to key documents by the FBI and Justice department despite submitting requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
Thompson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for Blood in the Water. Her other works include Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s (2009) and Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001/2017). She has also published several articles on the causes and effects of mass incarceration in the United States.
Russell G. Oswald
Oswald was the commissioner for the department of correctional services (DOCS) for New York State during the Attica uprising. In other words, he was head of the New York State penal system. Oswald cuts an ambiguous figure in Blood in the Water. On the one hand, Thompson makes it clear that he is committed to prison reform. For example, he renames prisons as “correctional facilities” and guards as “correctional officers.”
However, he is unnerved by prisoner demands for change in the July Manifesto and is ultimately unsympathetic when they rebel in September 1971. When his attempts at negotiations via the observers committee fail, he reluctantly agrees to sanction the retaking of the prison by force. Oswald was held partially to blame for the ensuing massacre and had his speeches routinely disrupted by protestors in the years that followed. Oswald gives his own version of events in Attica: My Story (1971).
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller
Rockefeller was the Republican Governor of New York State during the Attica crisis. Rockefeller believed that the rebellion was the result of a left-wing conspiracy fomented by radicals within the prison system. As such, he was reluctant to compromise with the prisoners, especially regarding their demand for legal amnesty. In a decision that might have changed history, he refused to visit Attica in person to assure the prisoners there would be no retaliation if they surrendered. He then authorized the assault on the prison.
It is difficult to say how far he anticipated or wanted the bloodbath that followed the retaking. What is known is that he had lofty political ambitions in the Republican party. It is also known that these would be served by him appearing “tough on crime.” His decisions over Attica were endorsed by then-President Richard Nixon, and he went on to serve as US vice president under Gerald Ford between 1974 and 1977, although he never won the Republican nomination for the presidency. Thompson suggests that he may have participated in the cover-up of state crimes at Attica. He retired from politics in 1977 and died in 1979.
