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ATTICA REMEMBERED

bitter ruins of another medieval bastille, one chief of state will seem more compassionate than another.
Winds of change will blow through American prison systems only when people organize to harvest a hurricane. There is still time for public committees, including prisoners, to force a door ajar into the closed, wretched society of these citizens without citizenship. 
The military always stands ready to apply a "final solution" when political cowards hand it a carte blanche. Now the cannons are silent and the screams of the shackled are muted but there will be reason to remember Attica.
It was, from the last stop on the way to hell, a clarion cry of the oppressed. But more, it was a signal of uprising, remarkable for its unity of inmates, defined by disciplined organization, expressed in understandable, justifiable demands and made memorable by a character best summed up in what Bernadette Devlin calls the battle cry, "Dare to Struggle-Dare to Win." 
For now, it can be said that what the hapless white guard "hostages" died for, died with them. What the Black and white inmates died for, lives on.

The Editors

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