Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton upends the typical telling of the Attica Revolt as an isolated, merciless event that altered American’s perceptions of prisons and drew sharp attention to the anti-Black legacy of the prison industrial complex. Tip of the Spear instead argues that years of abolitionist uprisings and organizing took place prior to Attica, coinciding with the imprisonment of many Black radicals belonging to revolutionary organizations such as the Black Panther Party. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Black revolutionaries were incarcerated for their involvement with Black liberation organizations because of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s intentional labeling of Black liberation organizations as extremist organizations. Burton makes compelling connections between the rise of prison rebellions and the imprisonment of Black revolutionaries, exposing that as a revolutionary Black consciousness grew within prison walls, so did the ability...

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