On this day in 1971, after four days, the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in western New York ended in about fifteen minutes of gunfire. Prisoners had taken control of part of the facility on 9 September and held staff as hostages. In the days that followed they set out a list of demands — better food and medical care, less crowding, an end to censorship of mail, religious freedom — and negotiations were carried on with a group of outside observers, lawyers, legislators and reporters among them, brought in at the prisoners' request.
On the morning of 13 September, tear gas was dropped over the yard and state police and corrections officers retook the prison by force. Thirty-nine men died that day, ten of them hostages. Forty-three people died in connection with the uprising in all. All but one of those killed that morning were killed by the retaking force; the hostages died of gunshot wounds, a fact established by the medical examiners in the days afterward and not before.
The families of the men who went to work that Monday morning, and the families of the men held inside, waited for the same lists of names.
Religious freedom was on that list of demands because men of several faiths were inside, and chaplains of more than one tradition were among those who went in and out during those four days. Outside the wall, families waited together through the nights, with prayers said in whatever words each of them had.
Tom Wicker of the New York Times was among the observers brought in at the prisoners' request, and he wrote about those four days afterwards in A Time to Die. It is a careful book, and much of its weight comes from his admitting how little the observers could do.