Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

On Monday, December 2, 2024, scholar Orisanmi Burton and Teaching for Black Lives co-editor Jesse Hagopian will discuss Burton’s book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, which argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within U.S. borders.

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

Tip of the Spear transforms our understanding of prison rebellion. In so doing, the book offers a stunning contribution to Black radical thought and abolitionist scholarship and politics. Exquisitely researched and argued, this is a must-read. — Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written book, Burton presents one of the most dynamic accounts of Black revolutionary struggle against the prison industrial complex to date. Burton centers Black radical action as the hub of knowledge production to explain the function, implementation, and logic of the carceral apparatus over the past fifty years. Powerfully arguing against the ill-conceived notion of Black revolt as spontaneous and state violence as the happenstance of misguided policy, Burton carefully takes the reader through a rigorously developed source map to understand the breadth and depth of prisons within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With a brilliant array of methodological, conceptual, and theoretical interventions, Tip of the Spear is a must-read and is fundamental to the study of prisons and movements against prisons. — Damien Sojoyner, author of Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums

Orisanmi Burton is assistant professor of anthropology at American University. His research examines the imbrication of grassroots resistance and state repression and explores the collision of Black-led movements for social, political, and economic transformation with state infrastructures of militarized policing, surveillance, and imprisonment.

These online classes with people’s historians are held at least once a month (generally on Mondays) at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET for 90 minutes. In each session, the historian is interviewed by a teacher and breakout rooms allow participants to meet each other in small groups, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. We designed the sessions for teachers and other school staff. Parents, students, and others are also welcome to participate.