By Emma Overton ‘22
News Editor
To honor the late Ruth Winter, who was a dynamic director of student activities at Lake Forest College for many years, the College invited Pulitzer Prize winning professor and historian Heather Ann Thompson to speak on Wednesday evening, October 10 in the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel. Thompson, who won the coveted 2017 Pulitzer in history for her book “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” is a professor of Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan.
Thompson began her talk thanking Lake Forest College for honoring her by choosing her as the 2018 Ruth Winter Lecturer and then noted she had big shoes to fill as Winter had been instrumental in bringing many prominent speakers to the College, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Katherine Hepburn, and Dag Hammarskjold, among many other notables.
Thompson told her highly engaged audience of college administrators, faculty, students, alumnae, and guests of her decade-long work researching the 1971 Attica Prison uprising in upstate New York. She noted that for nearly 20 years, the story of what had actually happened was covered up from the highest levels of government, including the Nixon administration, to the family members who had been “paid” for their silence.
Thompson regaled her audience with a story of how she distracted a county records clerk into copying hundreds of records so she could obtain the proof she needed to substantiate reports she received from the few inmates who survived the uprising. The clerk, who had unknowingly been sitting a wall away from hundreds of pages of Attica archival documents and photographs, supplied Thompson with proof that armed troopers and corrections officers murdered 39 men and severely wounded more than 100 others who were both hostages and prisoners during what then New York Governor and later Vice President Nelson Rockefeller covertly chose as a senseless end to the four-day showdown inside Attica prison.
Thompson also took an audience comment from a man who had recently come out of a prison nearly as horrific today as Attica was back then, regarding its treatment of prisoners. She then thanked the man for coming forward to tell his story, drawing a great deal of audience applause. The man, who did not try to shift blame for committing the crime that sent him to prison, simply told of barbarous, inhuman conditions that he experienced in prisons in America, especially those prisons that house a great number of people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, in addition to people of color.
Thompson’s research and book drew praise “for a narrative history that sets high standards for scholarly judgment and tenacity of inquiry in seeking the truth about the 1971 Attica prison riots,” according to a Pulitzer website statement. Her book was chosen for one of the 14 “Best of 2016” lists, including The New York Times Most Notable Books of 2016 list. Thompson has also signed a movie deal for her book, so the Lake Forest College community may have another chance to hear the real story of the Attica Prison uprising.
Photo Credit: SUNY Geneseo
Emma Overton can be reached at overtoneg@mx.lakeforest.edu.
