Advanced registration is encouraged. Click here to RSVP.

Tip of The Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt is a radical reinterpretation of the 1970s prison uprising, “Attica”. In this event members of The Black Alliance for Peace and The Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction join Orisanmi Burton in an engaging discussion around US prisons not only as a site of domestic warfare and counterinsurgency but also as sources of revolutionary black consciousness, defiant resistance, and abolitionist vision.

About the Author/Speakers:
Orisanmi Burton is a husband, father, and assistant professor of anthropology at American University. His research employs innovative ethnographic and archival methods to examine historical collisions between Black radical organizations and state repression in the United States. Dr. Burton’s work has been published in North American Dialogue, The Black Scholar, American Anthropologist, and Radical History Review among other outlets, and has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and The Margarite Casey Foundation, which selected him as a 2021 Freedom Scholar.
Malik Hayes, known to most as “Stoke”, is an artist and organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace in Philadelphia.
There will also be 1-2 participants from the WEB Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction as well

About the Book:
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.
Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.