New York History

On the morning of September 20, 1971, the radical defense attorney William Kunstler had a difficult choice. That day there would be almost two dozen funerals for inmates of Attica killed during the assault to take back the prison. Kunstler, whose name was in the New York Times nearly every day for representing the inmates, could deliver a eulogy for only one. He chose my father, Sam Melville.

Days earlier, members of the Weather Underground, incensed by what they felt was my father's state-sanctioned murder, had set off a bomb in the office of the New York prison commissioner, Russell Oswald. Rumors spread that their next action would be to steal my father's remains and burn them on Governor Rockefeller's lawn. To prevent this, on the day of his memorial, a van pulled up to the small church in the East Village filled with a battalion of African American men in black berets. Militant organizers in the Black Panther Party had asked some of their toughest to stand over my father's body. Although there was no precedent for guarding the remains of a white man, none needed reminding that my father was like John Brown, an abolitionist who crossed the ethnic divide to help forge the most effective "slave revolt" in modern U.S. history.

Authorities must have agreed; while the names of Attica victims were being withheld for weeks, Rockefeller seemed anxious to announce on the same day of the retaking that Mad Bomber Melville was shot randomly in D Yard while running with Molotov cocktails toward an oil drum, presumably to blow it up, but, thanks to Rockefeller's decisive leadership, my father was "no longer a threat to the good people of New York." Rockefeller (whose office my father destroyed the day before his arrest) also claimed that Sam Melville was responsible for the making of about three hundred Molotov cocktails out of peanut butter and instant coffee jars, a rocket launcher from plumbing scraps, and the electrifying blockades made from file cabinets, and organizing the "L" shaped trench, visible in many Attica photos, which was allegedly designed to entrap troopers in flames when they descended the catwalks.

As a child, however, I'd been told only that he was simply far away doing volunteer [End Page 38]

work. That was the cover story he and my mother had agreed to, and which he represented faithfully when he wrote to me from prison.

Almost two years after his death, at age eleven, Mom showed me his picture on the front page of the New York Times. It was then I learned that the man I'd always called Dad was known to the rest of the world as the Mad Bomber, the engineer of over a dozen targeted explosions to protest racism and U.S. imperialism in the summer of 1969. In 2010, one historian labeled him "the essential blueprint for every radical organization throughout the 1970s." That day, mom also showed me Letters from Attica, an anthology of his prison letters, posthumously published. By 1975 the book had begun to inhabit the same conversations as the revered radical bibles Soledad Brother by George Jackson and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. [End Page 39]

I was angry and cried for much of that afternoon. I felt that my father had been stolen from me. Then I opened Letters from Attica and learned there were others who shared my grief: activists, lawyers, and lovers. We were now a unique sort of family. I would spend the next twenty...