The War on Black Revolutionary Minds

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic and archival research, this talk explores government-orchestrated efforts to destroy the minds of imprisoned Black revolutionaries. Focusing on New York State prisons in the wake of the Attica rebellion of 1971, “The War on Black Revolutionary Minds” exposes an international network of government officials, intelligence operatives, elite academics, and medical professionals that used incarcerated people as guinea pigs for a range of behavioral, surgical, and pharmacological experiments. Carried out on the cusp of the US prison system’s globally and historically unprecedented expansion, this regime of medicalized torture aimed to understand why certain kinds of people resist domination and develop methods of permanently eliminating such resistance. This talk also discusses how the psychiatrists, psychologists, and anthropologists that conducted this research were explicit about its applicability beyond prison walls; that it had the potential to provide governments with new methods of controlling civilian populations at home and abroad. By unraveling this sordid tale of prison-based experimentation, this talk provides insight into the hidden forces shaping our present social order.

Orisanmi Burton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023).

Co-sponsored by Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration

Co-hosted by History, Humanities, and Health Interest Group