Sam Melville grew up in Tonawanda in the 1930s and 1940s and was killed in the famed 1971 Attica prison uprising. In between, Melville waged an urban guerrilla war in Manhattan against government agencies and corporations driving the Vietnam War effort, inspiring a flood of similar revolutionary activity in the 1970s. The following is an excerpt, the last of four to be published here, from Leslie James Pickering’s new biography of Melville, Mad Bomber Melville.

Leslie James Pickering is a Buffalo native with a master’s degree in history and journalism and a strong background in radical social justice. Pickering’s book will be available in July at www.arissamediagroup.com. Look for it locally at Rust Belt Books and Talking Leaves.

Sam’s sincerity impresses me but also scares me,” prisoner Bill Coons wrote in his diary when he saw Sam arrive at Attica.

“I won’t tread on him,” Coons said, “possibly because he’s a big guy, over six feet, lanky, loose-limbed, and a full set of calluses on his knuckles from practicing karate against brick and stone jailhouse walls. A heavy dude, this one.”

“Sam’s a swell guy,” Coons wrote after getting to know him better. “Give you the shirt off his back, but he won’t wear the right one to mess hall. His war on petty regulations has gotten him two keep-locks [solitary confinements] thus far…You couldn’t trust him alone in the halls; he might rewire the joint and blow it up. That would cause embarrassments when Albany came around.”

So far, Sam was surviving prison life. He occasionally found people inside who he could rap politics with and was even considering legal maneuvers aimed at prison reform, but still he felt alienated from the general prison population.

As a revolutionary, Sam saw prisoners as victims of oppressive circumstances that exist within an unjust society, but he had a hard time dealing with the lack of political awareness in most prisoners. Sam was used to the consciousness and freedom of his life on the outside and the contrast of life behind bars made him feel alone and defensive. He often found himself at battle with the prison authorities. Now that he was at Attica, conflict between Sam and the prison guards and administration would only increase.

Attica wasn’t coming off as the kind of place receptive to revolutionary organizing, so even when Sam wasn’t in keep-lock he often kept to his cell studying, doing yoga and feeding the birds. But it was against his nature not to get with the people around him and organize some kind of action against the brutality they were suffering. It wasn’t long before Sam was becoming unsatisfied with simply surviving prison:

It seems to me that the trouble with yoga is that you can get so spaced out you don’t care about things like justice or injustice. You have to separate yourself so much from your fellows. I don’t think you can have inner peace without outer peace too.

I’ve read an article recently about migrating geese; why they fly in that V formation and keep honking. It seems the formation creates a semi-vacuum by the large air movement making it possible to fly long distances without tiring. They honk because they are rooting, cajoling, scolding each other to keep up and keep pumping so the group can make it. Yeah. Honk! Honk!

“There is no individual change without social change, and there is no social change without political revolution,” Sam wrote in March:

Those who are frightened by the cataclysm political revolution presents or who fear the power of repressive status quo have the choice of either being swept under by the maelstrom of social upheaval or using their acumen (gleamed from the suffering of others) to guide us to an understanding of our present political reality so that we may pass to our next evolutionary stage, unforeseeable from our present, narrow, class perspective…The unavoidable conclusion that I arrive at is that I was not born in a vacuum; that I see my reflection in many, many faces. Now, it follows that if I am a sociological phenomenon and I suffer a sociological disease I must have a sociological prognosis. It’s here that our viewpoints part. You want to care for each tender shoot while (seemingly) not acknowledging the entire forest is violently aflame. I am presently seeking answers that may tell us whether to put out the fire and repair what we can or help the fire along and hope its end will leave the soil fertile enough to grow anew.

Mob hitman Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan was the first ever to escape from Attica in April 1971, infuriating guards and inspiring prisoners like Sam, who referred to the escape as “the great man Sullivan and that Good Friday morn.” Sam wrote, “There are indications that the hacks [prison guards] are engaging in overt terrorism for a change. Conflicting reports have emerged but something’s up for sure.”

The combination of Sullivan’s escape with the resulting increase in brutality was it for Sam. If he saw oppression on the outside that left him no choice but to fight, he would be fighting in prison as well.

I can’t tell you what a change has come over the brothers in Attica,” Sam wrote in August to a brother who had been released:

So much more awareness and growing consciousness of themselves as revolutionaries. Reading, questioning, rapping all the time. Still bigotry and racism, black, white and brown, but you can feel it beginning to crumble in the knowledge so many are gaining that we must build solidarity against our common oppressor—the system of exploitation of each other and alienation from each other. Since you left, a group has formed under the title of the Anti-Depression League, as yet a small group trying to create an alliance between all the various factions—Panthers, Young Lords, white radicals, Five Percenters, Orthodox Muslims, etc. Not an easy task as you well know. Among the problems we face is how to form revolutionary awareness relating to our prison condition…There’s only one revolutionary change as far as the prison system in Amerika is concerned. But until the day comes when enough of our brothers and sisters realize what that one revolutionary change is, we must always be certain our demands will exceed what the pigs are able to grant.

One prisoner said that during the changes sweeping Attica,

Sam was a prince of war among imprisoned fighters. To blacks he was that missing proof that white revolutionaries deserve black respect. To whites he was like a shield against their own privilege-fed cowardice. He made whites believe in their own courage just by the way he walked down the halls or talked to the really pig hacks.

Sam turned the inmates’ respect into support, and then he turned this support into power. As the inmates’ support for Sam grew, the hacks became somewhat less willing to push him around. And the more the hacks backed off, the harder Sam pushed…And because he gave the guards more truck, the inmates respected him more. It was a spiral of increasing power which Sam consciously created and maintained.

Things were moving faster and faster. All signs showed that Attica was a powder keg ready to explode, but the authorities only responded with more repression.

On August 21, 1971, George Jackson was shot to death by guards at California’s San Quentin prison. Jackson was imprisoned on a one-year-to-life felony sentence after robbing $71 from a gas station when he was 18. During his 12 years in prison, Jackson became a member of the Black Panther Party, founded prison organizations and authored two books, Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.

George Jackson’s fame further grew on August 7, 1970, when his 17-year-old brother, Jonathan Jackson, led a high-profile kidnapping in a Marin County, California courthouse. The kidnapping aimed to free George, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, who were known as the Soledad Brothers for being charged with the murder of a guard in Soledad Prison. As Jonathan and his band fled the courthouse with two freed prisoners and the judge as hostage, the police showered them with bullets. The only survivor was Jonathan’s comrade Ruchell Magee, who received a life sentence. Angela Davis was accused of being an accomplice and placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, but was eventually acquitted.

George Jackson’s books were very popular, and prisoners across America considered him a hero. In response to his murder, Sam helped organize a meal strike at Attica.

“It was the weirdest thing,” guard Jack Williams explained. “They all walked in as usual, divided into two lines and walked through the serving area. But nobody picked up a tray or a spoon, and nobody took any food. They just walked through the line and went to their seats and they sat down. They looked straight ahead and nobody made a sound. You could have heard your wristwatch ticking. It was eerie. Then we noticed that almost all had some black on them—some had cloth armbands, some had black shoelaces around their arms, others had pieces of black cloth pinned on them. It scared us, because a thing like that takes a lot of organization, a lot of solidarity, and we had no idea they were so well organized.”

“The lumpen are very excited at the strong display of solidarity exhibited last Friday,” Sam wrote. “At the midday meal, not a man ate or spoke—black, white, brown, red. Many wore black armbands. The priest was asked to say a prayer, and after some to-do, did so. No one can remember anything like it here before.”

The strike frightened prison authorities and they responded with yet more repression, according to Sam:

I was down to the disciplinary court two weeks ago and there were more than seventy men waiting for a hearing. The old-timers say it’s beginning to look like the old days where you got keep-lock for looking cross-eyed at the pig. They’re enforcing the tiniest shit now. I’m finishing a 14-day keep-lock for a small mess hall infraction which is just a reprimand…A hard worker in D Block just got a 60-day box bit for having the manifesto and progressive lit in his cell.

We have only one other alternative to meet their aggression, and at this time geography is against that—not to mention technology.

It is true I have much anger, but to say I am angry at the world not only misses the point but casts much doubt on any of the constructive energy my anger has generated…If you want to believe a man who is often angry but nevertheless sometimes possesses a remarkable ear, I tell you we are living in the eye of a hurricane. That the violent and irrepressible winds of change are swirling around us throughout a world that will no longer pay the bill of our government’s repine appetite. And that soon the tremors of the last couple of years will be as a sleeping lion lazily swatting a fly with his tail.

“All rules are now strictly enforced,” Sam wrote in his last letter from Attica on September 4, 1971, “Attire, haircuts, lining up, not talking, no wearing hats—everything. You’re busted for dispensing literature, holding meetings, or staring at pigs. We are treated as dogs. Don’t wag your righteous finger at Mancusi and pretend you’re shocked. Sue the motherfucker, or better yet shoot him. But for Christ’s sake do something.”