Attica Prison Uprising Began / Hanapepe Massacre - September 9

The Attica Prison Uprising began on this day in 1971. / On this day in 1924, a strike organized by Filipino sugar plantation workers turned into a massacre of Filipinos by local police.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all, Eve's here. Today's episode contains not just one,
but two nuggets of history. These are coming from the
T D I h C Vault, so you'll also here
to hosts. Consider it a double feature. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot com and from the desk of Stuff you
missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore

(00:21):
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and ex September nine.
The Attica Prison uprising started on this day in nine
seventy one. An immediate precursor to this uprising was the

(00:42):
killing of activists and author George Jackson. He was incarcerated
at San Quentin Prison in California, and he was killed
on August twenty one nine. This was during an alleged
escape attempt, but there are still a lot of unanswered
questions and controversies around his death, but the consensus among
the men who were incarcerated at Attica was that he

(01:04):
had been framed and murdered by the guards. This certainty,
combined with ongoing issues of racism and just dehumanizing conditions
at the prison put everyone on edge, from the incarcerated
men to the staff. Everyone. Less than three weeks after
Jackson was killed, Leroy Doer was in a play fight

(01:26):
with another man in the cell block a exercise yard.
This was horseplay, they weren't actually fighting with each other.
An officer yelled for him to stop, but also mistook
him for another man and called him by the wrong name,
so do Or didn't stop. He didn't know he was
the person that was being spoken to. It was his

(01:46):
first day back in the exercise yard after being keep
locked or confined completely to his cell for a week.
When another officer came down into the yard to break
up this this horseplay, do Or hit him in the
chest and said that he wouldn't be keep locked again.
This was not a punch, was more of a tap

(02:08):
or a shove. A crowd started to gather around them,
and the situation became incredibly tense, with a lot of
incarcerated men defending Doer and the officers becoming increasingly concerned
about the situation. They finally decided to drop it and
resolve it later. Resolving it later meant taking doer and

(02:29):
one of the men who had come to his defense
out of their cells after lock up and taking them
to solitary confinement. This was something that the other incarcerated
men were sure was a sign that something terrible was
about to happen to them. As the men were being
taken to breakfast the next morning, somebody in Company five
took advantage of an unattended lockbox to let somebody who

(02:51):
was supposed to be in keep locked out of his cell.
The officers realized what was going on, and they started
to contain everyone in Company five in one of the
access tunnels in the prison. When they realized they were trapped.
This led the men to panic, and some of them
jumped to the officers and took their keys. Almost immediately,

(03:13):
the officers lost control of a lot of attica. Incarcerated
men started breaking down security gates and making improvised weapons.
The prison staff was absolutely unprepared for something like this.
The facility itself had been built with all of these
security gates and other features that were supposed to prevent
exactly this kind of an uprising, and with the gates

(03:36):
broken down, they didn't really have a plan. The uprising
continued for days, and the incarcerated men took hostages. A
group of men in d yard and the prison commandeered
a typewriter and drafted a list of demands, but negotiations
about those demands kept running into roadblocks. Then, on September eleventh,

(03:56):
ninete officer William McQuinn, who had been struck in the
head during the initial takeover of part of the prison,
died of his injuries. On September, law enforcement decided to
retake the prison by force. When they did, in the
span of about fifteen minutes, thirty eight people were shot
to death and eighty more were wounded, one of whom

(04:18):
later died of his injuries. A quarter of those killed
were hostages, not incarcerated men. The building itself was also
heavily damaged, and during the effort to restore normalcy, many
of the incarcerated men were beaten, humiliated, and addressed with
racist slurs. There were some reforms that followed this riot.

(04:40):
Some of them were related to the demands that the
men had typed up during the uprising. Some of them
addressed some of the conditions that had primed the men
to stage and uprising in the first place. But a
lot of the dehumanizing conditions at the prison persisted. There
is a whole lot more to this story, from the
additions at Attica before the uprising to the uprisings aftermath,

(05:03):
and you can learn more about it in the November
four and six episodes of Stuffy Miss in History Class.
Thanks to Tari Harrison for all her audio work on
this podcast, and you can subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts,
Google Podcasts, and We're Real you get your podcasts. Tune
in tomorrow for an accidental discovery that totally changed the
world of forensic science. Hey, I'm Eves, and welcome to

(05:35):
This Day in History Class, a show that uncovers history
one day at a time. The day was September nine.
Strikes organized by Filipinos sugar workers in Kawaii, Hawaii, turned deadly.

(05:59):
The Hunt of Pay Pay massacre, as it became known,
resulted in the deaths of sixteen Filipinos and four police
officers and the injury of many other people. Sugar plantations
were a big business in Hawaii in the eighteen hundreds.
In early nineteen hundreds, the industry and Hawaii's economy and

(06:20):
politics were controlled by corporations known as the Big five
Castle and Cook, the O. H. Davies, Alexander and Baldwin,
Sea Brewer, and am fac Immigrants and Hawaiian laborers remained
at the bottom of the class hierarchy, though they produced
most of the island's wealth. The Hawaii Sugar Planters Association

(06:44):
or h sp A subjected workers to discrimination and segregation.
They put Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Filipino workers in
different camps, and a person's race often determined what a
signments and wages they received. By the nineteen twenties, workers

(07:05):
began to strike against the discrimination and poor conditions on plantations. Japanese, Chinese,
and Korean laborers left plantations to find better work in
bigger cities. The h s p A made up for
the losses by encouraging more Filipino people to move to
Hawaii to work on the plantations. More than one hundred

(07:28):
thousand Filipinos migrated to Hawaii between nineteen ten and nineteen
thirty two. That caused a drastic shift in the ethnic
makeup of the plantation workers spread throughout the Hawaiian Islands.
Most of the Filipinos were from the Ilocos Provinces and
the Visayan Islands. The h s p A intentionally chose

(07:49):
people who were uneducated and could not read or write,
as it figured they would be more compliant than people
who had received even just some schooling. But the Filipino
workers had grueling jobs, the pay was poor, and discrimination
was rampant on the plantations, their work days were ten

(08:10):
to twelve hours. They lived in barracks where they would
have to share a small room with several men, and
at the low wages they did make, largely went back
to company stores where they bought their living necessities. They
often lived in isolation with no temples, language schools, or
other community centers. To get a ticket back home to

(08:31):
the Philippines from their employers, they had to work seven
hundred and twenty days over three consecutive years. On top
of that, Filipinos were discriminated against because of their nationality.
But despite the h s p a's best efforts to
only hire people who would not rebel, in nineteen twenty,

(08:51):
Japanese and Filipino workers demanded better conditions, including an increase
in pay from seventy seven cents to one dollar and
twenty five cents per day. The h s p A
rejected their demands, and labor leader Pablo Manolopit, along with
Japanese labor leaders, formed the Higher Wage Movement. A strike

(09:14):
of Japanese and Filipino laborers proceeded and lasted several months.
The h s p A evicted workers from their housing,
a dispute divided Japanese leaders in Manolopit, and the h
sp A spread propaganda. None of the striker's demands were met,
but Filipino laborers continued to petition for better pay and

(09:36):
the right to collective bargaining. Still, sugar plantation owners refused
to acknowledge their demands. In April of nineteen, Mamlopit called
for Filipino workers to go on strike. Around twelve thousand
workers from plantations on Oahu, Hawaii, Maui, and Kawaii went
on strike. To attempt to put an end to the strikes,

(09:59):
the h s p A recruited Ilocano laborers from the
Philippines as strike breakers, pinning Ilocanos against the science, and
the h s p A used spies to infiltrate strike
meetings and rallies. On September eight, strikers at a camp
in Hana Pepe close to the Maca Welly Sugar plantation

(10:21):
took to Ilocanos hostage. Those who had joined the strikes
from that plantation were from the Visayan regions, while Ilocos
had continued working. The next day, police demanded the strikers
released the captured Ilocanos. They did so, but violence broke out,
resulting in the death of twenty people. Strikers armed themselves

(10:44):
with guns, knives, rocks, and clubs and went up against
the police. Governor Farrington sent in machine gun squads and
rifle companies from the National Guard. One and one strikers
were arrested, Seventy six went to trial, and sixty were
given four year jail sentences. Malopit was sentenced to ten

(11:05):
years imprisonment. Years later, a Filipino woman said that witnesses
had been promised money and a ticket to the Philippines
to testify against Malapit. The strike continued for three more months.
The hsp A continued to exploit workers, though laborers did
make some gains in working conditions, and other successful strikes

(11:28):
were waged by plantation workers into the mid nineteen hundreds.
Sugar plantations have since declined in Hawaii as corporations looked
to other countries where they could pay workers low wages.
I'm Eves Jeffcote and hopefully you know a little more
about history today than you did yesterday. And if you

(11:49):
haven't gotten your fill of history after listening to today's episode,
you can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at
t D I h C Podcasts. We'll be back with
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(12:20):
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