In September 1971, half of Attica’s 2,000-person incarcerated population took over the prison in a historic week-long uprising that ended in the massacre of 42 people. That week shocked the nation. Artist and activist Faith Ringgold began researching and crafting her next piece immediately. By 1972, it was complete: the United States of Attica.
Instead of the flag’s red, white, and blue, Ringgold’s map uses a Pan-African palette of red, black, and green—our diasporic blood, people, and land. Instead of marking towns and cities, she painstakingly inscribed events of anti-Black and colonial violence, from the Civil and Vietnam Wars to the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Watts Rebellion.
Splitting the map into four quadrants deliberately divides the “United” States. It also resembles the scope of a gun. Everyone on U.S. soil is a target. Ringgold even included a key message: “This map of American violence is incomplete / Please write in whatever you find lacking.”
The map could go on endlessly. But naming it the “United States of Attica” was a powerful choice. It reminds us that incarceration is not only comparable to but also part of the same tradition of centuries of colonial violence.
Since 1973, the U.S. prison population has grown by 500%. The struggle for freedom, as Ringgold emphasizes, is unfinished. Fifty years later, let’s respond to Ringgold’s invitation. What violence stays with us today?