The Capitol Siege Has Deep Roots in American History — Part VI

Herbert L. Klein
14 min readJan 25, 2021

This is Part VI of a series on the more than 40 micro-rebellions that have occurred in America since the Revolutionary War. The causes of these uprisings have been sparked by political grievances, economic injustices, racial bigotry and paranoia. The Capitol Insurrection of January 6th is not without precedent and understanding what sparked these earlier revolts makes it easier to understand what caused the January 6th uprising. Part VI covers the Political Rebellions of the last half of the 20th Century and The January 6th Insurrection at The Capitol.

The Attica Prison Riot, or Attica Prison uprising, occurred in 1971 at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica NY. The outbreak, which took place a week after George Jackson was killed trying to escape from San Quentin Prison, was one of the most significant flash points of the prisoners’ rights movement in America. On September 9, 1971, more than half of Attica’s 2,200 inmates rioted and took over the prison, taking 42 of the staff hostage.

During four days of negotiations, authorities agreed to most of the prisoners’ 28 demands but would not agree to complete amnesty from criminal prosecution or the removal of Attica’s superintendent. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered state police to seize control of the prison. When the uprising was over, at least 43 people were dead, including ten correction officers and prison employees as well as 33 inmates.

Memorial in front of the Attica Correctional Facility

The riot began quietly on September 9, 1971 when a group of prisoners heard that one of their members was restricted to his cell after an assault on a prison guard. Rather than line up for roll call, a few members of his cell block walked back to their cells. As the protesting group stepped past their isolated friend, they freed him from his cell. They then rejoined the rest of their prisoners at breakfast. When the prison’s senior officers found out what happened, they locked the entire cell block out of the yard and tried to escort them back to their cells. Enraged, the prisoners revolted. They seized control of two sections of the prison and took 42 officers and civilians hostage. They then produced a list of grievances and demanded that their conditions be met before they surrendered.

The prisoners were well organized. They appointed a head of security, Frank “Big Black” Smith, and a passionate orator and spokesman, 21-year-old Elliott James “L.D.” Barkley. Barkley, just days away from his scheduled release at the time of the uprising, was killed during the battle to recapture the prison. Barkley may have been shot in the back by officers. The articulate Barkley framed the revolt as both a plea for better working conditions and a political statement:

“We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven…The entire prison populace…have set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”

The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto Of Demands was directed at the “sincere people of society”. It set forth 27 demands, such as better medical treatment, fair visitation rights, an end to physical brutality, better sanitation, basic necessities like toothbrushes and showers and improved food quality.

The situation was further aggravated by Rockefeller’s refusal to meet with inmates. Feeling that the authorities failed to show them proper respect, the prisoners cut off talks. Correctional Services Commissioner Russell G. Oswald informed the them he could make no further concessions and if they failed to surrender, he would take back the prison by force.

The inmates prepared to defend themselves. They dug defensive trenches, electrified gates, fashioned battlements from metal tables and dirt and positioned gasoline to be lit if conflict broke out. They brought four corrections officers to the top of the command center and threatened to slit their throats if authorities failed to yield to their demands. In response, Rockefeller ordered that the prison be stormed if negotiations failed. Oswald ordered the prison to be retaken by force.

At 9:46 a.m. on September 13, 1971, tear gas was dropped into the yard and state troopers opened fire non-stop for two minutes into the smoke. By the time the facility was reclaimed, police had killed nine hostages and 29 inmates. A tenth hostage, Correctional Officer Harrison W. Whalen, later died of gunshot wounds. The New York State Special Commission on Attica wrote, “With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since The Civil War.” As an indirect result of the Attica uprising, the New York State Department of Corrections instituted a grievance procedure.

In retrospect, it was a tepid, inadequate, feeble response.

The Native American Movement has its roots in warfare between tribes and the United States that dates back long before the Revolutionary War and through the 19th century conflicts right up until today. Over the centuries, Native American tribes have nursed grievances over broken treaties and promises of sovereignty, fishing and hunting rights, land rights, travel restrictions, citizenship recognition and voting rights. The latter affront was only put to rest by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended the states’ prerogative to determine whether Native Americans could vote.

Flag of the American Indian Movement

The Wounded Knee Occupation occurred amidst this backdrop. It began on February 27, 1973 when approximately 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Residents of the area were captured at gunpoint and taken hostage.

The protest took place after the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO) failed to impeach their tribal president, Richard Wilson, whom they accused of corruption. Protesters also mobilized to call attention to the U.S. government’s repeated failure to comply with treaties. For years, internal tribal tensions had been growing over the poor living conditions on reservations. Tribal members believed that Wilson was autocratic and corrupt, parcelling out jobs and benefits to cronies and family. Opponents also accused him of selling grazing rights to local white ranchers at bargain basement rates — possibly taking kickbacks — but in the process reducing tribal revenue. Reservation violence was on the rise, which many tribal members attributed to Wilson’s private militia, Guardians of the Oglala Nation. And yet another concern was how border towns ignored white attacks against Lakota men when bar fights broke out, but had no difficulty prosecuting Lakota men for assaults and more violent crimes.

Oglala and AIM activists controlled Wounded Knee for 71 days while U.S. Marshals, FBI and other law enforcement agencies barricaded the town. Protestors chose Wounded Knee for its symbolic significance. It was the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre where on December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers slaughtered nearly 300 Lakota men, women and children.

In March of 1973, a U.S. Marshal was shot and paralyzed. Two tribe members, a Cherokee and Oglala Lakota, were shot and killed the following month. A civil rights activist named Ray Robinson disappeared and is believed to have been murdered.

The media provided saturation coverage of the occupation, especially after the two U.S. Senators from South Dakota, freshly elected James Abourezk and defeated presidential candidate George McGovern, visited the site. The events electrified Native Americans around the nation. Many of them traveled to Wounded Knee to join the protest.

Protest leaders defiantly declared Wounded Knee to be an independent territory of the Oglala Nation. In response, federal agents brought in a massive armory of military equipment — personnel carriers, rifles, grenade launchers, pilots and airplanes for aerial reconnaissance, flares and 133,000 rounds of ammunition — further heightening tensions. The government tightened the cordon around the town when, 30 days into the siege, it cut off food, water and electricity to Wounded Knee during a frigid winter. Media was barred from the scene. The FBI spread false rumors — such a report that AIM held hostages — to weaken public support which continued to grow as the media reported on the tribe’s poor living conditions.

Both sides traded fire throughout the three-month seige. Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont, a local Oglala Lakota, was killed by a shot from a government sniper on April 26th. As a result of Lamont’s death, a formal truce was called on May 5th and both sides disarmed. Many Oglala Lakota began to leave Wounded Knee, quietly filtering through federal lines at night. Three days later, the siege ended. Wounded Knee was evacuated and the government took control of the town.

Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

On January 2, 2016, an armed group of far-right extremists seized and occupied the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Reserve in Harney County, Oregon. They occupied the preserve until law enforcement made arrests forty days later. The protest leader was Ammon Bundy, who had, in 2014, participated in a standoff at his father’s Nevada ranch. Other members of the group were affiliated with private militias.

Organizers believed the federal government was not empowered to hold and manage public lands, but were obligated turn federal property over to the states. They focused on lands held by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). Triggering the protest were the convictions of two local ranchers for arson on federal properties in 2015. The occupation of the sanctuary began when Bundy led an armed party to refuge headquarters following a peaceful public rally.

By February 11th, all of the militants had surrendered or withdrawn from the occupation. Several leaders were arrested after leaving the site. One of them, LaVoy Finicum, was shot and killed during an attempt to arrest him after he reached for a handgun concealed in his pocket. After Finicum tried to evade an FBI roadblock, Ammon Bundy’s brother Ryan was wounded. More than two dozen of the militants were charged with federal offenses including conspiracy to obstruct federal officers, firearms violations, theft and destruction of federal property. A dozen pled guilty and six of were sentenced to short probations. Seven others, including Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were tried and acquitted of all federal charges. Seven of the militants served prison time for their roles in the occupation.

Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy. He formed the Citizens for Constitutional Occupation shortly before the group siezed control of the Malheur Refuge. His father organized and led a similar incident two years earlier.

Finicum was one of the group’s leaders but he also a spokesman. He was killed in a battle with an FBI Hostage Team after he ran a police roadblock and tried to kill an agent. Ryan Ammon was in the vehicle with Finicum and was wounded in this same encounter. Before he was killed, Finicum taunted the officers to shoot him.

LaVoy Finicum

The conflict started three months before the occupation.

On November 5, 2015, Ammon Bundy had a meeting with Harney County Sheriff David Ward. During the discussion, Bundy insisted that Ward shield father-and-son-militants Dwight and Steven Hammond from imprisonment. The duo had already been sentenced for arson on federal property and Ward said he was powerless to modify what the court had imposed. Bundy threatened that if Ward did not exonerate the Hammonds, “thousands” of armed militiamen would visit the county to “do Ward’s job” for him. Bundy organized a rally at the Harney County Fairgrounds to orchestrate direct action against the Hammonds’ sentences. A significant number of outsiders, often dressed in military camouflage and carrying firearms, filtered into the community. Many of them began threatening local residents if they did not express support for the Hammonds. They also threatened USFWS staffers.

A satellite image of Malheur National Refuge headquarters. A fire lookout was used as a watch tower (1); main offices were used as headquarters (2); other buildings were used as a canteen and barracks (3).

On January 2nd, at a rally which attracted 300 people to a Safeway Parking lot in Burns, Bundy announced plans to occupy the refuge, kicking off the occupation. On January 4th, militants bestowed a formal name on their group, The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. The group’s goal: economic revival of the logging and outdoor recreation industries. On January 7th, Sheriff Ward offered to escort the militants out of the county, an offer Bundy rejected.

By January 10th, more armed groups rotated through Burns, with some declaring they came to support the occupation, others to trying to convince the militants to quit. On January 14nd, Ammon Bundy said that the militants would be hunkering down for a long time. The next day, another militant anti-government group, the Oath Keepers, warned of a “conflagration so great, it cannot be stopped, leading to a bloody, brutal civil war” if the situation turned violent. Militants began to vandalize the sanctuary.

During the first weeks, law enforcement allowed the militants to come and go. Once outside the refuge, they were arrested at a traffic stop on a remote highway miles from populated areas. Both of the Bundy brothers and three other militants were caught. Hours after their capture, federal and state police moved into the region, formed a perimeter around the refuge and set up roadblocks. On January 29th, the last four militants in the refuge surrendered.

The FBI declared the entire refuge a crime scene. Agents found collections of firearms and explosives. Safes were breached. The militants stole money, cameras and computers. They also damaged cherished tribal artifacts.

During the occupation, extremists dug an illegeal new road. Using a government-owned excavator, they expanded a parking lot, dug trenches, destroyed part of a USFWS-owned fence and removed security cameras. Investigators found “significant amounts of human feces”. A USFWS spokesperson said the damage caused “the destruction and desecration of culturally significant Native American sites” and called it “disgusting, ghoulish behavior.”

The refuge’ was not re-opened to the public until mid-March. An FBI agent, W. Joseph Asarita, was charged with lying about the circumstances of Finicum’s death and obstruction of justice. After a two-and-one-half week trial, Asarita was acquitted of all charges. The occupation was said to cost taxpayers $3.3 million.

The U.S. Capitol Insurrection

As harrowing as the sacking of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th was, it should not have been a surprise. Not counting The Civil War, there have been more than 40 micro-rebellions in the 235 years since Shays Rebellion in 1786. In most of them. you can hear echoes and see the foreshadowing of what occurred in Washington on January 6th.

There is deeply engrained in our culture a strain of freedom that is both admirable and execrable. Admirable because Americans have unselfishly gone to great lengths and great expense to defend our political freedoms and those of our friends and allies. Execrable because far too frequently, too many Americans have defined freedom without regard to the common good, an all-consuming, selfish legacy that rejects any and all personal restraints or checks on personal liberty. If there is a national psychology, it is bi-polar because it creates a moral equivalence between existential threats like the one Hitler posed 80 years ago with an illusory threat to freedom a mask mandate might impose.

Other than that they were all violent uprisings against authority, there are few obvious parallels that you can point to in the genesis of The January 6th Insurrection and the micro-rebellions that preceded it. The “wrong” the Capitol rioters sought to right was a stolen election. This was and is a fiction sprung from the mind of a would-be demagogue and dictator. He was aided and abetted by irresponsible social media platforms which broadcast his lies to the gullible and a phalanx of enablers and sycophants, politicians who sought to inherit his voters, family protecting his “brand”, or corrupt “friends” and associates content to feed from the public trough and kick back a little to the king. There was nothing righteous about it. On the contrary, it was delusional.

The Capitol Insurrection rioters believe they had just cause to ransack the Capitol. In their minds, they are inheritors of the legacies of the Shays Rebellion insurrectionists and The Whiskey Insurrection militants. After all, just as those 18th century rebels fought against unjust taxes, the January 6th rioters rose up to fight against a stolen election.

Except the election was not stolen and Trump’s loss was the product of a free and fair election.

They could also claim they were the spiritual descendants of The Anti-Rent War fighters or Greenwood NY tax opponents. Both of those revolts came about because there was a genuinely aggrieved group. Finally,the January 6th insurrectionists could also claim their cause was as righteous as John Brown’s army or the followers of Nat Turner, and defend themselves because their uprising was not nearly as bloody as those earlier ones.

And of course they’d be wrong. Freeing slaves and abolishing slavery is a cause. Protesting election fraud which does not exist isn’t.

There are far stronger parallels between The Capitol Insurrection and The Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. In both instances, fringe right-wing groups believe the federal hasn’t the authority to hold public lands or, alternatively, certify the vote of a president rightfully chosen by the people.

To some degree, The Election Riot of 1874, where white supremacists committed acts of violence against Black voters and The Battle of Liberty Place, where white paramilitary groups tried to overthrow Louisiana’s state government, feature many of the same elements as The January 6th Capitol Insurrection. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Aryan Nations, the Oath Keepers, comprised of White supremacists, Fascists, Muslim haters and anti-Semites, if any of them knew any history, would be proud of their spiritual ancestors

But the closest historical metaphor to the January 6th siege is The Wilmington Uprising of 1898. That a murderous white mob could overthrow a democratically elected government in North Carolina, killing 60 Black men in the process, is a near perfect historical antecedent to the January 6th insurrection.

Those insurgents used many of the same tools Trump and his allies have employed for four years. To inflame rioters, Wilmington insurrectionists used The Big Lie: the Black vote was fraudulent. Black men were rampaging and raping white women. The election for North Carolina’s General Assembly was stolen. The Wilmington uprising took place on a far smaller stage than the January 6th Capitol raid, but it was far more successful. It demonstrated the power of that Big Lie, how easy it was to incite people to act on their fears and prejudices.

How successful? Well, most of the 125,000 Black men, women and children living in North Carolina prior to the massacre fled the state. By 1902, there were just 6,100 Black North Carolinians. The uprising’s effects were still felt 70 years later. No Black person was voted into the state’s General Assembly until 1969. North Carolina did not have a Black member of Congress until 1992.

This is the danger the January 6th uprising augurs. It encourages future uprisings and micro-rebellions and ratchets up their frequency, violence and destruction. And like the outrages, corruption, lies and creeping Fascism of the Trump presidency, when democratic norms are ignored and rejected, rebellion become the norm.

If that happens, this list of micro-rebellions in American history will grow longer. And although no one can predict the future, we can look forward to the slow crumbling of our democratic foundations and pillars until the time comes when American democracy exists in name only.

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Herbert L. Klein

Retired corporate counsel to a major automaker, history buff, avid baseball fan and golfer, proud to have been a newspaperman many years ago.