Biography
Frank "Big Black" Smith was an inmate at New York's Attica prison who served as head of security in the exercise yard during the September 1971 uprising, protecting the hostages. After the state retook the prison, he was singled out for notorious torture — made to lie naked for hours on a table with a football under his chin and told he would be killed if it fell, while guards beat and burned him. During the September 1971 uprising at New York's Attica prison — in which inmates seized the facility and held hostages for four days before Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered an armed assault that killed 39 men — the state, in December 1972, indicted 62 surviving inmates on some 1,289 counts while charging no trooper or guard; the Attica Brothers Legal Defense organized their cases, and Governor Hugh Carey closed the inmate prosecutions in 1976. He was among the indicted Attica Brothers, spent years organizing the Attica Brothers Legal Defense, and became the lead plaintiff in the prisoners' civil-rights lawsuit, which won a settlement in 2000. He died in 2004.
