Biography
Herbert X. Blyden was one of the chief negotiators and spokesmen for the rebelling prisoners during the September 1971 Attica uprising, a veteran prison organizer who had also helped lead the 1970 rebellion at the Tombs (the Manhattan House of Detention). 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 and a named plaintiff in the prisoners' federal litigation.
