As the Nation grew inside the prisons, wardens answered with solitary confinement, transfers, and bans on the Qur'an and Muhammad Speaks; Muslim prisoners answered with the writ. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, prisoners like Thomas X Cooper in Illinois's Stateville — held years in segregation for his faith — filed hundreds of suits demanding recognition of their religion.
In Cooper v. Pate (1964) the Supreme Court ruled that state prisoners could sue officials under the federal civil-rights act — ending the era in which courts refused to look behind prison walls. The case, brought by a Black Muslim the system had buried in isolation, is the foundation of modern prisoners'-rights law: every subsequent prison-conditions suit, from Attica's aftermath to today, stands on what the Nation's prisoners won.