Frank Smith, who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages, died Saturday in Kinston, N.C. He was 71.
The cause was kidney cancer, his wife, Ellen Pearl Smith, said. He lived in Brooklyn and Queens for many years before moving to Kinston last year.
Mr. Smith, a huge man with a booming voice who was known as Big Black, figured large in the uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility, 30 miles east of Buffalo, during the second week of September 1971. He was chosen by other inmates to be chief of security with a principal responsibility to protect outsiders brought in to negotiate an end to the crisis. None were hurt.
After state troopers stormed the prison, shooting and killing dozens of inmates and guards held as hostages, Mr. Smith was subjected to brutal reprisals. Guards thought he had castrated a guard, a rumor that turned out to be false.
In the aftermath of the riot, which left 32 inmates and 11 guards dead, officers struck Mr. Smith's testicles with their nightsticks and dropped lighted cigarettes and hot shell casings on his chest, he told jurors in a 1991 hearing. The guards repeatedly told him they would soon castrate him.
In his book, "A Time to Die" (Quadrangle/New York Times, 1975), Tom Wicker, then a columnist for The New York Times who was an official observer of the uprising, gave a similar description.
Mr. Smith spent the rest of his life keeping the memory of Attica alive, largely through legal proceedings that began in 1974 and ended in 2000, when inmates won a $12 million settlement: $8 million to split among themselves and $4 million for their lawyers.
Michael A. Telesca, a federal judge in Rochester who presided over the last phase of the marathon case, said in an interview yesterday that Mr. Smith had particularly fought to win a chance for each willing inmate to testify about Attica.
"Everybody was kind of hoping the thing would go away," Judge Telesca said. "Frank made sure it didn't."
Frank Smith was born as his mother, the daughter of a former slave, picked cotton near Bennettsville, S.C., on Sept. 11, 1933. She balanced her newborn baby in her sack and finished the day's work, Ellen Pearl Smith said.
When Frank was 5, his mother took the family to Brooklyn, where he regularly got in trouble.
He went to prison for stealing money from people playing an illegal game of dice in an after-hours club. They hid their gambling paraphernalia, called the police and turned him in for robbery, Mrs. Smith said. He was in other prisons before winding up in Attica, where tensions crackled because of overcrowding and policies like giving inmates one roll of toilet paper a month.
Mr. Smith was working at his 30-cent-a-day job in the laundry when the prison erupted. As coach of the prison football team, he was a logical security chief: his players patrolled, and he recruited disciplined Muslim inmates.
Mr. Wicker remembered wanting to hide behind Mr. Smith when the state police, in a fog of pepper gas, swept into the prison. He said Mr. Smith displayed resigned courage.
"I done had it all," Mr. Smith said to Mr. Wicker. "It don't make no difference."
Because Mr. Smith was at first mistakenly regarded as a leader of the revolt, he was indicted on 34 kidnap counts, two coercion counts and two counts of unlawful imprisonment. Elizabeth Fink, who worked for many years as lawyer for the self-described Attica Brothers, said the charges were dropped.
Mr. Smith moved to New York City and became a paralegal working on the $2.8 billion civil liability suit filed in 1974, which alleged that 1,200 prisoners had been beaten, tortured or denied medical care.
"Give us our day in court," Mr. Smith said to a judge in 1980. "We ain't never had that."
The case dragged on until 1997, when Mr. Smith was awarded $4 million by a federal jury in Buffalo. The award was overturned two years later by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan on the ground that Mr. Smith's case should not have been separated from the larger group.
The lawyers had done this on the theory that since Mr. Smith's injuries were among the worst, he might provide a benchmark for other awards.
In the settlement, Mr. Smith persuaded some inmates to accept far less than they thought they deserved. He arranged bus transportation, box lunches included, from New York to Rochester so they could testify.
Ms. Fink said that Mr. Smith volunteered as a substance abuse counselor and in suicide prevention efforts. She said he took mentally ill people into his own home.
Mr. Smith is also survived by his daughters Stephanie and Shakeba Smith, both of Brooklyn; his son Otis Battle of Durham, N.C.; his sisters Lillie Bradford, of Beach Island, S.C., and Helen Smith, of Brooklyn; his brother Alexander Smith, who lives near Atlanta; five grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.
Judge Telesca said that when he last talked with him, Mr. Smith said that "unfinished business" remained. He wanted the families of guards - almost all of whom sacrificed a chance for a legal award by accepting state compensation for their injuries - to get the money he believed they deserved.
"Frank had that ability to forgive," Judge Telesca said.