My Life is a narrative account of John Ree’s experiences working in the field of adult corrections for more than 40 years. For more information or to purchase a copy, check out Amazon.
As I mentioned previously a period from December 1970 until June 1972, the Reformatory remained segregated from the housing perspective with the exception of the Honor Dorm and Dormitory 4, which housed outside workers. On a Sunday morning August 7, 1972, around 10 o’clock, a group of black inmates entered an all-white dormitory and attacked while some were still sleeping in their beds. How they got into the dormitory was simple, as security was quite lax.
There was one officer in the dorm who was easily overpowered and the crash gates were not locked. At the end of that attack, there were 17 inmates in the institutional hospital with very serious injuries. After the attack, the institution was locked down and the majority of black inmates went back into Dormitories 5 and 6. The white inmates who were housed in Dorm 4 left their dorm and went back toward the segregated white housing units. The institution was locked down. A count was taken. Commissioner Holmes was notified and he dispatched Luther Luckett and myself to the Reformatory to assist Warden Black in assessing the situation to try to restore order.
By the time I got there, they had the inmates separated dormitory by dormitory and were preparing to open up the yard. This was a major technical error! Immediately all the white offenders were out on the baseball field, obviously armed with anything they could get their hands on. The black inmates were in another area of the institution and equally armed. If the two groups of offenders got together a lot of people were going to be seriously hurt.
Deputy Commissioner Luckett, Warden Black and several other staff members positioned themselves at the railroad gate and moved out on to the yard. They split into two groups, one talking to the white offenders and the others talking to the black offenders. This further angered the whites who felt totally offended. They did not start the fight. They were not the ones who had seventeen people in the hospital and now the administration was talking to the blacks. This was not a good situation.
I was at the railroad gate with the Reformatory Riot Squad fully armed and fully suited up. Everyone had been given a direct order by Warden Black not to fire a shot. “Do not fire under any circumstance!” were his orders.
I was the highest ranking individual at the railroad gate when the white inmates got up and started to charge the black inmates. With Deputy Commissioner Luckett, Warden Black and others in between, it was going to be an absolute melee. I ordered the officer at the railroad gate to fire his weapon.
“I have been told not to,” he said.
“I don’t give a sh*t, fire your weapon, they are going to get together and kill each other.”
He fired off three or four shots into the air, and immediately both groups settled down. We got the riot squad between the groups and there we were in a stand-off. Luckett, Warden Black and others were taken off the yard. We had approximately 1700 inmates on the yard; 65 percent white, 35 percent black and a group of about 20 officers with shotguns keeping them apart. Now what do we do?
When Black and Luckett came back, Warden Black was not very happy with me as I had countermanded his order. Deputy Commissioner Luckett was thrilled.
“I’m glad you did not obey his order, you saved my life!” he told me.
I don’t know if I saved his life but I know I saved somebody’s life because had they not fired the gun and the inmates continued to run into each other, people were going to die. After the reassessment of the situation, Harold Keown, I and a couple of other caseworkers went out on the yard and focused on the white inmates. They were all still fully armed and our job was to talk them back into the housing units.
I don’t remember exactly what I said but it worked; we continued to talk and gradually got the inmates moved back into the dormitories. We didn’t care where they went, whether they went to their dormitory or not; we didn’t even worry about the weapons. We let them keep their weapons. We just wanted to get them behind a locked steel gate and then we would try to sort things out and see what we could do.
We kept talking and talking and talking and finally got the white inmates in as the others that were talking to the black inmates got them in. So by 4 or 5 o’clock that evening we had everyone secure. We did not have a count. We did not have any additional people hurt but we surely were not in control of the institution. Sandwiches were made and sack lunches were served for dinner and we grouped in the warden’s conference room to figure out what in the hell we were going to do.
We barely had control of the institution and we were able to get a reasonably reliable count but we knew we were not anywhere close to being back to a normal operation. This was before inmate phones. This was a period of minimal communication. Because we asked for State Police backup it had gone over the wires of the police radio and therefore to the press. The disturbance was becoming the major story on the 11 o’clock news and the front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal on Monday morning.