Black Revolutionary George Jackson was shot to death in prison on Aug. 21, 1971, nearly one
month before his 30th birthday. There is still controversy surrounding
the circumstances of his death. Authorities reported that Jackson was
killed by a tower guard, who claimed George was trying to escape.. The uprising
left three guards and two prisoners dead, including Jackson. James Baldwin declared at a rally in Westminster, “No Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”
George L. Jackson was born in Chicago, Ill on September 23rd, 1941,and moved with his family
to Los Angeles at the age of 14. As a teen, he had a number of
juvenile problems, which landed him in trouble with the police and
resulted in him spending time in the Youth Authority Corrections
facility in Paso Robles, CA. In 1960, aged only eighteen, George Jackson was accused of stealing
$70 from a gas station in Los Angeles. Though there was evidence of his
innocence, his court-appointed lawyer maintained that because Jackson
had a record (two previous instances of petty crime), he should plead
guilty in exchange for a light sentence in the county jail. He did, and
received an indeterminate sentence of one year to life. Jackson spent
the next ten years in Soledad Prison, seven and a half of them in
solitary confinement. Instead of succumbing to the dehumanization of
prison existence, he transformed himself into the leading theoretician
of the prison movement and a brilliant writer.
While incarcerated at Soledad Prison in Salinas, CA. he became politicized and began studying the theories of Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon,
and Fidel Castro. Jackson was also inspired by the powerful events of the Cuban revolution and
the struggle of the people of Vietnam, as well as the anti-colonial
rebellions going on all over the so-called Third World. He developed strong ideas viewing capitalism as the
source of the oppression of people of color and became the leader in the
politicization of Black and Chicano prisoners in Soledad.
When he started teaching other prisoners about the
conditions that had got them into prison, and when he started organising
the other prisoners to defend themselves, he was put in solitary
confinement, where he did seven and a half years.
While in prison, he joined the Black Panther Party, and became one of its leading intellectuals and public figures.
On January
16, 1970, in response to the death of three Black Muslims, a white guard
(John Mills) was killed; In his twenty-eighth year, Jackson and two other black inmates , Fleeta
Drumgo and John Cluchette, were falsely accused of murdering the guard.
The accused men were brought in
chains and shackles to two secret hearings in Salinas County. A third
hearing was about to take place when John Cluchette managed to smuggle a
note to his mother: "Help, I'm in trouble." With the aid of a state
senator, his mother contacted a lawyer, and so commenced one of the
most extensive legal defenses in U.S. history. According to their
attorneys, Jackson, Drumgo, and Clutchette were charged with murder not
because there was any substantial evidence of their guilt, but because
they had been previously identified as black militants by the prison
authorities. If convicted, they would face a mandatory death penalty
under the California penal code. Within weeks, the case of the Soledad
Brothers emerged as a political cause célèbre for all sorts of people
demanding change at a time when every American institution was shaken
by Black rebellions in more than one hundred cities and the mass
movement against the Vietnam War.
For many supporters, the issue was the belief that the Soledad Brothers
were victims of a prison conspiracy. In August 1970, Jackson’s teenage
brother Jonathan was killed in the Marin County Courthouse in an
attempt to rescue his brother. Angela Davis, then a professor of philosophy at UCLA and the key organizer of the
Soledad Brothers campaign, was also a member of the Communist Party USA
and a “fellow traveler” of the Black Panther Party.was named as an accomplice to the crime because the guns used in the takeover were registered in her name.
but was later acquitted of conspiracy,
kidnapping, and murder. A possible explanation for the gun connection is
that Jonathan Jackson was her bodyguard. Thomas Magee, the sole
survivor among the attackers, eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated
kidnapping and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975.
Jackson was able to smuggle out his book, Blood in My Eye, only
a few days before his murder. It was published the autumn after his
death. His book is a political manifesto, relating Black struggle to a
larger struggle against imperialism, colonialism and the working class. Itt remains essential reading, even today.
The publication of
Jackson’s brilliant book "Soledad Brother" which contains the
letters that he wrote from 1964 to 1970, which is dedicated to Jonathan Jackson, was
released to critical acclaim in France and the United States, with an
introduction by the renowned French dramatist Jean Genet, in the fall of
1970.
Soledad Brother went on to become a classic of Black literature and political philosophy, selling more than 400,000 copies and acts as his testament and added to
his visibility. These uplifting writings, are the words of a prisoner
who would
not compromise with the authorities because he knew it would do no
good.
In a letter to his mother he expressed his outrage toward the
society he was born into, “I was born knowing nothing and am a product
of my total surroundings. I blame the capitalistic dog, the
imperialistic, cave-dwelling brute that kidnapped us, pulled the rug
from under us, made us a caste within his society with no vertical
economic mobility. As soon as all this became clear to me and I
developed the nerve to admit it to myself, that we were defeated in war
and are now captives, slaves or actually that we inherited a neoslave
existence, I immediately became relaxed, always expecting the worst, and
started working on the remedy.”
He felt that a great injustice had been committed against him by his
excessive and indeterminate sentence. He came to believe that he would
never be allowed to walk out of prison alive. He became increasingly
defiant in his attitude toward the justice system in general,
particularly with regard to the racial disparities in rates of
incarceration and lengths of sentencing.
The Attica prison rebellion https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2018/09/attica-prison-uprising1971-and-its.html in September is often speculated as a direct
outcome of his death, the most public revolutionary prison rights
activist murdered and silenced by the state apparatus.
Bob Dylan famously wrote a song about his legacy after his murder,
Bob Dylan - George Jackson
I woke up this mornin’
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground
Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground
He wouldn’t take shit from no one
He wouldn’t bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground
Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love
Lord, Lord
So they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground.
Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground
George Jackson stands alongside Malcolm X https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/02/malcolm-x-no-sell-out-19525-21265.html and countless others who
became politically and socially aware of racism and capitalism’s
underdevelopment of black America while locked down behind the walls of
prison. He represents an important ideological thread within the
international movement against colonialism, imperialism and racism. He
was sickened by the traditional ‘left’, and felt that their lack of
courage, their refusal to keep up with new developments and their
comfortable middle class backgrounds prevented them from organising real
change in society. He took to the Black Panther Party quickly, because
he saw that it was an organisation that spoke to the street, to the
dispossessed, the downtrodden; an organisation that *organised*, not
just talked. In ‘Blood in My Eye’, he puts it very simply:
“We are faced with two choices: to continue as we have
done for forty years fanning our pamphlets against the hurricane, or to
build a new revolutionary culture that we will be able to turn on the
old culture”
Jackson’s legacy is one of solidarity
and strength. His doctrine was not one of aggression, or Black
separatism, but of Black love and unity. He recognized the immense power
of solidarity within all marginalized communities. His doctrine was one
that allowed for the Black community to display strength through
education, unity, and self-defense.
One of the most dangerous components
of his doctrine was his use of racial unity. Although focused on Black
struggle and strengthening his community, he reached out to all cultural
groups, seeing the revolutionary potential in all oppressed people. He
was a part of organizing or an inspiration to many Latino prison
struggles as well. Additionally, his anti-imperialist framework guided
him towards supporting all countries under the United State’s
imperialist grip, in favor openly of the revolutions in Venezuela and
Cuba. His ability to unite all those around him, oppressed by the
predominantly white system that held him in chains, made him a dangerous
man to the status quo.
The historian Walter Rodney summed up George Jackson’s contribution brilliantly:
“George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated
himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where his clear vision
of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate
his perspective frightened the US power structure into physically
liquidating him… The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a
dynamic spokesman for the most wretched among the oppressed, and he was
in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.” http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/477.html
