“From Dachau with Love”
George Jackson, Black Radical Memory, and the Transnational Political Vision of Prison Abolition
DAN BERGER
To officials at San Quentin and Soledad prisons in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was prisoner number A63837. To many of his fellow prisoners then and since, he was The Comrade. To prison officials in the twenty-first century, he is the symbolic reason for the use of harsh sanctions, such as long-term solitary confinement and tough restrictions on reading material or political activity. To contemporary activists, he is the symbolic hope of political transformation and possibility amid the most dire of conditions—the hope for a world without prisons.
George Lester Jackson remains an enigma long after his death in the San Quentin prison yard on August 21, 1971, less than a year after he became a bestselling author for the collection of his prison letters, Soledad Brother. Whether as hero or villain, the memory of Jackson inspires prison activists and officials alike into the twenty-first century. Until recently, California prison officials pointed to Jackson as proof of the need for tough sanctions such as solitary confinement. In refusing to stay the execution of Crips founder turned anti-violence activist Stanley Tookie Williams in 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger argued that Williams had not been reformed because he had dedicated one of his books to George Jackson, among other notable Black activists.1 On the opposite end of the spectrum, Angela Davis, eminent scholar and a former friend of Jackson, credits him with a profound intellectual achievement. Jackson, she writes, drew international attention to “the prison as an institution—not only about political imprisonment, but about the relationship between the related processes of criminalization and racialization.”2
The wide gap between Schwarzenegger’s version of Jackson and Davis’s reflects fundamentally antagonistic visions of the world. Such differences have been replicated in scholarship: the few journalists and historians to write about the prisoners’ rights movement have, until recent years, been sharply critical of Jackson as the epitome of Black Power’s dangerous and violent tendencies. Historian Eric Cummins best encapsulates this perspective in his deeply researched yet troubling book, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. The first modern scholarly treatment of the influential 1960s-era prison movement, Rise and Fall describes Jackson and the wider world of prison activism in that time period as the tragic projection of the leftist imagination. Cummins argues that (mostly white) Bay-area radicals had a naive fascination with Black criminals that led them to invest a dangerous amount of authority and authenticity in prisoners who were political neophytes and petty hustlers conning their way to public support on the bodies of slain prisoners, guards and prison workers, and outside activists. Even more dangerously, Cummins argues, the faulty premise of the prison movement—which had politicized street crime—led to public distrust of prisoners and the left, thereby contributing to the harsh punitive practices that have governed California prisons and the country since the 1970s.3 Cummins is not wrong to problematize some of the naive assumptions or misguided actions that came out of the radical left, including the prison movement, in that time period. However, his argument in this regard is overstated and one-sided. In keeping with how many historians in the 1990s wrote about Black Power generally, Cummins sees it as having caused the violent implosion of the left and the success of subsequent revanchist policies.
Conversely, scholars in ethnic studies and literary theory, not governed by this dichotomized view of the 1960s, have praised Jackson’s incisive analysis of U.S. racial formation. These scholars, including Joy James and Dylan Rodríguez, see in Jackson and the wider field of prison radicalism a profound and enduring critique of U.S. racism as well as an explicit and appealing articulation of radicalism outside the strictures of American liberalism. These scholars recuperate Jackson in particular and dissident prisoners in general as a necessary part of American political theory. Prisoner writings, they argue, offer valuable insights into broad themes of race and empire, democracy and legality, justice and freedom. These scholars have shifted our view to see prisoners as intellectuals whose experience at the physical margins of society has given them a great deal of insight into the divisions at the center of American life writ large. In analyzing their own conditions, imprisoned intellectuals illuminate the wider world of modern unfreedom.4
Such bifurcated responses to Jackson have divided what he said from what he did, describing him as either a brilliant mind or a dangerous thug. However, contemporary historians are creating a new way of historicizing the lives and struggles of imprisoned radicals and radical prisoners. This essay follows in that vein by reexamining one of the most famous prisoners of the twentieth century. Reviewing Jackson’s record as both an author and an organizer, someone whose politicization was always shaped by his experience of the racist and violent world of California’s penal system, reveals a more complex portrait of Jackson and his legacy. This fuller picture of George Jackson, who he was and what he continues to mean to opponents of the prison, connects the prisoners’ rights movement of the mid-twentieth century to contemporary campaigns against the carceral state.
History and Memory
Historical figures, as ethnic studies scholar Roderick Ferguson notes of W. E. B. DuBois, constitute a discourse. The stories such people tell about themselves and that get told about them are more than stories—they are discursive claims to political significance, mobilized to leverage certain ideas, commitments, strategies, and values. They exist, in other words, in the realm of collective memory. The stories others tell of subordinated populations, such as prisoners, are often less about such groups as they are projections rooted in the fearful acknowledgment of large-scale social divisions. The stories that subordinated populations tell about themselves often revisit violations against them in order to construct a positive sense of self-worth. The gap between these uses of memory illuminates deep rifts in the national body politic.5
The intensity and physical isolation of prison accentuates the role of memory as a political strategy. After all, dissident prisoners must remind the outside world that they exist, that they deserve better treatment. The historical context of the 1960s helped define the specific contours of memory. The civil rights and Black Power movements scored powerful victories in their fight against white supremacy, including the end of legal segregation and an enhanced sense of possibility among African Americans. Yet alongside those positive transformations, throughout the 1960s the black incarceration rate began to rise in California and other states. Amid these cross-currents, Jackson and other black radical prisoners leveraged a memory of slavery as a way to describe their confinement. Their memories of slavery converged with a renewed attention to the peculiar institution among a new generation of leftist historians. As a result, Jackson joined a cohort engaged in what anthropologist Michael Hanchard described as a battle of “Black memory versus state memory.” Thinking through black memory, Jackson and others characterized prison as an extension of the country’s foundational racism.6
Such memorial constructions did more than define prison as slavery. They also positioned prisoners as abolitionist warriors. Jackson’s claims throughout his published work and in interviews he gave at that time, replicated through a variety of posthumous representations, constructed a larger-than-life hero of black liberation. These descriptions are no less fantastical than the depictions of Jackson by California political officials and prison guards, as described elsewhere in this volume, that see Jackson as an angel of death and the instigator of four decades of uninterrupted racial gang warfare in the state prisons.7 Yet such cynical portrayals of Jackson and the wider prisoners’ rights movement are, in ways deliberate and fortuitous, used to justify the harsh practices that have governed the California prison system since the early 1970s. By design they fail to capture what has always been so compelling about Jackson, for such figures seek to erase what Jackson has meant to the wretched of the earth.
What follows is an investigation into George Jackson as both a person and subject of memory: why he has offered so much hope to prisoners and such fear to their keepers from the late 1960s to the early twenty-first century. The rest of the article pursues a genealogy of George Jackson’s influence across three generations: first, his maturation across a decade of serving a life sentence (1960–1969); next, his eighteen months of fame that saw him become a defendant once again, a bestselling author, a political spokesman, and finally a martyr (1970–1971); and finally, his four and a half decades as an icon of prisoner resistance in the age of mass incarceration (1971–2017). In each phase, Jackson has influenced prison management, especially in California. As an avowed revolutionary, he was an intractable challenge to the orderly functioning of prison. As an author, he brought critical attention to the institution. As a symbol, his inspiration depended on whether one viewed prison as a site of rebellious victims or monstrous villains. Joining the pantheon of slain black radical icons of the 1960s era, Jackson’s writings continue to illuminate a transnational political vision opposed to prisons and state violence. His role as an author was especially critical in giving him a life after death, for it provided the material culture needed to keep his flame burning.8
Life: 1960–1969
George Jackson entered the California penal system as did many black youths of his age: a new migrant to the West, a working-class kid with a penchant for causing trouble. After a series of petty crimes and time in juvenile detention, he was sentenced to one year to life for his role in a gas station robbery. George Lester Jackson was the second oldest of five children and the oldest son to Lester and Georgia Jackson, a postal employee and a homemaker. His parents were from southern Illinois, although like many black people who moved to Chicago in the interwar years, their roots were deeper in the South. The Jackson family had moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1956 in the hopes that the new environment would put the fifteen-year-old George on a different path. But he continued to run afoul of the law in Southern California. He was arrested three times in 1957 for petty burglary attempts—police shot him in the forearm and leg during one of the arrests—and he spent eighteen months in a reform school for boys before being paroled at the end of 1958. He completed his sophomore year of high school under the tutelage of the California Youth Authority, the state’s legendary juvenile justice system, which loomed large over the lives of poor black migrants to the Golden State.9
Upon his release from the reform school, Jackson continued to court danger. Four more arrests followed, for fighting and robbery, and he served another few months under the auspices of the Youth Authority. On September 18, 1960, two days before his nineteenth birthday, Jackson was on his way back to Pasadena from Tijuana with a friend. The pair held up a gas station for $71. Jackson’s role was limited to the getaway driver. But given his prior offenses, his court-appointed attorney convinced him to plead guilty and hope for leniency. The judge, taken more with Jackson’s record than his plea, sentenced him to serve between one year and life in prison.
The vagueness of the term was a hallmark of California’s ostensibly liberal penal policy. What made California’s prison system liberal was its belief that the state could exclude those it deemed unfit to participate as citizen subjects and that it would either remake or remove wayward individuals from political and economic life. Rather than assigning a fixed set of years as punishment, the logic of indeterminate sentencing held that the parole board, called the Adult Authority (or, for those in juvenile detention, the Juvenile Authority), would examine each prisoner’s application on a case-by-case basis to see if the person was ready to be released by the standards of the Authority. The indeterminate sentencing law was passed in 1917 but gained steam as a model of social engineering during World War II. The policy effectively made the Adult Authority into the ultimate arbiter of a person’s prison term. The indeterminate sentence laws effectively made the parole board into a sentencing body; it alone decided when and under what criteria someone had proven themselves sufficiently “reformed” to be released. Critics charged that the Authority used prison time as a bludgeon to ensure compliance to the prison rules in particular and to a self-disciplined Protestant work ethic more generally.10
Jackson would spend the last eleven years of his life confined, mostly going back and forth between Soledad, a new prison in California’s Central Valley, and San Quentin, a century-old facility disaffectedly called “the Q” and located in Marin County, less than twenty miles from the San Francisco Bay Area. Unlike the prison in Soledad, modern in construction but rural in location, San Quentin was an archaic dungeon near a major—and generally progressive—population center. San Quentin was built by convict labor in 1852, two years after California became a state. It was the oldest prison in California and would soon become one of the most famous prisons in the world. In 1960, Jackson entered a world even more sharply polarized by race than the neighborhoods he had once called home. In response, he displayed a kind of non-political black solidarity rooted in self-defense. In 1962, he gathered a few other black prisoners to avenge the racially motivated stabbing of another black prisoner; guards foiled the plot with guns and gas and then shipped Jackson and his coconspirators to San Quentin.
It was the first of several write-ups Jackson received, mostly for banal activities. Journalist Min Yee reports that between “1962 and 1970, Jackson was cited forty-seven times for disciplinary infractions. He was denied parole ten times, even though his crime partner in the gas station robbery had been released years before.” Most of his infractions “were for minor matters—playing poker, grabbing more food from the chow line when he was hungry,” having more cigarettes in his possession than were allowed, not lining up at the bars during count, not cleaning his cell when told to do so. Although he received only a reprimand for some of these infractions, he was often placed in solitary as punishment. Between 1965 and 1969, he received three citations for fighting and two for possessing a weapon; the rest were for nonviolent activities. Jackson continued to be involved in the prison’s illicit economy—especially through gambling and the trade in prohibited items—throughout the first half of the 1960s. And in the prison’s racially volatile atmosphere, he continued to square off against guards and prisoners alike.11
Jackson had not been inclined toward politics before his incarceration, yet he quickly became known for his political activism. A combination of issues pushed him in a more political direction. Prison conditions were atrocious: rancid food, limited programming (especially for black prisoners), segregated facilities inside the prison, the curtailed access to basic hygiene health, the arbitrary and extended use of solitary confinement—often for violating picayune protocols. Underneath it all lay the constant threat of violence from white prisoners and guards alike. Prison officials, where they did not already nurture racial prejudice, demanded absolute obedience to their authority, no matter how capricious. Jackson began to read widely in philosophy, politics, and current events. Already in 1962, remembers fellow Soledad prisoner Willie Sundiata Tate, Jackson espoused revolutionary nationalist ideology that was mutually informed by socialism and Black Power.12 His reputation grew as his political perspective developed. By the mid-1960s, he was a leading force in the growing racial conflict inside California prisons. No primordial race war, these battles reflected the struggles for empowerment and bodily integrity that animated black communities on the outside at this time. They were struggles for human rights, political autonomy, and cultural pride. Jackson’s overtly political organizing provided a new framework for mobilization in an environment that had been dominated by the politically ambiguous Nation of Islam.13
By the mid-1960s, with California’s overall prison population declining but ever more racially disparate, Jackson had gained a reputation throughout the California penal system.14 When Black Panther cofounder and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton went to prison in 1968 for the manslaughter of police officer John Frey, he found Jackson’s influence in the actions of other black prisoners. Although Newton and Jackson never met face to face, they communicated through others. Jackson, after all, was to the prison environment what Newton was to the urban one: a minister of defense, a self-taught theoretician, a strong and strident black revolutionary nationalist and Marxist. They had a lot to offer each other in helping circulate the message of black revolution between the cell block and the city block. Newton connected Jackson to Fay Stender, a young attorney who was working for Black Panther lead counsel Charles Garry at the time and who would go on to found the Prison Law Project. Newton asked Stender to look into Jackson’s case in 1969 after the Panther leader heard from other prisoners about a man they considered to be a living legend.
Stuck in a prison cell, Jackson corresponded with his growing list of supporters. He wrote periodically for the Black Panther newspaper and joined the Black Panther Party with the title of field marshal. It was a military rank, and his charge was to expand the party’s paramilitary apparatus by recruiting members among black militant prisoners. In practice, this designation served to institutionalize what Jackson was already doing and would continue to do. Many Panthers celebrated the move as extending the reach of the party more formally inside of prisons, since Jackson’s involvement would increase the organization’s profile among those it considered to be a natural base of potential cadre. The title was not purely honorific: Jackson viewed as critical expanding the military capacity of black radicalism. His deepening connections with the party emerged in tandem with his growing commitment to third world revolutionary movements and their use of armed struggle. Modeling himself after the influential psychologist and theorist Frantz Fanon, who proclaimed the violence of anti-colonial revolutions in Africa an essential part of overthrowing the colonial mind-set among the oppressed, Jackson promoted people’s war as the necessary antidote to imperialism.15 Although prison restricted his physical movement and limited his reading material, Jackson nonetheless read avidly about the anti-colonial movements in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Like the Panthers generally, Jackson connected the third world condition with that of the American prison. His membership in the party, as much symbolic as substantive, extended the party’s emphasis on prisons beyond the arrests and trials of its free-world members. A series of deadly incidents inside Soledad prison in early 1970 would push Jackson beyond the pages of the Black Panther newspaper, turning him into a global icon of black militancy.
Life and Death: 1970–1971
Jackson’s notoriety within prison began to reach a wider public audience in 1970. A series of murders, smart organizing, and literary success elevated Jackson’s status—and with it came a growing public interest in the plight of prisoners. The year 1970 opened violently for California prisons. On January 13, a guard known for excellent marksmanship shot and killed three black prisoners in the yard of Soledad prison. Among the slain was W. L. Nolen, a prison boxing champ much beloved by black prisoners for his militant opposition to the racism of both guards and prisoners. When the area district attorney described these killings as justified three days later, prisoners beat and killed a guard in retaliation. While nothing happened to the guard who killed three black prisoners, the prison quickly charged three black prisoners with the other guard’s death.16 The three accused were John Clutchette, Fleeta Drumgo, and George Jackson. Prison officials initially held the men incommunicado; their respective families did not find out the charges against them until the middle of February. Around that time, Fay Stender became Jackson’s attorney and set out to build the kind of defense campaign for him that she had helped build for Huey Newton.
With the help of the Black Panthers, the Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party, assorted leftists throughout the Bay area, and the men’s families, Stender began turning the case of the “Soledad Brothers” into a cause célèbre that would characterize the 1970s era of prisoners’ rights. The newly formed Soledad Brothers Defense Committee included a long list of famous supporters, emphasizing the brutal and racist conditions of the California prison system. Supporters focused especially on George Jackson: he was the best spoken of the three, his family the most supportive, and he faced the stiffest penalty if convicted. Jackson was serving a sentence of one year to life, whereas Clutchette and Drumgo had bounded sentences. California penal code at the time held that anyone already serving a life sentence would automatically receive a death sentence if convicted of murder. Thus, Jackson provided supporters a chance to champion the intellect of condemned men while at the same challenging the brutality of the prison system that was found in everything from the capricious nature of his sentence to the everyday racism he and others experienced from white guards and prisoners alike.
Like so many others in the tradition of defending those facing political persecution, the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee claimed both the men’s innocence and the system’s guilt. The idea was to use the legal system in pursuit of a total critique of the system itself. While some people may have held on to both positions, they had different imperatives. Supporters would grow divided between those who believed in the men’s innocence and thus pursued legal remedies, and those, like Jackson, who wished to use the publicity surrounding the case to advance a revolutionary movement. The Soledad Brothers case, with its Manichean combination of official brutality and attractive, articulate dissidents, became paradigmatic of the prison’s growing centrality in American society. The effort to free Jackson, Drumgo, and Clutchette joined long-standing leftist critiques of capitalism’s legal bias with Black Power’s militant anti-imperialism.17
The case launched a new wave of prisoner defense campaigns; in the coming years, several prison riots captured national attention and catalyzed a variety of organizations dedicated to reforming or abolishing the prison. For several years after the Soledad Brothers case, writes historian Regina Kunzel, “leftist credibility seemed to depend on radical prison activism”; radical sectors of the feminist and lesbian and gay movements of that time, as well as other social movements of the 1970s, turned their attention to the prison following the lead of the Black Panthers and New Leftists who made George Jackson into a cause célèbre.18
The Soledad Brothers case also became a valuable prism through which to make sense of the growing connection between race and incarceration. In 1970, the rate of imprisonment was the lowest it had been in twenty years, with ninety-six per 100,000 people in prison. Never again would the American incarceration rate be so low. And yet the racial disparity of who went to prison was becoming entrenched. Already in 1970, black people were incarcerated at seven times the rate of whites.19 When Father Earl A. Neil eulogized George Jackson a year later as an apostle of “the Black condition,” he was more prophetic than perhaps he realized.20 Writing at the dawn of mass incarceration, Jackson was both an eloquent writer whose books contributed to making the prison visible and a militant revolutionist whose strategies triangulated blackness, confinement, and violence as mutually reinforcing. George Jackson advocated violent struggle against any and all manifestations of American power; such a course, he maintained, would cleanse the black soul of the confinement of white supremacy. As Frantz Fanon had suggested of anti-colonial movements in Africa, Jackson held that violence would vindicate a wounded black manhood. Several of those who followed his directives found themselves in prison, if they weren’t already. But Jackson also provided a glimpse of what was to come: an upside-down world where the prison would serve as a palimpsest of the ghetto, an institution that cast a long and indelible shadow over black life for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.21
Stender was both advocate and organizer. She suggested turning Jackson’s letters into a book to build support for the case. Stender was a hard-working radical attorney in her late thirties when she met George Jackson. A Berkeley native, Stender had worked for several years with Black Panthers and other Bay Area activists. She was working for Panther lead attorney Charles Garry when Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice appeared in 1968. Cleaver’s lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, smuggled some of his writings out of prison as legal materials. She then tapped into a loose network of writers, lawyers, and activists to raise Cleaver’s profile. Axelrod showed his writings to the editor of the Bay Area leftist newsmagazine Ramparts, which published some of them and gave Cleaver a job right out of prison. Axelrod also solicited the support of famous writers around the country to campaign for Cleaver’s release and the publication of Soul on Ice.22
Stender hoped to accomplish a similar feat with George Jackson. Through him, Stender’s life became more consumed by prison activism as more and more incarcerated people began asking her to take up their cases. Although she continued to specialize in prison law, her focus throughout 1970 remained on George Jackson. She drew on a wider circle of Panther supporters to develop the project from an idea into a publishable manuscript. Stender contacted her friend Jessica Mitford, the inimitable former Communist from a British aristocratic family who was, by that time, a celebrated author and muckraking journalist. Mitford introduced Stender to Gregory Armstrong of Bantam Books, who agreed to publish the book. The book was titled Soledad Brother, although by the time it appeared the three men had been transferred to San Quentin.23
The plan for the book fit within the strategy proclaiming the innocence of the Soledad Brothers. It coincided, though, with a spike in the other strategy percolating around the Soledad Brothers case: revolutionary violence against confinement. On August 7, 1970—two months before the publication of Jackson’s book—George Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, stormed the Marin County Courthouse in an armed revolt during the trial of San Quentin prisoner James McClain. The younger Jackson armed McClain and two other prisoners, William Christmas and Ruchell Magee. The group took the judge, district attorney, and several jurors hostage—only to be killed moments later by San Quentin prison guards who surrounded the courthouse and enforced the prison’s uncompromising policy of ending hostage scenarios by any means necessary. Jackson, Christmas, McClain, and Judge Harold Haley were all killed. The incident ultimately led to the arrest of scholar-activist Angela Davis, an intimate friend of George Jackson and mentor to Jonathan. Davis owned several of the guns used by the young Jackson, who had been serving as her bodyguard in the wake of many death threats against her for her active involvement in the Communist Party.24
The dramatic and bloody raid on the courthouse and the intensive two-month police search for Davis in its aftermath brought the story of the Soledad Brothers to an international audience. They also provided the backdrop against which Soledad Brother appeared. Fitting within a long history of prison writings—following quickly on the heels of prison writings by Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale, among others—Soledad Brother cemented the prison’s role as a critical site for black activism. Soledad Brother garnered fame for its author because it both articulated an existing current of radicalism among prisoners in the civil rights era and heightened it through powerful descriptions of Black Power and radical internationalism behind bars. The book demonstrated what former prisoners associated with Jackson identify of his demeanor overall: a principled, abiding, and global commitment to socialism, self-determination, and solidarity. Jackson’s book of letters influenced a generation of prisoner writings, much as Jackson’s strident self-confidence influenced a generation of prisoner actions.25
Soledad Brother merged memoir and Marxism to develop a theory of imprisonment as an extension of slavery. Throughout Soledad Brother, Jackson talks about remembering birth, enslavement, and the Middle Passage. “I recall the day I was born, the first day of my generation,” he wrote in one such passage. “It was during the second (and most destructive) capitalist world war for colonial privilege, early on a rainy Wednesday morning, late September, Chicago.”26 Jackson instantiated a model of prisoner literature that blended systemic critique with personal detail, the cross-currents of world-historical and autobiographical knowledge. His writings suggest the prison was a gestational site of long black memory. Jackson’s move between slavery and incarceration provided a framework through which to understand both the history and future of disproportionate black incarceration. “Blackmen [sic] born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations,” Jackson wrote by way of introduction to the book.27
The book offered a compelling if fractured portrait of life in prison that was at once bold beyond its context and a perfect reflection of it. The book’s fragmentary conversations, for the reader sees only Jackson’s letters, not the ones to which he responded, offer an atypical glimpse of popular black masculine consciousness in the second half of the 1960s and beyond. Part of the book’s appeal was in its ability for readers to see Jackson as a kind of everyman—a victim of his circumstances, working to make the best of a bad situation. His letters displayed an increasingly radical consciousness alongside the growing radicalization of black urban youth. George Jackson was, as described by New York Black Panther Sundiata Acoli, “the epitome of any Black person” who elected activism over apathy.28 From inside of prison, his letters narrate the major events of the era—the Watts uprising, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy—as well as the shift from a religious-inspired association with the Nation of Islam to the growing influence of revolutionary nationalism associated with the Marxist movements in Vietnam, Cuba, South Africa, and elsewhere across the “Third World.”29
Through Soledad Brother, Jackson emerged as a translator of the discontent growing inside prisons. He was part of a coterie of black prisoners that challenged racism in prison and whose politics were shaped by the extrajudicial killing of several black prisoners by white guards or prisoners, often acting with the collusion of guards. Jackson exposed the contentious and violent struggles taking place behind prison walls. His words provided the coherent narrative through which people could understand the growing prison protest in a highly politicized register. In Jackson’s urgent telling, prisons were schools rapidly graduating authentic revolutionaries who transformed themselves behind bars. “There are still some Blacks here who consider themselves criminals—but not many. Believe me, my friend, with the time and incentive that these brothers have to read, study, and think, you will find no class or category more aware, more embittered, desperate, or dedicated to the ultimate remedy—revolution. The most dedicated, the best of our kind—you’ll find them in the Folsoms, San Quentins, and Soledads. They live like there was no tomorrow. And for most of them there isn’t.”30 Jackson’s description of the polarized prison environment was also an argument about the broader forms of confinement that structure black life. To be black, Jackson claimed, was to live in and struggle against confinement. Black politics required “improvising on reality” from within what Jackson elsewhere called “the Black contingencies of Amerika [sic].”31
In Jackson’s commentary on Black America, Soledad Brother offered both a retrospective on the very recent past and a window into an emerging racial future. That Jackson (see figure 3) launched his critique of American society from prison was no coincidence, for his book—and the wider genre of prisoner literature that exploded in the mid-1960s—was a meta-commentary on the growth of the carceral state from its victims. Writing from the shadows of society, in the wake of civil rights legislative victories, George Jackson was a voice of protest from those who were more disenfranchised by the corporate capitalism of racial liberalism, increasingly deterritorialized and speaking the language of color blindness, than by the white-sheeted terrorists of Jim Crow’s dying regime. In describing the intense violence of racial hierarchies in prison, Soledad Brother was an intractable declaration that racism remained “at the center of the American experience.”32
Figure 3 George Jackson being led to court, circa 1971. Authorities so feared him that he is shackled at the wrist, waist, and ankles. His supporters praised his humor, charm, and eloquence. Photo by Dan O’Neil; courtesy of It’s About Time (Black Panther Party archive).
Anticipating the nuanced investigations of critical race theorists, Jackson showed that race persisted in and through otherwise invisible institutions. That he wrote from California’s isolation cells was a sneak peek inside what was fast becoming a premier technology of racial violence—the prison—while simultaneously presaging a wider truth about American racism: racism persists as a material force despite, even because of, attempts to render it an individual or impolitic opinion.
Soledad Brother is perhaps most eloquent in its defense of the life of the mind. Jackson’s letters express the dialectic of imprisoned radical intellectuals, at once proclaiming a freedom of and through the mind while simultaneously challenging the oppressive weight of racism and confinement as being “the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life.”33 George Jackson’s stubborn insistence that prison was not all powerful celebrated the intellectual and political sophistication of people written off by society. He trounced the guards and the entire system they represented while providing an existential meditation on freedom. Even amid the constant threat of death, the mind continues to thrive.
The life of the mind was an essential component for prisoner radicalism. Jackson offered his own evolving political consciousness as the dividing line between life and death for black people in general. “I must follow my mind. There is no turning back from awareness. If I were to alter my step now I would always hate myself. I would grow old feeling that I had failed in the obligatory duty that is ours once we become aware. I would die as most of us Blacks have died over the last few centuries, without having lived.” The severity of confinement forced the prison movement to be, in part, an intellectual movement. Without privacy or autonomy in nearly every register, dissident prisoners could still sharpen their minds. Literacy offered a measure of self-determination otherwise unavailable.34
Jackson’s eloquence reflected his widely read knowledge across the sciences, economics, languages, philosophy, and anthropology. His literary talents expressed an abiding internationalism that he introduced to other others as much through subtle word choices as through explicit arguments about the third world. Jackson’s signature sign-off, “from Dachau with love,” as well as his deliberate use of “U.S.A.” to refer interchangeably to the United States of America and the Union of South Africa as white supremacist states, expressed a global critique of the violence inherent to racial states across time and space, including the United States, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa. Jackson’s international reference points exemplified the tutoring in world history and affairs that he provided—first to fellow prisoners, and then to readers. One generation removed from the Holocaust and with apartheid firmly intact, Jackson demonstrated that the prison could not contain his intellect or empathy. The international scope of his reading practice placed American prisons as part of a global campaign against white supremacy. It also established Jackson alongside other world famous prisoners of the time, including South Africa’s anti-racialists, Irish Republicans, and Palestinian nationalists.35
This internationalism influenced other prisoners, too. James Carr, one of Jackson’s lieutenants, wrote that Jackson looked to the national liberation struggles in continental Africa as his greatest inspiration and that he tutored others to look to the third world for examples.36 This internationalism blended in the pages of Soledad Brother with a universal aspiration for human connection. His charisma blended romance and politics into a life-or-death struggle against all manner of violence and alienation. “If we can reach each other through all of this, fences, fear, concrete, steel, barbed wire, guns, then history will commend us for a great victory won. If so—it will be your generosity and my good fortune.” Such language, which prompted one reviewer to celebrate that Soledad Brother “breathes you in,” emphasized the affective connections of collectivity as an antidote to the bitter isolation of confinement.37
Jackson’s growing ability to channel existential angst through a communist analysis popularized an anti-racist critique of global capitalism. “I don’t want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument,” he wrote of his vision. “I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, racism, poverty, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth, and licentious usurious economics.… If there is any basis for a belief in the universality of man then we will find it in this struggle against the enemy of all mankind.”38
The intellectual life of prison was not unidirectional. Soledad Brother revealed that political critique, political thought, could travel from inside prison to the outside world and not just the other way around. Coming alongside growing interest in the plight of prisoners from the New Left, this capacity for intellectual critique was, in fact, the source of the prison’s anxiety about prison authors. “To San Quentin administrators,” writes Eric Cummins, “local citizen involvement in prison issues seemed so potentially violent in the early 1970s that the prison prepared for a ‘storming of the Bastille’ and drew up plans to close access roads to the prison and even to direct prison tower gunfire outward, for the first time in history, onto any group attempting to break into the prison.”39 Officials also worked to ban Soledad Brother from entering facilities, a practice that continued for decades. Several California prisons refused to accept copies of the book that the publisher donated to the prison libraries. Word of the book still spread, and individual prisoners received copies. Jackson said that prisoners “seem to be gratified that one of us had the opportunity to express himself” and appreciated that he was “getting ideas across, speaking for them, speaking for us.”40
While they did not want other prisoners to read the book, prison officials viewed the text as a chance to conduct surveillance on prison militants for the purpose of undercutting prisoners’ efforts to mobilize. L. H. Fudge, the superintendent of North Coast Conservation Center, released a memo to prison officials in the state suggesting that “every employee in the Department of Corrections” read Soledad Brother as part of the in-service training for staff to understand “the personality makeup of a highly dangerous sociopath.”41 Precisely because its author was still in prison, the book generated additional attention to prison protest—something prison officials sought to discredit or redirect. San Quentin warden Louis Nelson pointed to the media coverage describing the prison as “the best breeding and/or recruiting ground for neo-revolutionaries” as rationale for closing or restructuring several educational organizations in the prison.42
Despite its widespread popularity, Jackson disliked Soledad Brother. He wanted the book to be a text of revolutionary theory and a call to arms. He disagreed with its portrayal of him as an innocent victim rather than a captured revolutionary, and he thought the book focused on him in a too personal rather than overtly political manner.43 As he fielded interviews, engaged a host of new correspondents, and saw his fame rise, Jackson moved to consolidate his political positions. An imprisoned Che Guevara, an American Frantz Fanon, Jackson advocated armed struggle as a necessary force to inspire popular uprising. In particular, he proposed Guevara’s “foco” strategy, which held that a small group of revolutionaries attacking the state would generalize into an open rebellion that could displace the state. He saw his brother’s failed assault as one such example, claiming that his brother lacked sufficient support from other radicals and had underestimated that guards were the “most callous and vicious men … in all the enemy state.”44
Jackson fired Stender and hired John Thorne, a leftist attorney more pliable to his interests. He also set about writing a new book that would advance his ideas around guerrilla warfare. With extensive quotes from Jonathan’s letters to him, Blood in My Eye included Jackson’s thoughts on fascism, political economy, imprisonment, and the urban condition. It developed ideas that were only incipient in Soledad Brother, yet with a bleak and bloody political outlook that called for immediate armed insurrection. He completed the manuscript for Blood in My Eye in mid-August. It was published posthumously, Jackson contributing to his own memorialization from the grave.45
Death and Life: 1971–2017
George Jackson was killed on August 21, 1971, in an incident that some alleged was an escape attempt gone awry, others maintained was a government execution that Jackson foiled with a counterattack, and still others alleged was some combination of the two. The lack of an agreed-upon course of events has been part of what keeps Jackson’s memory alive. Regardless of what happened, it is clear that prisoners briefly seized control of the Adjustment Center at San Quentin and that five men—three guards and two prisoners, all white—were killed before, as Bob Dylan sang in his musical elegy of the slain prisoner, “they cut George Jackson down.” While prison guards killed Jackson, the other five had their throats slit with makeshift knives that some prisoners had fashioned; one of the guards was also shot. The bloody incident troubled attempts to cast the episode in binary terms—one of either victimized prisoners or a victimized prison system—since there were, as Jackson had written, “funerals on both sides.”46
Nevertheless, Jackson’s death sparked a prairie fire around the country. A widespread belief that he was targeted for assassination, along with Jackson’s own emphasis on armed struggle, led some leftists to respond to his death by attacking the instruments of power. By the end of August, the Weather Underground had bombed the California Department of Corrections office, and a group calling itself the George L. Jackson Assault Squad of the Black Liberation Army opened fire inside a San Francisco police station, killing one officer.47
What proved to be the biggest response to Jackson’s death began as a silent protest that prisoners launched at Attica Correctional Facility in western New York. Prisoners there had been confronting the administration with a series of grievances, and the silent protest they organized to commemorate Jackson’s death soon became the most dramatic prison riot in American history. The four-day takeover of the prison, complete with impressive if improvised experiments in self-governance, ended when state troopers violently retook control, killing thirty-nine people in the process. But as the Attica rebels themselves said, theirs was the “sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.” Prisoners around the country expressed their outrage about the events in San Quentin and Attica alike in a series of protests and strikes. Jackson now became not only the intellectual leader of prison radicalism but also its martyred ancestor—a symbol to nurture, a reason to continue.48
The events at San Quentin and Attica marked a new phase in the prison movement. In the coming years, as several other California prison activists were slain in internecine battles, several onetime prison activists retreated from their earlier positions. Although they did not universally condemn Jackson, they distanced themselves from him in a way that contributed to unsettling the construction of him as an innocent victim.49 Dissident prisoners continued to organize throughout the decade and beyond. But their ability to command public attention receded as calls for expanded punishment grew even more powerful. As a result, prisons became more atomized and, beginning in the early 1980s, far more plentiful. The circumstances of Jackson’s death, along with a growing tide of law-and-order conservatism from Democrats and Republicans alike, bolstered public support for the well-worn arguments of punitive hard-liners such as Ronald Reagan.50
In death, both George and Jonathan Jackson became symbols of black radicalism—memories to nurture or repress. Ruchell Magee, the only surviving participant of the August 7 events, described Jonathan in biblical terms: “The only Jesus for a Black man today is a man like Jonnie Jackson. He’s a hard driving Black man with plenty of soul to recognize the time of day. He wasn’t talking Black, he was acting Black—just like I am going to do from now on.” Prisoners used similarly praising terminology in talking about the elder Jackson. Amid a growing and increasingly successful counterrevolution arguing for expanded punishment, Jackson continued to inspire prisoners to become politically active, to study political theory and current events, to make connections beyond prison walls. A survey of prisoner writings throughout the decade (and since) reveals his centrality to prisoner attempts to find in politics a chance to survive the isolation and violence of confinement.51
As conditions grew more dire and public support waned, prisoners in the mid-1970s turned to other methods of action—from unions and forms of prisoner self-governance to lawsuits against the state. Black nationalists turned to print culture. With less public support and little in the way of a mass movement to support them, these prisoners used media as a way to sustain connections with other prisoners and with sympathetic outsiders. California, Illinois, and New York—all states with once-thriving chapters of the Black Panther Party and long histories of black radicalism—each housed a series of revolutionary nationalist newspapers based in or focused on prison. These publications included Arm the Spirit in California (edited in San Quentin, produced in San Francisco); Black Pride (produced at the Marion Federal Penitentiary), and Midnight Special (edited by a collective in New York City but entirely authored by prisoners).52
These and similar publications at the time took George Jackson as their inspiration. Prisoners writing in both Black Pride and Midnight Special discussed Jackson frequently and at great length: everything from meditations on Jackson’s intellectual arguments to the invocation of his legacy as an inspiration for further militancy to poetic and artistic renderings. In one issue of Midnight Special, a prisoner in Lorton, Virginia, used Jackson to claim that the United States would rise or fall according to its treatment of prisoners: “Wake-up Amerika if you expect to remain. / You see Amerika the solutions are under / George Jackson names.” Begun in July 1978, Arm the Spirit included a picture of Jackson and a quote from him on the front page of every issue, seemingly identifying its mission in Jackson’s call for an anti-fascist mass movement.53
San Quentin, the site of Jackson’s fame and fall, remained central to the construction of his memory. The prison had experienced dozens of stabbings throughout the 1970s—eighty-five in 1974 alone.54 In tandem with an appeal to the United Nations organized by San Quentin prisoner and former Black Panther Jalil Muntaqim, prison activists held demonstrations at the gates of San Quentin starting in 1977.55 The organizers chose August in order to commemorate George (and Jonathan) Jackson. In 1977 and 1978, the protests were held on or near August 21, and the organization sponsoring the solidarity march at the prison gates called itself the August 21 Coalition. The demonstrators petitioned that the prisoners’ demands be met, which included giving prisoners access to media through which they could expose prison conditions.56
By 1979, prisoners institutionalized this protest in the form of a holiday. Black August was said to commemorate the martyrs of the California prison movement, all of whom died in August: George and Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain, and Jeffrey Khatari Gaulden, who died in San Quentin on August 1, 1978.57 Black August began as a way to honor the relatively recent history of prison radicalism alongside the long history of slave rebellions. As the tradition continued, Black August participants have pointed to the many dates of black historical significance that have occurred in the month of August. August has been the month of slave rebellions, from the beginning of the Haitian Revolution (August 21, 1791) to those attempted by Gabriel Prosser (originally scheduled for August 30, 1800), launched by Nat Turner (beginning August 21, 1831), and called for by Henry Highland Garnett (August 22, 1843). It has been a time of death (W. E. B. DuBois, August 27, 1963) and of birth (Marcus Garvey, August 17, 1887; Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association [UNIA], formed in August 1914). And it has been a time of protest, from the UNIA’s month-long international convention of 25,000 people at Madison Square Garden in August 1920 to the 1963 March on Washington, from the Watts rebellion of 1965 to the 1978 standoff between police and the black naturalist MOVE organization in Philadelphia.58 Now an international hip hop festival, as well as a holiday celebrated by multiracial groups of dissident prisoners, Black August has become a celebration of black diasporic radicalism.59
Though Black August and scattered other efforts survived the era, the prison movement was drowned out by a new era of toughness. In the years since 1980, members of the frayed coalition of the 1970s prison movement continued their work solo. Several journalists wrote about the expansion of harsh conditions and more prisons. Several academics studied what the reliance on prisons meant for U.S. racial formation and politics. Several artists beautifully challenged what was increasingly called the prison industrial complex. And several politically active prisoners mentored others, worked with outside activists, fought against the AIDS epidemic, and circulated their writings or art. Such efforts produced organizations such as the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, Critical Resistance, the Jericho Movement to Free Political Prisoners, and scattered defense campaigns. With little in the way of a mass movement against prisons, such efforts nonetheless persisted in surfacing critiques of the punishment logic. Meanwhile, prisons proliferated yet became more inaccessible. The incarceration rate skyrocketed, seemingly with no end in sight.60
George Jackson has been a palimpsest, an absent presence, in these transformations. Memory is about narrative consistency, and the lack of a consistent narrative about the events at San Quentin in August 1971 or the events at Attica the following month linger without resolution. As the law-and-order counterrevolution took hold and buried the Black Power origins of the 1960s-era prison radicalism, Jackson was used as a rationale for more prisons, longer sentences, and tougher penalties. California officials cited Jackson as the cause of building Pelican Bay, one of the most restrictive prisons in the world, a place where prisoners spend years or decades in near-total isolation. Popular books about him seemed only to confirm that he was a hustler and a fake, a gangster and a good writer who manipulated people’s sympathies to violent ends. Among the radical left, scattered and isolated as it may have been, George Jackson remained a hero and a martyr in whose image many black men in prison continued to fashion themselves. He continues to inspire prisoners to improve their literacy, become politically active, and see themselves as more than a victim of circumstance.61
In American Saturday, the 1981 true-crime book about the day George Jackson was killed, novelist Clark Howard ends his story with the ominous warning that “there are others like him. They are out there in the night somewhere. Carrying George around inside them.”62 Howard may be right, but not in the melodramatic way he intended. Today’s George Jacksons are not, by and large, walking the streets. Rather they are pacing the cells of solitary confinement units in Pelican Bay, California; Red Onion, Virginia; Huntsville, Alabama; Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and elsewhere. They lack the book contracts and public sympathy that rocketed George Jackson to public visibility. But they remain ever present.
Prisoner organizing has always had a sense of urgency from the fact that it is contesting both diffuse and highly tangible forms of state power. At issue is not just a theory of the U.S. carceral state but its physicality. George Jackson’s writings, as well as his political practice inside San Quentin and Soledad, provide a framework for approaching social change from behind concrete walls and concertina wire. Adopted verbatim, Jackson’s writings could be ruthless, cruel, and unworkable. Rather than a developed political program, his memory offers an abiding political inspiration that allows the desperate and disenfranchised to locate themselves within a broader body politic. That was Jackson’s posthumous message, when he wrote “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch, give up your life for the people.”63
An excerpt of that quote—“settle your quarrels,” which had previously adorned the masthead of the late 1970s prisoner newspaper Arm the Spirit—sparked a 2012 call from prisoners at California’s supermax Pelican Bay to end gang and racial hostilities inside and outside of prison. “We must all hold strong to our mutual agreement from this point on and focus our time, attention and energy on mutual causes beneficial to all of us [that is, prisoners] and our best interests,” the statement read. “We can no longer allow CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] to use us against each other for their benefit!”64 The statement was drafted by a political collective formed at Pelican Bay that coordinated a series of hunger strikes and lawsuits against long-term solitary confinement between 2011 and 2013. The final hunger strike was the biggest, perhaps in the nation’s history, with 30,000 people initially participating. In 2015, their efforts succeeded in limiting the use of long-term solitary confinement in the state. Some men who had been in isolation for more than two decades were released into general population.65
Reverberating across the generations, three of Jackson’s comrades who spent years in the San Quentin’s solitary confinement unit, the Adjustment Center, responded to the Pelican Bay statement. The three—David Giappa Johnson, Luis Bato Talamantez, and Willie Sundiata Tate—all stood trial as part of the “San Quentin Six” case that stemmed from the violence of August 21, 1971. Having spent years in prison and achieving some notoriety for their work against racism in prison, the three men congratulated the Pelican Bay prisoners for their message: “Prison struggle made us comrades,” they declared. They advised the strikers to nurture a life of the mind and a memory of solidarity. “Never surrender lest your spirit be broken. Other comrades will help you. Maintain freedom of mind while captive. Prisoners from cradle to the grave but never slaves! Stand for the good and for justice for all. Struggle to overcome internal conflict. No longer is this about just one individual, one race, set or prison. Take heart. You are not alone!”66
The strike at Pelican Bay, and the intergenerational dialogue it prompted with veterans of the 1970s era, defined a new era of prison protest. Much as George Jackson and his comrades drew on the memory of slavery to aid their efforts, so too have twenty-first-century rebels appealed to the memory of Jackson’s era. In the spring of 2016, prisoners in Alabama called for a “national prison strike against slavery.” They launched the strike in September to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of the Attica rebellion. With actions in at least half a dozen states and involving tens of thousands of prisoners, the national strike came after years of local labor and hunger strikes in American prisons. That these strikes have come mostly from people in long-term solitary confinement and have taken the form of life-or-death hunger strikes is a sign of how dire conditions in American prisons have become.67
It is also a sign of a new mood of opposition and possibility inside American prisons that has been matched by outside social movements seeking to shrink the size and scope of the prison system. Grassroots campaigns have targeted everything from solitary confinement and sentencing policies to moratoriums on prison construction and curtailments of police violence. George Jackson’s influence here can be found in the political connections these movements make—especially between black life in the prison and the city—as well as in the burst of (largely nonviolent) direct action. Occupy Wall Street and the Movement for Black Lives have connected prisons to police violence and economic inequality while the rise of formerly incarcerated groups such as All of US or None and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls have targeted the stigmas and exclusions that still confine people after their release from prison. That such organizing has coincided with direct action protests against deportations as well as prisoner hunger strikes in Turkey, Israel, and other repressive countries has expanded the transnational thrust of prison organizing.68
George Jackson and the wider prison movement that he has come to represent continue to inspire opponents of the carceral state. To them, he is not a reason to prey on hapless civilians, much less serve as a justification for harsh or unending punishment. Much as the living George Jackson sparked a movement against the use of indeterminate sentencing, so too does the memory of him inspire those who organize against solitary confinement. More than that, however, George Jackson serves as inspiration to those who seek personal and social transformation. Jackson serves as a catalyst for efforts to develop multiracial unity in places that thrive on racial division, to develop and hone the capacity for political expression in places that actively discourage intellectual engagement. This version of George Jackson does not stalk the night but rather paces the cramped cells of the supermax, walks the yard at any number of jails, prisons, and detention centers that dot the American landscape.
For generations, the former slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s declaration “ar’n’t I a woman” has provided a touchstone for those seeking to understand the competing pressures black women faced during and since the nineteenth century. The pithy statement provides a shorthand explanation of the enduring complexities of black women’s experience. Its poignancy makes up for the fact that, as historian Nell Irvin Painter has shown, Truth herself likely never uttered those words. Rather, an early biographer of Truth probably conjured the passage for dramatic effect. The memory of George Jackson functions similarly: he provides an example of uncompromising political activist who rose above the brutality and isolation of his surroundings in order to express a vision of collective liberation. Although the days of chattel slavery are behind us, the abolitionist flame still burns deep inside the earth’s leading jailer. George Jackson remains a spark for those who carry the torch in pursuit of a world without prisons.69
Notes
1. Dan Berger, “Two Prisoners Named Williams,” Nation, December 14, 2005, http://
2. Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 105.
3. Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). For similar views of Jackson, see also Paul Liberatore, The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin Massacre (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996); Lori Andrews, Black Power, White Blood: The Life and Times of Johnny Spain (New York: Pantheon, 1996).
4. See, for example, Joy James, ed., Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) and Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prisons in a Penal Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); H. Bruce Franklin, The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Michael Hames-Garcia, Fugitive Justice: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Doran Larson, The Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014). For an exemplary history that rejects this traditional divide, see Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Antilynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
5. Roderick Ferguson, “Du Bois: Biography of a Discourse,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 269–88; see also Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Jonathan Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Alan Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010); Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
6. Michael Hanchard, “Black Memory versus State Memory: Notes toward a Method,” SmallAxe 12, no. 2 (2008): 45–62; David Scott, “On the Archaeologies of Black Memory,” SmallAxe 12, no. 2 (2008): v–xvi. On the rise of black incarceration in California in the mid-twentieth century, see Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 158–94. On foundational racism, see Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racism in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016). Interest in slavery as both history and allegory was resurrected during the 1970s in the United States. Marxist-influenced labor historians John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Lawrence Levine, Nathan Huggins, Leon Litwack, and others produced a new scholarship on slavery that, in Hahn’s summary, “showed growing and increasingly sophisticated interest in what slaves ‘did’ under slavery, and in how they shaped the institution and hastened its eventual demise.” See Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 108.
7. Keramet Reiter, 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Jeffrey A. Beard, “Hunger Strikes in California Prisons Is a Gang Power Play,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2013, http://
8. Manning Marable, “Marxism, Memory, and the Black Radical Tradition,” Souls 13, no. 1 (2011): 1–16. The literature on material culture and collective memory is vast; see, for example, Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom.
9. My sketch of Jackson’s carceral biography draws on Yee’s reportage in this book, as well as the autobiography Jackson provides in Soledad Brother and an array of secondary sources. See George Jackson, Soledad Brother (1970; repr., Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994); Berger, Captive Nation, 91–138. On the Juvenile Authority in the life of black Californians, see Donna Murch, Living for the City: Education, Migration, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Miroslava Chávez-García, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
10. Prison Action Project, Freedom on Our Terms: The Case against the Adult Authority pamphlet (Oakland: n.p., ca. 1971), in author’s files courtesy of Tony Platt. Indeterminate sentencing and parole were notable features of the twentieth-century rehabilitative school of penology. Indeterminate sentencing was first developed in California, beginning in 1917. Parole developed similarly as part of a governmental effort to regulate behavior, based on the belief that criminal behavior could be eliminated through proper training. Thus, prisons in the twentieth century were often known as “training facilities.” See Kohler-Haussman, Getting Tough, 211–49; Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 304–8; Jonathan Simon, Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
11. Min S. Yee, The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 126; “George Lester Jackson (Deceased),” November 16, 1971, FBI memo, Jonathan Peter Jackson, Federal Bureau of Investigation file 157-20544, folder 1, 2–5.
12. Sundiata Tate, interview with the author, December 17, 2012.
13. On the Nation of Islam’s influence in prisons prior to that point, see Eldridge Cleaver, “Prisons: The Muslims’ Decline,” in Prison Life: A Study of the Explosive Conditions in America’s Prisons, ed. Ramparts Magazine editors and Frank Browning (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 100–3; and Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968); Toussaint Losier, “… ‘For Strictly Religious Reason[s]’: Cooper v. Pate and the Origins of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Souls 15, no. 1–2 (2013): 19–38; Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement (New York: Routledge, 2017), chap. 2; and Garrett Felber, “ ‘Shades of Mississippi’: The Nation of Islam’s Prison Organizing, the Carceral State, and the Black Freedom Struggle,” Journal of American History 105, no. 1 (June 2018): 71–95.
14. Eric Schlosser reports that “the number of inmates in California had declined by more than a fourth, despite the state’s growing population” between 1963 and 1972; see Schlosser, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” Atlantic, December 1998, 51–77.
15. On Fanon’s views, see Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (London: Pluto Press, 2015), as well as Fanon’s most famous work, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1966). For an original analysis of Fanon’s ideas from another prisoner, see James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2010).
16. French author Jean Genet, who became one of Jackson’s most prominent supporters, viewed this distinction as a kind of algorithm of the value placed on black life versus that placed on white life. See Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 67.
17. More generally on these connections, see Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, esp. 265–314.
18. Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 193. Other movements of the time, including those for Puerto Rican independence, Chicano civil rights, indigenous sovereignty, and nuclear disarmament, each turned their attention to the prison, at least for a little while. For a sampling of the ways prison informed a variety of movements of the 1970s, see the essays in Dan Berger, ed., The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). On the feminist movement, see Emily Thuma, “Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism,” WSQ 43, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2015): 52–71.
19. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 117; Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, “Incarceration and Social Inequality,” Daedalus, Summer 2010, 8–19.
20. Father Earl A. Neil was rector of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland and an active supporter of the Black Panthers. He officiated funerals for both Jonathan and George Jackson. See “George Jackson Funeral,” audio file PM 067, Freedom Archives, San Francisco, California.
21. George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972; repr., Chicago: Black Classics Press, 1990). See also Michael B. Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 95–134.
22. See Kathleen Cleaver, ed., Target Zero: A Life in Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), xiii; Melanie Margaret Kask, “Soul Mates: The Prison Letters of Eldridge Cleaver and Bevely Axelrod” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003); Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: New Press, 2009).
23. See September 2, 1970, press release from Bantam Books and Coward-McCann announcing publication of Soledad Brother; and the June 23, 1970, letter from Fay Stender to Jessica Mitford, both in Jessica Mitford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, (hereafter JMP), box 48, folder 9. For Newton’s and Stender’s involvement, see Ron Rosenbaum, “Wither Thou Goest,” Esquire Magazine, July 1972, 86–88, 92, 174–76.
24. For more on the events of August 7, see Berger, Captive Nation, 120–29.
25. Berger, 91–96, 109–20.
26. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 234, in the 1994 edition; all subsequent citations of Soledad Brother refer to this edition.
27. Jackson, 4.
28. Sundiata Acoli, interview with the author, October 31, 2012.
29. More generally on the third world project, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007).
30. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 26.
31. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 42; George Jackson, November 16, 1970, draft of letter to New York Times, in Papers Relating to the Publication of Soledad Brother, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter PPSB), carton 1, folder 22. More generally on the connection between blackness, confinement, and freedom, see Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” in Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 25–34.
32. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 5. My arguments here build on several recent interventions in critical race theory and American ethnic studies. See, for example, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, eds., Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Hong, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
33. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 14.
34. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 146. More broadly on this point, see James, Imprisoned Intellectuals; Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Megan Sweeney, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prison (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
35. See, for example, the books he requests on p. 294 of Soledad Brother and the list of books seized from his cell after his death; N. R. Snellgrove memo to L. S. Nelson, “Books Taken from the Cell of George Jackson,” September 3, 1971, available at https://
36. James Carr, Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr (1975; repr., Oakland: AK Press 2002), 123–24.
37. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 269; Suzannah Lessard, “Beyond Cleaver,” Washington Monthly, November 1970, 63.
38. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 266.
39. Cummins, Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement, viii.
40. Jessica Mitford, “A Talk with George Jackson,” New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1971.
41. L. H. Fudge, November 4, 1970, State of California Memorandum, Subject: In-Service Training Recommendations, in JMP, box 44, folder 4.
42. L. S. Nelson, March 22, 1971, California State Prison, Subject: Inmate Activity Programs, in JMP, box 44, folder 4.
43. In a letter to the editor of Soledad Brother, Gregory Armstrong, Jackson wrote, “There is very little that I could say at present to make people think that I am merely an ox in a bind, an 18 yr. old candy store bandit. That hasn’t worked, I knew it wouldn’t. And really, it wasn’t my idea to try it.” Meanwhile, Stender confided to Armstrong that Jackson was “angry with me for the book for cutting out the blood and guts part.” See George Jackson to Gregory Armstrong, September 20, 1970, PPSB, carton 1, folder 38; Fay Stender to Greg Armstrong, n.d., PPSB, carton 1, folder 47; George Jackson, “Top Secret Legal Manifesto,” January 11, 1971, Huey P. Newton Foundation Papers, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, series 2, box 4, folder 16.
44. George Jackson to Jessica Mitford, March 4, 1971, in JMP, box 48, folder 9.
45. Berger, Captive Nation, 158–61.
46. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 14.
47. Eric Mann, Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson (New York: Perennial, 1974).
48. Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon, 1971); Tom Wicker, A Time to Die (New York: Ballantine, 1975); National Lawyers Guild, San Quentin to Attica: The Sound before the Fury (New York: National Lawyers Guild, ca. 1972), Raul R. Salinas Papers, Stanford University, box 8, folder 3.
49. See, for example, Gregory Armstrong, The Dragon Has Come (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Eve Pell, We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).
50. On responses to Jackson’s death, see Berger, Captive Nation, 144–76. On the larger conservative response to these issues, see Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Julilly Kohler-Haussman, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
51. Reginald Major, Justice in the Round (New York: Third Press, 1973), 122. For contemporary examples of prisoner literature in the vein of Jackson, see Sanyika Shakur, Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (New York: Atlantic Press, 1993); Kevin Rashid Johnson, Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2010).
52. On diverse forms of prisoner organizing in the 1970s, see Berger and Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement, chap. 4. On Black Nationalist print culture, see Berger, Captive Nation, chap. 6.
53. “Tribute to George Jackson,” Midnight Special, September 1973, 9. The quote from Jackson that appeared in each issue of Arm the Spirit is cited in footnote 63.
54. Cummins, Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement; James Jacobs, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977).
55. On Muntaqim’s United Nations appeal, see Berger, Captive Nation, 244–48.
56. “Saturday, August 24: George Jackson Day of Unity,” Sun Reporter, August 24, 1974, 6; Peter Magnani, “Demonstrators Protest Attacks on Black Prisoners,” Sun Reporter, August 25, 1977, 3; “Black Prisoners Call for San Quentin Demo,” Sun Reporter, July 27, 1978, 11.
57. Gaulden was a comrade of Jackson’s and a leading figure in the prison military formation Jackson started, the Black Guerrilla Family. Gaulden had been imprisoned since 1967, part of the George Jackson generation of prisoners who became revolutionaries upon their confinement. He makes few appearances in the records of California’s prison movement before his death, though he was well known among Bay Area prison activists. He was convicted in May 1972 for killing a civilian laundry worker at Folsom the previous September, allegedly in response to Jackson’s death. While playing football in the Adjustment Center yard, Gaulden was pushed too hard and hit his head. Guards allowed him to bleed to death on the yard as they removed prisoners individually. Shuuja Graham, interview with the author, August 3, 2012; Friends of San Quentin Adjustment Center, Letters to Mother from Prison (ca. 1972), in Tony Platt, private archives; “Says Skin Search Clears Him of Stabbing Guard,” Jet Magazine March 25, 1976, 22–23; “Four-Day Railroad: Jeffrey Gaulden Convicted in Sacramento,” Committee for Prisoner Humanity and Justice volume 2, number 1, 5.
58. See, for instance, Kiilu Nyasha, “Black August 2009: A Story of African Freedom Fighters,” http://
59. For more on the holiday, see Berger, Captive Nation, 257–67. In the 1990s, Black August served as the name of a global hip hop festival celebrating imprisoned radicals and the larger black freedom struggle. Black August was also the title of a 2006 independent film about George Jackson, based on Gregory Armstrong’s book, The Dragon Has Come.
60. On the efforts of prison organizing in the 1980s and 1990s, see Berger and Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement, chap. 6. On the proliferation of prisons in that time period, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Elizabeth Kai Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
61. For books describing Jackson as a fraud, see Clark Howard, American Saturday (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1981); Liberatore, The Road to Hell; Andrews, Black Power, White Blood; Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (New York: Summit, 1989). For positive, though typically less popular, affirmations of Jackson in this time period, see Network of Black Organizers, Black Prison Movements USA (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1995); Shakur, Monster; Johnson, Defying the Tomb; and the anthologies edited by Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and Warfare in the American Homeland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Jackson is also the only deceased prisoner depicted in the 2008 portfolio of “prints against the prison-industrial complex” put out by the Just Seeds artist collective. On Pelican Bay, see Reiter, 23/7.
62. Howard, American Saturday, 319.
63. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, xviii.
64. Isaac Ontiveros, “California Prisoners Make Historic Call to End Hostilities between Racial Groups in California Prisons and Jails,” San Francisco Bay View, September 12, 2012, http://
65. Reiter, 23/7, 194–205; Keramet Reiter, “The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance within the Structural Constraints of a U.S. Supermax Prison,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 3 (2014): 579–611; Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Plot from Solitary,” New York, February 26, 2014, http://
66. Sundiata Tate, Bato Talamantez, and Giappa Johnson, “San Quentin 3 Declare Solidarity with Prisoners’ Agreement to End Hostilities,” San Francisco Bay View, December 1, 2012, http://
67. Dan Berger, “Rattling the Cages,” Jacobin, November 18, 2016, https://
68. Berger and Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement, epilogue; Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary (New York: Little, Brown, 2015); Abby Zimet, “Sense of the Uncanny: George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine,” Common Dreams, December 20, 2015, https://
69. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996), 287.