George Jackson

Chicago, Los Angeles, and the Road to Soledad

George Jackson was born on 23 September 1941 in Chicago, the second of five children of Georgia and Lester Jackson — a postal worker whose steady employment gave the family a degree of economic stability that was not common in the South Side neighbourhoods where they lived, but that did not insulate them from the specific forms of racial pressure that structured Black life in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. The family moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, settling in the Pasadena area and then in the communities of the eastern San Gabriel Valley — a geography of middle-class aspiration and racial restriction where Black families were welcome to live in specific neighbourhoods and nowhere else, and where the gap between the promise of California mobility and the reality of racial exclusion was experienced as a daily condition.

Jackson's adolescence was troubled in the specific way that the adolescence of bright, restless young Black men in racially constrained communities often was in that period — encounters with the police, juvenile charges, a reform school sentence, and then, in 1960 at eighteen, the arrest and conviction that would define the rest of his life. He had been accused of robbing a gas station of seventy dollars. His lawyer arranged a guilty plea under the California Indeterminate Sentencing Law, which prescribed sentences of one year to life for the offence — a structure that gave the parole board complete discretion over how long a prisoner actually served. The lawyer apparently did not make clear to Jackson or his family that pleading guilty meant accepting a potentially lifetime sentence, one that the parole board could extend indefinitely if they chose to. They chose to, year after year, for eleven years.

The Prison Education: Reading as Resistance

What Jackson did with the years the parole board gave him was the most consequential fact of his life. He read — voraciously, systematically, with the specific hunger of a man who understood that his survival in the conditions he was living in required not just physical endurance but intellectual equipment. He worked through Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Fanon, and the entire tradition of revolutionary theory that was available to him in the prison library and through the books his family sent. He read the history of slavery, of colonialism, of the labour movement, of the specific development of American capitalism. He read voraciously in economics and political philosophy, developing an analytical framework that was more rigorous and more original than most of what was being produced by the academic left outside the prison walls.

The reading was not passive absorption but active argument — Jackson's letters from prison, which would eventually be published as Soledad Brother, show a mind in constant contention with the texts he was reading, challenging them, synthesising them, applying them to the specific conditions of his situation in ways that produced genuinely new analysis. His central argument — that the California prison system was not a criminal justice institution but a racial and class control mechanism, that the incarceration of Black men in California was structurally continuous with slavery, and that the prison itself was the most honest expression of what American capitalism did with people it could not exploit in other ways — was not derived directly from any single source but synthesised from his reading, his observation of the prison system from inside, and the political intelligence he had developed over a decade of confinement.

The Black Guerrilla Family and Prison Organisation

Jackson's political work inside California's prisons was not only intellectual. He organised — building networks among prisoners, developing political education programmes, and working to transform the racial gang structures that the prison system cultivated into something with more explicitly political orientation. The Black Guerrilla Family, which he co-founded inside the California prison system in the mid-1960s, was an attempt to build a Marxist-Leninist organisation within the prison population — an organisation that would understand the political dimensions of imprisonment, resist the racial divisions the system used to keep prisoners from organising collectively, and maintain connections with the radical movements outside the walls.

The BGF's founding reflected Jackson's analysis that the prison population was not a criminal class separate from the working class but the most brutally oppressed segment of the working class — people whose poverty, race, and lack of political power had made them available for incarceration and who, once inside, were subjected to a system designed to break their capacity for collective resistance. Building an organisation capable of political consciousness and collective action within those conditions required confronting the specific mechanisms — racial division, informant networks, differential privilege — that the prison system deployed to prevent exactly that kind of organisation. Jackson understood those mechanisms with the precision of someone who had spent years living inside them and analysing them simultaneously.

Soledad, January 1970, and the Murder Charge

On 13 January 1970, a guard at Soledad Prison shot and killed three Black prisoners in the exercise yard during a racially charged fight. A grand jury ruled the killings justifiable homicide. Three days later, a white guard at Soledad was thrown from a third-floor tier and killed. Jackson, along with John Clutchette and Fleeta Drumgo, was charged with the guard's murder — charged, as their supporters argued, not because the evidence against them was compelling but because they were the most politically active Black prisoners in the facility and the prison administration wanted them neutralised. They became, almost immediately, the Soledad Brothers — a cause around which the entire left-wing anti-prison movement of 1970 crystallised.

The Soledad Brothers Defence Committee, which Angela Davis helped organise, was one of the most effective prisoner solidarity campaigns in American history. It connected the three defendants to a broad network of lawyers, activists, academics, and celebrities — Jean Genet wrote the introduction to Soledad Brother from France, having visited California to support the case; international solidarity committees formed in Europe and elsewhere. The campaign generated the public profile that made Soledad Brother a bestseller and that placed Jackson's letters before an audience that extended far beyond the American left. The letters themselves did the rest: they were extraordinary documents, combining the intimacy of correspondence with family members with the analytical rigour of a political theorist, and they communicated Jackson's situation with an immediacy that no secondary account could have matched.

Jonathan Jackson and the Marin County Courthouse

The most devastating single event in the Soledad Brothers case was the Marin County Courthouse action of 7 August 1970, in which Jonathan Jackson — George's seventeen-year-old brother — entered the courthouse armed, freed three prisoners who were appearing for a hearing, took Judge Harold Haley and several other hostages, and attempted to drive out. The escape failed in the courthouse parking lot in a confrontation with San Quentin guards: Jonathan Jackson, Judge Haley, and two of the prisoners were killed. The guns Jonathan Jackson had used were registered to Angela Davis, producing the federal charges and FBI manhunt that made Davis one of the most famous political prisoners in American history.

George Jackson's response to his brother's death was not public grief but a deepening of the political analysis he had been developing — a conviction that Jonathan had understood clearly what the situation required and had acted on that understanding, and that the appropriate response to his death was not mourning but intensified struggle. The letters he wrote in the months following Jonathan's death, which appear in Blood in My Eye alongside the political essays he was working on, show a mind that had moved from the analytical distance of Soledad Brother to something more urgent and more explicitly revolutionary — a sense that the situation was approaching a point of no return and that the political arguments he had been making in letters and essays needed to become something more than arguments.

August 21, 1971: The Death at San Quentin

On 21 August 1971, George Jackson was shot and killed in the yard at San Quentin State Prison. The official account, released by the California Department of Corrections within hours of his death, stated that he had been shot while attempting to escape — that he had smuggled a gun into the prison, had used it to take guards hostage, and had been shot while running across the yard toward the outer wall. Three guards and two prisoners were also killed in the incident.

Jackson's lawyers, supporters, and a significant body of subsequent investigation challenged the official account on several grounds. The specific physical evidence — the trajectory of the bullet that killed him, the testimony of witnesses about the sequence of events in the yard, the question of how a prisoner in maximum security conditions could have smuggled a firearm into a location-restricted visit — raised questions that the official account did not satisfactorily resolve. The alternative account offered by his supporters was that he had been set up — that the August 21 events had been orchestrated by prison authorities who understood that he was about to become more dangerous to the system than any armed confrontation could justify allowing, and who had arranged for his killing under circumstances that would be attributed to an escape attempt.

The question of what actually happened on 21 August 1971 has never been definitively resolved. What is not disputed is that George Jackson was shot dead in the San Quentin yard eleven years into a sentence that had begun with a seventy-dollar robbery, six days before his thirtieth birthday, on the same day that the manuscript that would become Blood in My Eye was substantially complete. He was twenty-nine years old.

Soledad Brother: The Letters as Literature and Politics

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, published in October 1970 with an introduction by Jean Genet, sold more than 400,000 copies and was translated into seventeen languages — a commercial and political success that no publisher who had read the letters in advance would have predicted, because the letters were not designed for publication and do not read as if they were. They are personal documents, addressed to his mother and father, to his younger brother Jonathan, to his lawyer, and to Angela Davis — intimate in their emotional register, full of the specific textures of prison life and family worry, and also consistently and formidably analytical in their political content.

The letters to his mother describe his daily life with a specificity that makes the experience of long-term imprisonment vivid in ways that more formal accounts cannot: the food, the noise, the specific quality of time in solitary confinement, the relationships with other prisoners, the management of anger and fear over years of waiting. The letters to Davis, which he began writing in 1970, are among the most remarkable personal and political correspondences in American literature — between two people who had never met, whose connection was forged entirely through letters exchanged across the distance between a maximum security prison and a university campus, and whose political analysis was converging through that exchange toward conclusions that both understood as dangerous to act on and impossible not to act on.

Blood in My Eye: The Unfinished Argument

Blood in My Eye, published posthumously in 1972 from the manuscript Jackson had been working on at the time of his death, is a more explicitly revolutionary document than Soledad Brother — more theoretically systematic, more directly concerned with questions of strategy and tactics, more willing to engage with the arguments for armed struggle that Soledad Brother had approached but not fully elaborated. Its central argument is that what the American state calls fascism abroad — the systematic use of state power to suppress working-class and colonised people in the service of capital — is the same system being operated domestically against Black Americans and the poor, and that understanding this equivalence is the precondition for building the kind of resistance that can actually challenge it.

The book is unfinished — Jackson was killed before he could complete it — and its incompleteness is visible in places where the argument breaks off or is less developed than the surrounding material. But the incomplete sections make the completed ones more rather than less powerful: they are the work of a man who knew he was working against time, who understood that the prison system was likely to kill him before he could finish what he was writing, and who wrote with the urgency that understanding produces. The book is not comfortable reading — it is the work of someone who had concluded that the situation required things that most of his readers would find disturbing — but it is serious reading, and the seriousness of the political analysis it contains has not diminished in the decades since its publication.

The Parole Board and the Question of Justice

The fundamental injustice of George Jackson's imprisonment is not primarily the question of whether he killed anyone inside the prison — he was accused of killing a guard at Soledad and died before that case was resolved — but the question of why he spent eleven years in prison for a seventy-dollar robbery. The indeterminate sentencing structure that California used in 1960 gave the parole board absolute discretion over release dates, and the board used that discretion, in Jackson's case, to deny parole year after year to a prisoner whose conduct inside the prison would in most cases have produced release within two or three years. The political explanation — that the parole board was keeping him imprisoned because of his organising activities and his growing political prominence — is the explanation that his supporters offered and that the pattern of denials strongly suggests.

That explanation has specific implications for how to understand Jackson's life and death. If the parole board was using its discretion to keep a politically active prisoner incarcerated not because of his original offence but because of what he had become inside the prison, then his imprisonment was not a criminal justice matter but a political one — the use of a criminal justice mechanism to achieve a political end. That use is exactly what Jackson's political analysis described: the prison as an instrument of class and racial control rather than a response to crime. His own case was, in this reading, not merely an illustration of his argument but the argument itself, lived out in his body over eleven years until a guard's bullet ended it on a summer morning in the San Quentin yard.

Also Profiled — Black Power & Panthers