Jonathan Jackson

Jonathan Peter Jackson was born on the twenty-third of June 1953 in Pasadena, California, the youngest of the five children of Lester Jackson and Georgia Bea Jackson. He came into the world nearly twelve years after his brother George, and from boyhood his life bent toward that bond. A gifted, serious youth, he grew up in the shadow of his brother's imprisonment and gave himself to the cause of the men he called the Soledad Brothers.

George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo stood accused of killing a guard at Soledad Prison, and their case became a rallying point for a generation. Jonathan, still a teenager, immersed himself in the defense campaign, standing close to Angela Davis and to the movement that gathered around his brother. Those who knew him recalled that his every interest seemed bound up in George's freedom.

On the seventh of August 1970, at seventeen, Jonathan entered the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, where a hearing was underway. Armed, he moved to take Judge Harold Haley, a prosecutor, and three jurors hostage, joined by the San Quentin prisoners James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee, in a desperate bid to force the liberation of the Soledad Brothers. In the gunfire that erupted as they attempted to leave, Jonathan, Judge Haley, McClain, and Christmas were killed.

He was seventeen years old. History remembers him as a boy who loved his brother without measure and gave his whole young life to that love. May Jonathan Jackson be honored, and may his name be spoken with tenderness.