George Jackson

George Lester Jackson was born on the twenty-third of September 1941 at Chicago, Illinois, the second of five children of Robert Lester Jackson — a postal worker — and Georgia Jackson, a homemaker. The family migrated to Los Angeles in 1956. He was educated through tenth grade at the Manual Arts and Jordan High Schools of Watts before withdrawing. At eighteen, on the twenty-fifth of September 1960 — two days after his nineteenth birthday — he was sentenced under California's habitual-criminal statute to one year to life for his marginal participation in a seventy-dollar gas-station robbery in which he had been a passenger. The driver of the car had been the principal — Jackson had not entered the station. He served the next eleven and a half years inside the California correctional system.

He served the first two years at Tracy and the following eight years principally at Soledad State Prison, where between 1962 and 1969 he completed the body of self-education through which he became one of the principal Black political prisoners of his generation. He read across that period Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fanon (placed in this archive), Du Bois (placed in this archive), and the entire surviving printed history of the African American freedom movement. He was admitted to the Black Guerrilla Family — the small Black prisoner-organising group founded inside the California system — and conducted the prisoner-organising work for which he would across the following four years be principally known.

On the thirteenth of January 1970 a Soledad guard shot and killed three Black inmates in a yard altercation; a white guard was killed in retaliation three days later. Jackson, John Clutchette and Fleeta Drumgo were charged with the killing of the white guard. The three were named the Soledad Brothers and the defense committee organised around them across the following twenty months produced the principal national mobilisation around prisoner rights in the post-war United States.

He published in October 1970 — at the height of the Soledad Brothers campaign — the volume of his prison letters Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. The book sold over four hundred thousand copies within a year of publication and remains the foundational primary text of the African American prison-letter genre.

On the twenty-first of August 1971 — three days before the Soledad Brothers trial was to open — Jackson was killed at San Quentin under the official version of an attempted escape carrying a smuggled handgun. The official record of the incident has been contested by his family and the post-mortem investigators of the United Prisoners' Union.

He was twenty-nine.

He is honored here as the foundational theorist of prisoner organising.