Jonathan Jackson

Jonathan Peter Jackson was born on the twenty-third of August 1953 at Pasadena, California, the youngest child of Robert Lester Jackson and Georgia Bea Jackson. He was the youngest brother — by twelve years — of George Jackson (placed in this archive), then nine years old and already imprisoned at Tracy. He was raised in Pasadena and attended the Pasadena public schools through the John Muir High School, where he was a high-achieving student in the Pasadena Unified District's gifted-and-talented programme and a member of the school's debate, chess and Black Student Union groups.

He had been five years old at the beginning of his older brother's incarceration in 1960 and had grown up across the entire period of George's imprisonment. From 1965 — when Jonathan was twelve and George was twenty-three and at Soledad — Jonathan visited his brother regularly with his mother and corresponded with George by letter weekly until George's death in August 1971. The correspondence — substantial portions of which were published posthumously in the Soledad Brother volume of 1970 — reflects George's role as Jonathan's principal intellectual interlocutor across his teenage years.

He participated from age sixteen in the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee founded in early 1970 around the defense of his brother and the two other prisoners charged with the January 1970 killing of the Soledad guard. He volunteered for the committee's legal-defense fundraising work, attended the Black Panther Party legal education classes at the Berkeley headquarters, and conducted the defense-leaflet distribution work in the Bay Area Black colleges and high schools through the spring and summer of 1970.

On the seventh of August 1970 he entered the Marin County Civic Center courthouse at San Rafael during the trial of James McClain, William Christmas and Ruchell Magee — the three San Quentin prisoners awaiting trial for the killing of a San Quentin guard. He was carrying weapons under his coat. At seventeen, in concert with the three men in the dock, he took the trial judge Harold Haley, the deputy district attorney Gary Thomas, and three women jurors hostage. The hostage-takers attempted to drive a Hertz rental van from the courthouse parking lot. San Quentin guards opened fire on the van as it pulled away. Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, William Christmas and Judge Haley were killed.

He was seventeen years old.

His mother Georgia Bea Jackson — having now lost her two sons in the space of twelve months — gave the closing speech at his and George's joint memorial service at Saint Augustine's Episcopal Church in Oakland in August 1971. She continued her organising work with the Mothers of San Quentin until her own death in 1997.

He is honored here as the youngest brother killed at the Marin County Civic Center.