George Jackson (activist)

George Lester Jackson (September 23, 1941 – August 21, 1971) was an American author, activist and convicted felon.

While serving an indeterminate sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station in 1961, Jackson became involved in revolutionary activity and co-founded the prison gang Black Guerrilla Family.

In 1961, he was convicted of armed robbery – for stealing $70 at gunpoint from a gas station – and sentenced to one year to life in prison.

During his first years at San Quentin State Prison, Jackson became involved in revolutionary activity.

He was described by prison officials as egocentric and anti-social.

In 1966, Jackson met and befriended W. L. Nolen, who introduced him to Marxist and Maoist ideology.

The two founded the Black Guerrilla Family in 1966 based on Marxist and Maoist political thought.

In speaking of his ideological transformation, Jackson remarked: "I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me."

In January 1969, Jackson and Nolen were transferred from San Quentin to Soledad Prison.

In 1970, he was charged, along with two other Soledad Brothers, with the murder of correctional officer John Vincent Mills in the aftermath of a prison fight.

The same year, he published Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, a combination of autobiography and manifesto addressed to an African-American audience.

The book became a bestseller and earned Jackson personal fame.

On January 13, 1970, corrections officer Opie G. Miller shot Nolen and two other black prisoners (Cleveland Edwards and Alvin Miller) during a yard riot with members of the Aryan Brotherhood, killing all three.

Following Nolen's death, Jackson became increasingly confrontational with corrections officials and spoke often about the need to protect fellow inmates and take revenge on correction officers, employing what Jackson called "selective retaliatory violence".

On January 17, 1970, Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette were charged with murdering a corrections officer, John V. Mills, who was beaten and thrown from the third floor of Soledad's Y wing.

This was a capital offense and a successful conviction would have put Jackson in the gas chamber.

Mills was purportedly killed in retaliation for the shooting deaths of three inmates by Miller the previous year.

Miller had not been charged with any crime, as a grand jury ruled his actions during the prison fight justifiable homicide.

In the aftermath Jackson, Drumgo, and Clutchette became known as the Soledad Brothers and activists worked to get the three acquitted whom they viewed as being political prisoners and accused based on their race.

The activists also wanted to bring attention to the disproportionate rates at which people of color were being incarcerated compared to white people and to the socioeconomic factors that led to their imprisonment in the first place.

The Soledad Brothers Defense Committee was formed by Fay Stender and had many famous activists, celebrities, and writers join and support the committee.

Among these activists was Angela Davis.

Davis while working with the committee would eventually become a leader of the committee and become a close friend of Jackson.

Jackson and Davis corresponded over letters frequently and Jackson had sent a manuscript of his book Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, and asked her to read it and asked for her help in improving it.

On August 7, 1970, George Jackson's 17-year-old brother Jonathan P. Jackson burst into a Marin County courtroom with an automatic weapon, freed prisoners James McClain, William A. Christmas and Ruchell Magee, and took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas, and three jurors hostage to demand the release of the "Soledad Brothers".

Police killed Haley, Jackson, Christmas and McClain as they attempted to drive away from the courthouse.

Eyewitness testimony suggests Haley was hit by fire discharged from a sawed-off shotgun that had been fastened to his neck with adhesive tape by the abductors.

Thomas, Magee and one of the jurors were wounded.

The case made national headlines.

Angela Davis, who owned the weapons used in the hostage taking, was later acquitted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder.

A possible explanation for the gun connection is that Jonathan Jackson was her bodyguard.

Jackson was killed in prison by prison guards in 1971, during an escape attempt in which three prison guards and two inmates were killed.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Jackson was the second son of Lester and Georgia Bea Jackson's five children.

He spent time in the California Youth Authority Corrections facility in Paso Robles due to several juvenile convictions including armed robbery, assault, and burglary.

In his 1972 book Blood in My Eye, Jackson describes himself as a "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Fanonist".

As Jackson's disciplinary infractions grew he spent more time in solitary confinement, where he studied political economy and radical theory.

He also wrote many letters to friends and supporters, which would later be edited and compiled into the books Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, bestsellers that brought him a great deal of attention from leftist organizers and intellectuals in the U.S. and Western Europe.

He amassed a following of inmates, including whites and Latinos, and most enthusiastically with other black inmates.

Magee, the sole survivor among the attackers, eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975.

Magee was imprisoned for over 60 years.