To the Man-Child, Tall, evil, graceful, brighteyed, black man-child Jonathan Peter Jackson
who died on August 7, 1970, courage in one hand, assault rifle in the other; my
brother, comrade, friend the true revolutionary, the black communist
guerrilla in the highest state of development, he died on the trigger, scourge
of the unrighteous, soldier of the people; to this terrible man-child and his
wonderful mother Georgia Bea, to Angela Y. Davis, my tender experience, I
dedicate this collection of letters; to the destruction of their enemies I
dedicate my life.
George
L. Jackson
August 7, 1970, just a few days after George Jackson was
transferred to San Quentin, the case was catapulted to the forefront of
national news when his brother, Jonathan, a seventeen-year-old high school
student in Pasadena, staged a raid on the Marin County courthouse with a
satchelful of handguns, an assault rifle, and a shotgun hidden under his coat.
Educated into a political revolutionary by George, Jonathan invaded the court
during a hearing for three black San Quentin inmates, not including his
brother, and handed them weapons. As he left with the inmates and five
hostages, including the judge, Jonathan demanded that the Soledad Brothers be
released within thirty minutes. In the shootout that ensued, Jonathan was
gunned down. Of Jonathan, George wrote, "He was free for a while. I guess
that's more than most of us can expect."
***********************************************
Slavery is being practiced by
the system under color of law – Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today; it's the
same thing, but with a new name. They're making millions and millions of
dollars enslaving Blacks, poor whites, and others - people who don't even know
they're being railroaded. -- Ruchell Cinque Magee
(from radio interview with Kiilu Nyasha, "Freedom is
a Constant Struggle," KPFA-FM, 12 August 1995)
If you were asked to name
the longest held political prisoner in the United States, what would your
answer be?
Most would probably reply "Geronimo ji jaga (Pratt)," "Sundiata
Acoli", or "Sekou Odinga" -- all 3 members of the Black Panther
Party or soldiers of the Black Liberation Army, who have been encaged for their
political beliefs or principled actions for decades. Some would point to Lakota
leader, Leonard Peltier, who struggled for the freedom of Native peoples,
thereby incurring the enmity of the US Government, who framed him in a 1975
double murder trial. Those answers would be good guesses, for all of these men
have spent hellified years in state and federal dungeons, but here's a man who
has spent more.
Ruchell C. Magee arrived in Los Angeles, California in 1963, and wasn't in town
for six months before he and a cousin, Leroy, were arrested on the improbable
charges of kidnap and robbery, after a fight with a man over a woman and a $10
bag of marijuana. Magee, in a slam-dunk "trial," was swiftly
convicted and swifter still sentenced to life.
Magee, politicized in those years, took the name of the African freedom
fighter, Cinque, who, with his fellow captives seized control of the slave
ship, the Amistad, and tried to sail back to Africa. Like his ancient namesake,
Cinque would also fight for his freedom from legalized slavery, and for 7 long
years he filed writ after writ, learning what he calls "guerrilla
law", honing it as a tool for liberation of himself and his fellow
captives. But California courts, which could care less about the alleged
"rights" of a young Black man like Magee, dismissed his petitions
willy-nilly.
In August, 1970, MaGee appeared as a witness in the assault trial of James
McClain, a man charged with assaulting a guard after San Quentin guards
murdered a Black prisoner, Fred Billingsley. McClain, defending himself,
presented imprisoned witnesses to expose the racist and repressive nature of
prisons. In the midst of MaGee's testimony, a 17 year old young Black man with
a huge Afro hairdo, burst into the courtroom, heavily armed.
Jonathan Jackson shouted "Freeze!" Tossing weapons to McClain,
William Christmas, and a startled Magee, who given his 7 year hell where no
judge knew the meaning of justice, joined the rebellion on the spot. The four
rebels took the judge, the DA and three jurors hostage, and headed for a radio
station where they were going to air the wretched prison conditions to the
world, as well as demand the immediate release of a group of political
prisoners, know that The Soledad Brothers (these were John Cluchette, Fleeta
Drumgo, and Jonathan's oldest brother, George). While the men did not hurt any
of their hostages, they did not reckon on the state's ruthlessness.
Before the men could get their van out of the court house parking lot, prison
guards and sheriffs opened furious fire on the vehicle, killing Christmas,
Jackson, McClain as well as the judge. The DA was permanently paralyzed by gun
fire. Miraculously, the jurors emerged relatively unscratched, although Magee,
seriously wounded by gunfire, was found unconscious.
Magee, who was the only Black survivor of what has come to be called "The
August 7th Rebellion," would awaken to learn he was charged with murder,
kidnapping and conspiracy, and further, he would have a co-defendant, a
University of California Philosophy Professor, and friend of Soledad Brother,
George L. Jackson, named Angela Davis, who faced identical charges.
By trial time the cases were severed, with Angela garnering massive support
leading to her 1972 acquittal on all charges.
Magee's trial did not garner such broad support, yet he boldly advanced the
position that as his imprisonment was itself illegal, and a form of
unjustifiable slavery, he had the inherent right to escape such slavery, an
historical echo of the position taken by the original Cinque, and his fellow
captives, who took over a Spanish slave ship, killed the crew (except for the
pilot) and tried to sail back to Africa. The pilot surreptitiously steered the
Amistad to the US coast, and when the vessel was seized by the US, Spain sought
their return to slavery in Cuba. Using natural and international law
principals, US courts decided they captives had every right to resist slavery
and fight for their freedom.
Unfortunately, Magee's jury didn't agree, although it did acquit on at least
one kidnapping charge. The court dismissed on the murder charge, and Magee has
been battling for his freedom every since.
That he is still fighting is a tribute to a truly remarkable man, a man who
knows what slavery is, and more importantly, what freedom means.
FREE CINQUE !!
May 27, 1997 © 1997 Mumia Abu-Jamal - All Rights Reserved
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From the Forward to Soledad Brother (1994) By Jonathan Jackson, Jr.
I was born eight and a half months after my
father, Jonathan Jackson, was shot down on August 7, 1970, at the Marin County
Courthouse, when he tried to gain the release of the Soledad Brothers by taking
hostages. Before and especially after that day, Uncle George kept in constant
contact with my mother by writing from his cell in San Quentin. (The Department
of Corrections wouldn't put her on the visitors' list.) During George's
numerous trial appearances for the Soledad Brothers case, Mom would lift me
above the crowd so he could see me. Consistently, we would receive a letter a
few days later. For a single mother with son, alone and in the middle of both
controversy and not a little unwarranted trouble with the authorities, those
messages of strength were no doubt instrumental in helping her carry on. No
matter how oppressive his situation became, George always had time to lend his
spirit to the people he cared for.
A year and two weeks after the revolutionary takeover in Marin, George was
ruthlessly murdered by prison guards at San Quentin. Both he and my father left
me a great deal: pride, history, an unmistakable name. My experience has been
at once wonderful and incredibly difficult. My life is not consumed by the
Jackson legacy, but my charge is an accepted and cherished piece of my
existence. It is out of my responsibility to my legacy that I have come to
write this Foreword to my uncle's prison writings.
Today I read my inherited letters often those written from George to my
mother with a dull pencil on prison stationery. They are things of beauty, my
most valuable possessions, passionate pieces of writing that have few rivals in
the modern era. They will remain unpublished. However, the letters of Soledad
Brother demonstrate the same insight and eloquence the way George's
writings make his personal experience universal is the mainstay of his
brilliance.
When this collection of letters was first released in 1969, it brought a young
revolutionary to the forefront of a tempest, a tempest characterized by the
Black Power, free speech, and antiwar movements, accompanied by a
dissatisfaction with the status quo throughout the United States. With
unflinching directness, George Jackson conveyed an intelligent yet accessible
message with his trademark style, rational rage. He illuminated previously
hidden viewpoints and feelings that disenfranchised segments of the population
were unable to articulate: the poor, the victimized, the imprisoned, the
disillusioned. George spoke in a revolutionary voice that they had no idea existed.
He was the prominent figure of true radical thought and practice during the
period, and when he was assassinated, much of the movement died along with him.
But George Jackson cannot and will not ever leave. His life and thoughts serve
as the message George himself is the revolution.
The reissue of Soledad Brother at this point in time is essential. It
appears that the nineties are going to be a telling decade in U.S. history. The
signposts of systemic breakdown are as glaringly obvious as they were in the
sixties: unrest manifesting itself in inner-city turmoil, widespread rise of
violence in the culture, and international oppression to legitimize a state in
crisis. The fact that imprisonments in California have more than tripled over
the last decade, supported by the public, is merely one sign of societal
decomposition. That systemic change occurred during the sixties is a myth. The
United States in the nineties faces strikingly analogous problems. George spoke
to the issues of his day, but conditions now are so similar that this work
could have been written last month. It is imperative that George be heard,
whether by the angry but unchanneled young or by the cynical and worldly
mature. The message must be carried farther than where he bravely left it in
August of 1971.
Over the past twenty-five years, why has George Jackson not been an integral
part of mainstream consciousness? He has been and still is underexposed,
reduced to simplistic terms, and ultimately misunderstood. Racial and
conspiracy theory aside, there are rational reasons for his exclusion. They
stem not only from the hard-line revolutionary aspects of George's philosophy,
but more importantly from the nature of the political system that he existed in
and under.
Howard Zinn has pointed out in A People's History of the United States
that "the history of any country, presented as the history of a family,
conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often
repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists
and workers, dominators and dominated." U.S. history is essentially that
type of hidden history. Without denying important mitigating factors, the
United States of today is strongly linked to the values and premises on which
it was founded. That is, it is a settler colony founded primarily on two basic
pillars, upheld by the Judeo-Christian tradition: genocide of indigenous
peoples and slave labor in support of a capitalist infrastructure. Although the
Bible repeatedly exalts mass slaughter and oppression, Judeo-Christian morality
is publicly held to be inconsistent with them. This dissonance, evident within
the nation's structure from the beginning, informs the state's fi rst function:
to oversimplify and minimize immoral events in order to legitimize history and
the state's very existence simultaneously.
Ironically, traditional Judeo-Christian morality is a perfect vehicle for
genocide, slavery, and territorial expansion. As a logical progression from
biblical example, expansion and imperialism culminated in the United States
with the concept of Manifest Destiny, which held that it was the colonists'
inherent right to expand and conquer. Further it was a duty, the "white
man's burden," to save the "natives," to attempt to convert all
heathens encountered. Protestant Calvinism provided a set of ethics that fit
perfectly with the colonists' conquests. Max Weber, in his definitive study on
religion, The Sociology of Religion, wrote, "Calvinism held that
the unsearchable God possessed good reasons for having distributed the gifts of
fortune unevenly"; it "represented as God's will [the Calvinists']
domination over the sinful world. Clearly this and other features of Protestantism,
such as its rationalization of the existence of a lower c lass, 1 were not
only the bases for the formation of the United States, but still prominently
exist today. "One must go to the ethics of ascetic Protestantism,"
Weber asserts, "to find any ethical sanction for economic rationalism and
for the entrepreneur." When a nation can't admit to the process through
which it builds hegemony, how can anything but delusion be a reality? "The
monopoly of truth, including historical truth," stated Daniel Singer in a
lecture at Evergreen State College (Washington) in 1987, "is implied in
the monopoly of power."
Clearly, objective history is an impossibility. This understood, the
significant problem lies in how the general population defines the term; history
implies that truth is being told. It is an unfortunate fact that history is
unfailingly written by the victors, which in the case of the United States are
not only the original imperialists, but the majority of the "founding
fathers," dedicated to uniting and strengthening the existing mercantile
class among disjointed colonies. There can be no doubt that from the creation
of this young nation, history as a created and perceived entity moved further
and further away from the objective ideal. Genocide, necessary for "the
development of the modern capitalist economy," according to Howard Zinn,
was rationalized as a reaction to the fear of Indian savages. Slavery was similarly
construed.
The personalization of history, the process by which we construct heroes and
pariahs, is a consequence of its dialectical nature. Without fail, an odd
paradox is created around someone who, by virtue of his or her actions, becomes
prominent enough to warrant the designation "historical figure."
There is a leap on the part of the general public, sparked by the media, to
another mindset. Sensational deeds are glorified, horrible acts reviled. A few
points are selected as defining characteristics. The media, conforming to their
restrictions of concision (which make accuracy nearly impossible to attain),
reiterate these points over and over. Schools and textbooks not only teach
these points but drill them into young minds. Howard Zinn comments that
"this learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent
objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from
politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly."
A few tidbits, factual or not, incomplete and selective, are used to describe
the entirety of a person's existence. They become part of mainstream
consciousness. We therefore know that Lincoln freed the slaves, Malcolm X was a
black extremist, and Hitler was solely responsible for World War II and the
Holocaust. All half-truths go unexplained, all fallacies go unchallenged, as
they appear to make perfect sense to the everyday, noncritically thinking
American. The paradox has been created: The more famous a person becomes, the
more misunderstood he or she is. This accepted occurrence is incredibly
counterintuitive: the public should know more, not less, about a noteworthy
individual and the sociopolitical dynamics surrounding him or her.
This historical mythicization is not, for the most part, a consciously created
phenomenon. The media don't go out of their way to mislead the public by
constructing false heroes and emphasizing the mundane. Fewer "dimly lit
conferences" take place than conspiracy theorists believe. It is the
existing political system that is responsible for the information that reaches
the general public. The state's control of information created the system, and
it continually re-creates it. Propagated by schooling and the media,
information that reaches the public is subject to three chief mechanisms of
state control: denial, self-censorship, and imprisonment.
Denial is the easiest control mechanism, and therefore the most common. If
events do not follow the state's agenda or its ecumenical ideology and might
bring unrest, they are denied. Examples are plentiful: prewar state terrorism
against the people of North and South Vietnam and later the bombing of
Cambodia; government funding and military aid to the Nicaraguan Contras; and
support of UNITA and South Africa in the virtual destruction of Angola, among
many others.
Denial goes hand in hand with self-censorship. The media emphasize certain
personal characteristics and events and de-emphasize others, in a pattern that
supports U.S. hegemony. The information that reached the public after the U.S.
invasion of Panama in 1989 is telling. It was not until much later, after the
heat of controversy, that the average citizen had access to the scope of the
devastation. The effectiveness of self-censorship in this case was maximized, as
the full details of the Panama invasion were patchwork for years.
While we may assume that the media have an obligation to accurately convey such
an event to the public, the media in fact perpetuate the government's position
by engaging in their own self-censorship. Noam Chomsky points out in Deterring
Democracy, "With a fringe of exceptions mostly well after the tasks
had been accomplished the media rallied around the flag with due piety and
enthusiasm, funnelling the most absurd White House tales to the public while
scrupulously refraining from asking the obvious questions, or seeing the
obvious facts."
Denial and self-censorship create a comfort zone for the U.S. citizenry,
generally uncritical and willing to accept digestible versions of historical
personalities and world events. The reasoning behind denial and
self-censorship: do not make the public uncomfortable, even if that means
diluting, sensationalizing, or lying about the truth.
Ultimately, when denial and self-censorship may not be sufficient for control
of information, the state resorts to imprisonment. All imprisonment is
political and as such all imprisonments carry equal weight. Society does,
however, distinguish two categories of imprisonment: one for breaking a law,
the other for political reasons. A difference is clear: American Indian
Movement leader Leonard Peltier, serving a federal sentence for his supposed
role at Wounded Knee, is considered a different type of prisoner than an armed
robber serving a five-to-seven-year sentence.
State policy reflects institutional needs. When the state as an institution
cannot tolerate an outside threat, real or perceived, from an individual or
group, the consequences at its command include isolation, persecution, and
political imprisonment. All may occur in greater or lesser form, depending on
the degree of threat.
Political incarceration removes threats to the political and economic hegemony
of the United States. Even though in 1959 George Jackson initially went to
prison as an "everyday lawbreaker" with a one-year-to-life sentence,
it was his political consciousness that kept him incarcerated for eleven years.
In 1970 George wrote:
International capitalism cannot be destroyed without the extremes of struggle.
The entire colonial world is watching the blacks inside the U.S., wondering and
waiting for us to come to our senses. Their problems and struggles with the
Amerikan monster are much more difficult than they would be if we actively
aided them. We are on the inside. We are the only ones (besides the very small
white minority left) who can get at the monster's heart without subjecting the
world to nuclear fire. We have a momentous historical role to act out if we
will. The whole world for all time in the future will love us and remember us
as the righteous people who made it possible for the world to live on. If we
fail through fear and lack of aggressive imagination, then the slaves of the
future will curse us, as we sometimes curse those of yesterday. I don't want to
die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I
want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pol lution, racism,
nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism,
a thousand different brands of untruth, and licentious usurious economics.
Nothing is more dangerous to a system that depends on misinformation than a
voice that obeys its own dictates and has the courage to speak out. George
Jackson's imprisonment and further isolation within the prison system were
clearly a function of the state's response to his outspoken opposition to the
capitalist structure.
Political incarceration is a tangible form of state control. Unlike denial and
self-censorship, imprisonment is publicly scrutinized. Yet public reaction to
political incarceration has been minimal. The U.S. government claims it holds
no political prisoners (denial), while any notice given to protests focused on
political prisoners invariably takes the form of a human interest story
(self-censorship).
The efficacy of political incarceration in the United States cannot be denied.
Prison serves not only as a physical barrier, but a communication restraint.
Prisoners are completely ostracized from society, with little or no chance to
break through. Those few outside who might be sympathetic are always hesitant
to communicate or protest past a certain point, fearing their own persecution
or imprisonment. Also, deep down most people believe that all prisoners,
regardless of their individual situations, really did do something
"wrong." Added to that prejudice, society lacks a distinction between
a prisoner's actions and his or her personal worth; a bad act equals a bad
person. The bottom line is that the majority of people simply will not believe
that the state openly or covertly oppresses without criminal cause. As Daniel
Singer asked at the Evergreen conference in 1987, "Is it possible for a
class which exterminates the native peoples of the Americas, replaces them by
raping Africa for humans it then denigrates and dehumanizes as slaves, while
cheapening and degrading its own working class is it possible for such a
class to create a democracy, equality and to advance the cause of human
freedom? The implicit answer is, `No, of course not."'
How does a person inside or outside prison confront the cultural mindsets,
the layers of misinformation propagated by the capitalist system? Sooner or
later, what can be called the "radical dilemma" surfaces for the few
wanting to enter into a structural attack/analysis of the United States.
Culturally, educationally, and politically, all of us are similarly limited by
these layers of misinformation; we are all products of the system. None of us
functions from a clean slate when considering or debating any issue, especially
history as it pertains to the United States.
George Jackson struggled against the constraints of denial and self-censorship,
to say nothing of his physical and communicative distance from society.
Political prisoners are inherently vulnerable to an either/or situation:
isolating silence or elimination. For George, his vociferous revolutionary
attitude was either futile or self-exterminating. He was well aware of his
situation. In Blood in My Eye, his political treatise, he wrote:
I'm in a unique political position. I have a very nearly closed future, and
since I have always been inclined to get disturbed over organized injustice or
terrorist practice against the innocents wherever I can now say just about
what I want (I've always done just about that), without fear of self-exposure.
I can only be executed once.
George was equally aware that revolutionary change happens only when an entire
society is ready. No amount of action, preaching, or teaching will spark
revolution if social conditions do not warrant it. My father's case,
unfortunately, is an appropriate indicator. He attempted a revolutionary act
during a reactionary time; elimination was the only possible consequence.
The challenge for a radical in today's world is to balance reformist tendencies
(political liberalism) and revolutionary action/ideology (radicalism). While
reformism entails a legitimation of the status quo as a search for changes
within the system, radicalism posits a change of system. Because
revolutionaries are particularly vulnerable, a certain degree of reformism is
necessary to create space, space needed to begin the laborious task of making
revolution.
George's statement "Combat Liberalism" and the general reaction to it
typify the gulf between the two philosophies. George was universally
misunderstood by the left and the right alike. As is the case with most modern
political prisoners, nearly all of his support came from reformists with
liberal leanings. It seems that they acted in spite of, rather than because of,
the core of his message.
The left's attitude toward COINTELPRO is a useful illustration. COINTELPRO, the
covert government program used to dismantle the Black Panther Party, and later
the American Indian Movement, is typically cited by many leftists as a damning
example of the government's conspiratorial nature. Declassified documents and
ex-agents' testimonies have shown COINTELPRO to be one of the most unlawful,
insidious cells of government in the nation's history. COINTELPRO, however, was
really a symptomatic, expendable entity; a small police force within a larger
one (FBI), within a branch of government (executive), within the government
itself (liberal democracy), within the economic system (capitalism). Reformists
in radicals' clothing unknowingly argued against symptoms, rather than the
roots, of the entrenched system. Doing away with COINTELPRO or even the FBI
would not alter the structure that produces the surveillance/elimination
apparatus.
In George's day, others who considered themselves left of center, or even
revolutionary, concerned themselves with inner-city reform issues, mostly black
ghettos. The problem of and debate about inner cities still exists. However,
recognition of a problem and analysis of that problem are two very different challenges.
The demand to better only predominantly black inner-city conditions is
unrealistic at best. In the capitalist structure, there must be an upper,
middle, and especially a lower class. Improving black neighborhoods is the
equivalent of ghettoizing some other segment of the population poor whites,
Hispanics, Asians, etc. Nothing intrinsic to the system would change, only
superficial alterations that would mollify the liberal public. As Chomsky
asserts in Turning the Tide:
Determined opposition to the latest lunacies and atrocities must continue, for
the sake of the victims as well as our own ultimate survival. But it should be
understood as a poor substitute for a challenge to the deeper causes, a
challenge that we are, unfortunately, in no position to mount at the present
though the groundwork can and must be laid.
Failure to understand the radical, encompassing viewpoint in the sixties led to
reformism. In effect, the majority of the left completely deserted any attempt
at the radical balance required of the politically conscious, leaving only
liberalism and its narrow vision to flourish.
Nobody comprehended the radical dilemma more fully than George Jackson. Indeed,
he developed his philosophy not out of mere happenstance, but with a very conscious
eye upon maintaining his revolutionary ideology. He writes in Blood in My
Eye:
Reformism is an old story in Amerika. There have been depressions and
socio-economic political crises throughout the period that marked the formation
of the present upper-class ruling circle, and their controlling elites. But the
parties of the left were too committed to reformism to exploit their
revolutionary potential.
George's involvement with the prison reform movement should therefore be seen
as a matter of survival. Unlike the reformist left, prison oppression was directly
affecting him. His balanced reform activities improving prisoners' rights
while speaking out against prison as an entity were required to make living
conditions tolerable enough for him to continue on his revolutionary path.
Simply, he did what he had to do to survive created space while
simultaneously pursuing his radical theory.
The reform George Jackson did accomplish was and still is incredible,
transforming the prison environment from unlivable to livable hell, from
encampments that he called reminiscent of Nazi Germany to at least a
scaled-down version of the like. With his influence, these changes occurred not
only in California, but throughout the nation. Only now is his influence
beginning to slip, with reactionary politics bringing about torture and sensory
deprivation facilities such as Pelican Bay State Prison in California, as well
as the reintroduction for adoption of the one-to-life indeterminate sentence.
This type of sentence is fertile ground for state oppression, as it is up to a
parole board to decide if an inmate is ever to be let go. A prison can easily
and effectively create situations that transform a one-to-life into a life
sentence. (Tellingly, the indeterminate sentence is being promoted not by the
right, but by a California senator formerly associated with mainstream libera l
causes.)
Politically, George Jackson provided us all with a radical education, a viable
alternative to viewing not only the United States but the world as a political
entity. He gave the disenfranchised a lens through which they could clearly see
their situation and become more conscious about it. He wrote in April 1970:
It all falls into place. I see the whole thing much clearer now, how fascism
has taken possession of this country, the interlocking dictatorship from county
level on up to the Grand Dragon in Washington, D.C.
Crucially, George's treatment is a concrete, undeniable example of political
oppression. Race is more times than not the easy answer to a problem. Among
people of color in the United States, the quick fix, "blame it on
whitey" mentality has become so prevalent that it shortcuts thinking.
Conversely, stereotypes of minorities act as simple-minded tools of divisiveness
and oppression. George addressed these issues in prison, setting a model for
the outside as well: "I'm always telling the brothers some of those whites
are willing to work with us against the pigs. All they got to do is stop
talking honky. When the races start fighting, all you have is one maniac group
against another." On the surface, race has been and is still being put
forth as an overriding issue that needs to be addressed as a prerequisite for
social change. In fact, although it seems to loom as a large problem, race as
an issue is again a symptom of capitalism. Of course, on a paltry le vel and
among the relatively powerless, race does play a part in social structure (the
racist cop, the bigoted landlord, etc.), pitting segments of the population against
each other. But revolutionary change requires class analysis that drives
appropriate actions and eliminates race as a mitigating factor. Knowing these
socioeconomic dynamics, George Jackson was first and foremost a people's
revolutionary, and he acted as such at all times without compromise. His
writings clearly reflect his belief in class-based revolutionary change.
Considering the many structural elements affecting him, it is easy to see why
George and his message have been misinterpreted. The quick takes on him are
abundant: it's assumed that he was imprisoned and oppressed because he was
black, because he had publicized ties with the Black Panther Party and was a
well-known organizer within the prison reform movement. Although George became
a "prison celebrity," a status that certainly didn't help him in
terms of acquittal and release, ignorance of the actual forces responsible for
his prolonged imprisonment is inexcusable. The radical viewpoint is absolutely
indispensable when regarding both George's life circumstance and philosophy.
His life serves not as a mere individual example of prison cruelty, but as a
scalding indictment of the very nature of capitalism.
In these times, there are two very different ways to be born into privilege.
First and most obvious in the system of capital is to be born into wealth.
Second, and not precluding the first, is to have an intellectual, politically
conscious base from which to grow as a person philosophically and spiritually.
Radical figures in modern society Lenin, Trotsky, Ché Guevara, my father,
Jonathan Jackson, and my uncle George Jackson have the capability of
providing this base through their examples and writings.
Those not born into privilege can achieve a politically conscious base in
different ways. No veils separate the lower class from the realities of
everyday life. They have been given the gift of disillusion. Bourgeois
lifestyle, although perhaps sought after, is in most cases not attainable.
Daily survival is the primary goal, as it was with George. Of course, when it
finally becomes more attractive for one to fight, and perhaps die, than to live
in a survival mode, revolution starts to become a possibility. Not a riot, not
a government takeover by one or another group, but a people's revolution led by
the politically conscious.
This consciousness doesn't simply appear. Individuals must grow and work into
it, but it's an invaluable gift to have insight into and access to an
alternative to the frustration, a goal on the horizon.
The nineties are an unconscious era. The unimportant is all-important, the
essential neglected. What system than capitalism, what time period than now, is
better suited to naturally create the scape-goat, the seldom-heard political
prisoner, misunderstood in his cult-of-personality status, held back in a choke
hold from society? It is not only our right, but our duty, to listen to and
comprehend George Jackson's message. To not do so is to turn our backs on one
of the brilliant minds of the twentieth century, an individual passionately
involved with liberating not only himself, but all of us.
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation,
understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be
saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you
fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in
revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.
George
Jackson
Jonathan Jackson, Jr.
San Francisco
June 1994
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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Free All Political Prisoners!
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