Noon, August 7, 1970. San Rafael, California. San Quentin inmate James McClain was on trial for assaulting a guard. 20 minutes into the proceedings a tall slim 17 year old in an afro stood up among the observers, drawing an M1 carbine from his overcoat and tossing a pistol to McClain. “Alright gentlemen. I’m taking over now.” Two more inmates scheduled to testify in the trial, Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, took up the guns offered by young Jonathan Jackson and captured judge Harold Haley, deputy district attorney Gary Thomas, and three jurors as hostages. Photographers Jim Kean and Roger Bockrath of the San Rafael Independent Journal were present to record the historic image of a captive Amerikan judge, still dressed in his robes, trembling under the gun of the New Afrikan guerrilla. “You can take our pictures, we are the revolutionaries.” “We want the Soledad Brothers freed in 30 minutes.” But the revolutionaries misjudged their adversary in one crucial respect: they underestimated the enemy’s "reckless disregard for life," even their own. As the rented getaway van pulled out of the parking lot, a contingent of San Quentin guards and court police unleashed an overwhelming volley of gunfire, sacrificing the judge in order to cut off the escape and prevent a prisoner exchange. In the hail of bullets Christmas, McClain, and young Jonathan Jackson were martyred.

In a letter dated “August 9, 1970 Real Date, 2 days A.D.” his brother, Black Panther Field Marshall George Jackson wrote “I want people to wonder at what forces created him, terrible, vindictive, cold, calm man-child, courage in one hand, the machine gun in the other, scourge of the unrighteous–’an ox for the people to ride’!!!” This post is the result of such wondering.

Clues to his state of mind can be found in Blood in My Eye , the political treatise for which George Jackson is best remembered. In these pages we find Jackson’s diagnosis of the Amerikan mind, his analysis of global fascism, and his detailed prescription for urban guerrilla warfare in the heart of the white capitalist empire, informed in part by the reports of young Jonathan. The letters Jonathan sent during this time record nonstop police patrols in the streets of Los Angeles, confusion and intrigue among the vanguard party surrounding the assassinations of such leaders as Chicago’s Fred Hampton. Having succeeded in infiltrating the Panthers, the forces of reaction evidently decided the time had come to employ more naked force and roll up the revolutionaries.

In 1960, while living in Pasadena, George Jackson was accused of stealing $70 from a gas station. Though a witness was present to testify he was not involved, because he had a record his court-appointed lawyer suggested he plead guilty in exchange for an anticipated light sentence. Instead he was given an indeterminate sentence of one year to life. During the first years of his captivity he transformed himself into an incredibly effective activist, organizer, and Marxist theorist. Prison guards found pretexts to punish George for his activism, often by extreme forms of deprivation and solitary confinement. When this torture could not break him, guards attempted to have him killed by other inmates. These efforts culminated in the framing of Jackson, as well as two other men, for the death of a guard at Soledad.

In January 1970, a half hour after the acquittal of a guard for the killing of three black prisoners, a different guard was found beaten to death. Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and George Jackson, who would come to be known as the Soledad Brothers, were charged with the murder. The accused men were brought in chains to two secret hearings in Salinas County. If convicted in these proceedings the men would face an automatic death penalty. Before a third secret hearing John Clutchette managed to smuggle a note to his mother, who contacted a lawyer.

The case was considered consequential enough in pig circles that infiltrator and agent provocateur Thomas E. Mosher blew his cover after bad-jacketing Fred Bennett, the liason between the Black Panthers and the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, leading to his murder at a guerrilla training camp in Santa Cruz. While George was careful not to reveal to his brother the extent of his mistreatment, Jonathan nonetheless became deeply occupied by his brother’s situation. In his own words:

People have said that I am obsessed with my brother’s case, and the movement in general. A person that was close to me once said that my life was too wrapped up in my brother's case, and that I wasn’t cheerful enough for her. It’s true I don’t laugh very much any more. I have but one question to ask all you people and people that think like you, what would you do if it was your brother?

In his letters George instructed Jonathan to study a field like medicine or chemistry for the benefit of the people’s army. He cautioned comrades not to make the sensitive teen feel insecure by teasing him over his green eyes and light complexion.

The Soledad Brothers defense attracted the energies of activists throughout the state and the country. Among those in a leading role was former UCLA philosophy professor Angela Davis, who had been ousted from her academic post as part of governor Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist purge of the University of California. Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in the “Dynamite Hill” neighborhood, named for the settler terrorist bombings that occurred there. Davis was surrounded with black communist activists during her youth, and became affiliated with the CPUSA and the Black Panther Party upon her return from graduate studies in Germany. Some of George’s correspondence with Angela can be found in Soledad Brother. Jonathan Jackson was her bodyguard. They were seen together in a rented van in the Bay Area when Davis purchased a shotgun, whose barrel was later sawn off. After the raid Angela was became the subject of a nationwide womanhunt that ended with her capture in New York City and eventual acquittal. The state was unable to prove that Davis had violated any law regarding the purchase, storage, or use of firearms, nor that she had any advance knowledge of Jonathan’s plan.

George sometimes referred to his brother as his “alter ego.” In a news conference after the raid he said of Jonathan “I loved that boy. I was the first to stand him up in his crib. Not a crib, really. All we had was a box. I taught him how to walk; I wanted to teach him how to fly. I’ll think of him now as I think of Che Guevara.” This would prove incisive, as RIBPP Minister of Defense Kevin “Rashid” Johnson has in modern writings identified Guevara’s “foco” theory, the same as expounded in Blood in My Eye as an adventurist deviation which gained currency from a misunderstanding of the material circumstances surrounding the Cuban revolution and Che’s failures in the Congo and Bolivia. This is put succinctly in the foreword to Soledad Brother where born orphan Jonathan Jackson Jr. laments “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…”

Two days before his trial was scheduled to begin, on August 21, 1971, George Jackson was shot and killed during what guards claimed was an escape attempt. They say he managed to smuggle a full-size military style pistol from a visitor, balanced on top of his head, concealed under an afro wig. The inmates who shared his cell block asserted he sacrificed himself to save the rest of them from a massacre. The day after Jackson’s death at least 700 inmates at Attica Prison in New York began a hunger strike, which would precipitate the Attica Uprising and Massacre two weeks later. The other two Soledad Brothers, John Cluchette and Fleeta Drumgo, were acquitted of the murder of the guard in March of 1972. Ruchell Magee, the one surviving participant of Jonathan Jackson’s daring rescue attempt, continues to be denied parole.

https://www.freeruchellmagee.org/

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