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Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
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Published January 1, 1973
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June 14, 2024
A FAMOUS “REVOLUTIONARY” DOCUMENT FROM THE ‘60s/‘70s
George Lester Jackson (1941-1971) was an African-American author and revolutionary. While serving a sentence for a $70 armed robbery of a gas station in 1961, in 1966 he co-founded the Marxist–Leninist Black Guerrilla Family. In 1970, he and two others were charged with the murder of a prison guard; he was shot and killed during an attempted prison escape in 1971, in which hostages and prison guards were also killed.
In an early letter, he recalls, “I stopped attending school regularly, and started getting ‘picked up’ by the pigs more often… These pickups were mainly for ‘suspicion of’ or because I was in the wrong part of town. Except for once or twice I was never actually caught breaking any laws. There just wasn’t any possibility of a policeman beating me in a footrace… (the pig is working mainly for money, bear in mind, I am running for my life). There wasn’t a pig in the city who could ‘follow the leader’ of even the most timid ghetto gang.” (Pg. 16)
He recounts how as a teenager, he accidentally drove his father’s car “inside the plate-glass window and front door of the neighborhood barbershop… I tried to apologize. The brother that owned the shop allowed my father to do the repair work himself. No pigs were called to settle this affair between brothers… the brother sensed that my father was poor, like himself, with a terribly mindless, displace, irresponsible child on his hands… and didn’t insist on having the gun-slinging pig from the outside enemy culture arbitrate the problems we must handle ourselves.” (Pg. 17)
He observes, “I’ve learned one very significant thing for our struggle here in the U.S.: all blacks do look alike to certain types of white people. White people tend to grossly underestimate all blacks, out of habit. Blacks have been overestimating whites in a conditioned reflex.” (Pg. 21)
He asserts, “A RESONSIBLE state government would have found a means of weeding out most of the savage types that are drawn to gunslinger jobs [like prison guard] long ago. How did all these pigs get through!!?... You may as well give a baboon a gun and set him loose on us!! It’s the same in here as on the streets out there. WHO has loosed this thing on an already suffering people? The Reagans, the Nixons, the men who have, who own… Any fool who falls in here … might shoot me tomorrow from a position thirty feet above my head with an automatic rifle!!... He won’t even miss a day’s wages.” (Pg. 29)
He boasts, “I have enlarged my vision so that I may be able to think on a basis encompassing all, not just myself, my family, my neighborhood, but the world. I have completely arrested the susceptibility to think in theoretical terms. Or give credence to religious, supernatural, or other shallow unnecessary things of this nature that lock the mind and hinder thinking.” (Pg. 37)
He wrote to his mother, “I promised myself that I wouldn’t write you again from here… My feeling seems to be wasted on you… I write home to you people, my people, the closest of my kind for understanding and advice. I attempt to advise you in areas of which experience has made me better informed. I get no understanding… My advice falls upon deaf ears!... If a person doesn’t stand with me, he stands against me to my way of thinking. I feel that you have failed me Mama. I know that you have failed me.” (Pg. 43-44) In another letter, he says to her, “why do you continue to send me Easter cards? This is the height of disrespect you show me. You never wanted me to be a man… What is wrong with you, Mama? No other mama in history has acted the way you act under stress situations.” (Pg. 80)
He observes, “Have you ever wondered how you and I and all out kind lost their identity so fast? The last blacks were brought into this country only seventy-five to eighty years ago, three generations at most. This is too short a time for us to have lost as much as we have. No other people have completely been divorced from their own as we have in such a short period.” (Pg. 48)
He suggests, “I have faith in the fact that we, the majority of peoples (5 to 1) on earth, can live with and complement each other’s existence if we rid the earth of the barbarous influence spread by this inhuman, unnatural minority! My faith in life holds still to the principle that we men of color will soon make a harmonious world out of this chaotic travesty of facts. But first we must destroy the malefactor and root out all of his ideals, moralities, and institutions. It is to this end that I have long since dedicated myself… by any and all means.” (Pg. 83)
He states, “The theory of an existing and benevolent god simply doesn’t make sense to anyone who is rational. A benevolent and omnipotent God would never allow such imbalances as I see to exist for one second. If by chance I am wrong, however, I must then assume that being born black called for some automatic punishment for sins I know nothing about, and being innocent it behooves me to defy god.” (Pg. 101-102)
He says of Martin Luther King Jr., “I am sure you are acquainted with the fact that he was opposed to violence and war; he was indeed a devout pacifist. It is very odd, almost unbelievable, that so violent and tumultuous a setting as this can still produce such men. He was out of place, out of season, too naïve, too innocent, too cultured, to civil for these times. That is why his end was so predictable… I really never disliked him as a man. As a man I accorded him the respect that his sincerity deserved. It is just as a leader of black thought that I disagreed with him. The concept of nonviolence is a false idea. It presupposes the existence of compassion and a sense of justice on the part of one’s adversary.” (Pg. 127-128)
He advises, “Forget that Westernized backward stuff about god. I curse god the whole idea of a benevolent supreme being is the product of a tortured demented mind. It is a labored, mindless attempt to explain away ignorance, a tool to keep people of low mentality and no means of production in line. How could there be a BENEVOLENT superman controlling a world like this. He would have to be malevolent, not benevolent. Look round you, evil rules supreme. God would be my enemy.” (Pg. 151)
He contends, “The guy who earns a parole surrendered some face in the course of his stay here prior to board… No black will leave this place if he has any violence in his past, until they see that thing in his eyes. And you can’t fake it, resignation---defeat, it must be stamped clearly across his face.” (Pg. 161)
He notes, “those who support capitalism in any appreciable degree … are our irreconcilable enemy… Any man who stands up to speak in defense of capitalism must be slapped down.” (Pg. 186)
He explains, “I don’t consider myself a writer, an intellectual, really none of the things that can be ISOLATED, when I FEEL I’ll write (or talk) in an effort to effect and affect… but actually I don’t prefer anything as mild as pen and paper. In my fancies I see myself growing up to be a VC type, a Che-type cat with all four paws on the ground… Perfect love, perfect hate, that’s the insides of me.” (Pg. 235)
This book will interest those studying the “revolutionary” and “writings from prison” aspect of African-American history.
George Lester Jackson (1941-1971) was an African-American author and revolutionary. While serving a sentence for a $70 armed robbery of a gas station in 1961, in 1966 he co-founded the Marxist–Leninist Black Guerrilla Family. In 1970, he and two others were charged with the murder of a prison guard; he was shot and killed during an attempted prison escape in 1971, in which hostages and prison guards were also killed.
In an early letter, he recalls, “I stopped attending school regularly, and started getting ‘picked up’ by the pigs more often… These pickups were mainly for ‘suspicion of’ or because I was in the wrong part of town. Except for once or twice I was never actually caught breaking any laws. There just wasn’t any possibility of a policeman beating me in a footrace… (the pig is working mainly for money, bear in mind, I am running for my life). There wasn’t a pig in the city who could ‘follow the leader’ of even the most timid ghetto gang.” (Pg. 16)
He recounts how as a teenager, he accidentally drove his father’s car “inside the plate-glass window and front door of the neighborhood barbershop… I tried to apologize. The brother that owned the shop allowed my father to do the repair work himself. No pigs were called to settle this affair between brothers… the brother sensed that my father was poor, like himself, with a terribly mindless, displace, irresponsible child on his hands… and didn’t insist on having the gun-slinging pig from the outside enemy culture arbitrate the problems we must handle ourselves.” (Pg. 17)
He observes, “I’ve learned one very significant thing for our struggle here in the U.S.: all blacks do look alike to certain types of white people. White people tend to grossly underestimate all blacks, out of habit. Blacks have been overestimating whites in a conditioned reflex.” (Pg. 21)
He asserts, “A RESONSIBLE state government would have found a means of weeding out most of the savage types that are drawn to gunslinger jobs [like prison guard] long ago. How did all these pigs get through!!?... You may as well give a baboon a gun and set him loose on us!! It’s the same in here as on the streets out there. WHO has loosed this thing on an already suffering people? The Reagans, the Nixons, the men who have, who own… Any fool who falls in here … might shoot me tomorrow from a position thirty feet above my head with an automatic rifle!!... He won’t even miss a day’s wages.” (Pg. 29)
He boasts, “I have enlarged my vision so that I may be able to think on a basis encompassing all, not just myself, my family, my neighborhood, but the world. I have completely arrested the susceptibility to think in theoretical terms. Or give credence to religious, supernatural, or other shallow unnecessary things of this nature that lock the mind and hinder thinking.” (Pg. 37)
He wrote to his mother, “I promised myself that I wouldn’t write you again from here… My feeling seems to be wasted on you… I write home to you people, my people, the closest of my kind for understanding and advice. I attempt to advise you in areas of which experience has made me better informed. I get no understanding… My advice falls upon deaf ears!... If a person doesn’t stand with me, he stands against me to my way of thinking. I feel that you have failed me Mama. I know that you have failed me.” (Pg. 43-44) In another letter, he says to her, “why do you continue to send me Easter cards? This is the height of disrespect you show me. You never wanted me to be a man… What is wrong with you, Mama? No other mama in history has acted the way you act under stress situations.” (Pg. 80)
He observes, “Have you ever wondered how you and I and all out kind lost their identity so fast? The last blacks were brought into this country only seventy-five to eighty years ago, three generations at most. This is too short a time for us to have lost as much as we have. No other people have completely been divorced from their own as we have in such a short period.” (Pg. 48)
He suggests, “I have faith in the fact that we, the majority of peoples (5 to 1) on earth, can live with and complement each other’s existence if we rid the earth of the barbarous influence spread by this inhuman, unnatural minority! My faith in life holds still to the principle that we men of color will soon make a harmonious world out of this chaotic travesty of facts. But first we must destroy the malefactor and root out all of his ideals, moralities, and institutions. It is to this end that I have long since dedicated myself… by any and all means.” (Pg. 83)
He states, “The theory of an existing and benevolent god simply doesn’t make sense to anyone who is rational. A benevolent and omnipotent God would never allow such imbalances as I see to exist for one second. If by chance I am wrong, however, I must then assume that being born black called for some automatic punishment for sins I know nothing about, and being innocent it behooves me to defy god.” (Pg. 101-102)
He says of Martin Luther King Jr., “I am sure you are acquainted with the fact that he was opposed to violence and war; he was indeed a devout pacifist. It is very odd, almost unbelievable, that so violent and tumultuous a setting as this can still produce such men. He was out of place, out of season, too naïve, too innocent, too cultured, to civil for these times. That is why his end was so predictable… I really never disliked him as a man. As a man I accorded him the respect that his sincerity deserved. It is just as a leader of black thought that I disagreed with him. The concept of nonviolence is a false idea. It presupposes the existence of compassion and a sense of justice on the part of one’s adversary.” (Pg. 127-128)
He advises, “Forget that Westernized backward stuff about god. I curse god the whole idea of a benevolent supreme being is the product of a tortured demented mind. It is a labored, mindless attempt to explain away ignorance, a tool to keep people of low mentality and no means of production in line. How could there be a BENEVOLENT superman controlling a world like this. He would have to be malevolent, not benevolent. Look round you, evil rules supreme. God would be my enemy.” (Pg. 151)
He contends, “The guy who earns a parole surrendered some face in the course of his stay here prior to board… No black will leave this place if he has any violence in his past, until they see that thing in his eyes. And you can’t fake it, resignation---defeat, it must be stamped clearly across his face.” (Pg. 161)
He notes, “those who support capitalism in any appreciable degree … are our irreconcilable enemy… Any man who stands up to speak in defense of capitalism must be slapped down.” (Pg. 186)
He explains, “I don’t consider myself a writer, an intellectual, really none of the things that can be ISOLATED, when I FEEL I’ll write (or talk) in an effort to effect and affect… but actually I don’t prefer anything as mild as pen and paper. In my fancies I see myself growing up to be a VC type, a Che-type cat with all four paws on the ground… Perfect love, perfect hate, that’s the insides of me.” (Pg. 235)
This book will interest those studying the “revolutionary” and “writings from prison” aspect of African-American history.
February 14, 2025
Important + harrowing map of supremacy and violence. The regime of anti-Blackness inflicted upon him, which remains unforgivably recognizable to the contemporary reader; the misogynoir he so confidently wielded; the repeated bids for connection and understanding with parents rendered distant by their lifetimes coping under the weight of white terrorism; the brief window to a sexual trauma that he (regarding his own abuse by a full-grown woman at age 16 as some sort of masculine achievement) encourages his younger brother to repeat; the elation radiating from his later letters to outside comrades which hold, in the negative space, the horrible torment of all of his years of isolation and alienation.
May we all find in our hearts a shred of Comrade Jackson's strength of conviction and will, though our revolution should not find itself bound by the undeniable limitations of his personal politic. Either all of it goes or none of it does.
May we all find in our hearts a shred of Comrade Jackson's strength of conviction and will, though our revolution should not find itself bound by the undeniable limitations of his personal politic. Either all of it goes or none of it does.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews