Jackson, George (1942–1971)

George Jackson is a lesser-known name in the field of activism and social justice, yet his legacy is one that sustains and informs a number of projects and revolutionary movements. He was a political prisoner who was sentenced to an undetermined jail sentence (1 year to life) at the age of 18 after being tricked into a confession for the alleged robbing of a gas station. He agreed to confess to spare the county the court costs in return for a short sentencing. Eleven years later (seven of which were spent in special isolation units where the prisoner was in his cell for 23½ hours per day); Jackson was murdered in the prison system that he never left. He was shot dead by a white security guard in San Quentin Prison in August of 1971 while awaiting trial for being framed in the death of a guard in Soledad Prison. Guilty of being black in America and for demythologizing historical and economic oppression, Jackson died a martyr for the revolutionary cause.

A master dialectician and scholar of the likes of Marx, Fanon, Mao, Lenin, and Che Guevara, Jackson used his time in prison to study, write, and encourage fellow prisoners to transform their slave or prisoner mentality into a revolutionary consciousness. He had a tremendous gift for writing and being able to relate the philosophical, political, and economical into both educative materials for his fellow prisoners and to map out a precise and disciplined approach toward the guerrilla tactics necessary for the overthrowing of capitalism. He was a leading figure in the genesis and development of the prison rights movement and was a field marshal for the Black Panther Party. He was murdered in prison because of his teachings and writings. Comrade George, as he sometimes signed his name, was organizing a revolutionary consciousness among his fellow captures and needed to be stopped.

Jackson critiqued the historical formation of social relations between capitalism, racism, and the legacy of slavery as manifest by the contemporary prison system, he labeled the Amerikan (the way George spelled it) society as the epitome of fascism. Freedom or democracy is an illusion that masquerades for a select few who then prey on the world. Although he wrote using traditional Marxist vocabulary, his analysis and methodology must be labeled as black Marxism and would now be recognized as part of the black radical tradition. Socialism and communalism are age-old principles with lineages that can be traced to East African cultures. Jackson preached that black folk must be educated, organized, and prepared to fight to overthrow the complete infrastructure of modern life in order to transform the existing control and materiality of the means of production, as well as to [Page 768]violently decolonize their own subjectivity from the slave consciousness which has infiltrated the black community. His motivation stemmed not only from an outrage from the blatant inequalities and injustices enacted upon black persons in Amerika, but also from a deep place of revolutionary love.