Soledad Brother by George Jackson

First published: 1970

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1964-1970

Locale: California

Principal Personages:

• George Jackson, an African American who spent much of his life in prison
• Jonathan Jackson, George’s brother, who became a revolutionary and died at the age of seventeen
• (Robert) Lester Jackson, the father of George and Jonathan Jackson
• Georgia Jackson, the mother of George and Jonathan Jackson
• Angela Davis, a black instructor accused of supplying Jonathan with guns used in an assault on a courthouse

Form and Content

Soledad Brother is a collection of George Jackson’s letters to relatives and friends, written from California prisons. At the age of eighteen, Jackson was given an indeterminate sentence of one year to life for stealing $71 from a gas station. Despite his two prior convictions for armed robbery, his rage at serving eleven years in prison for stealing only $71 is understandable. What made it worse was his belief that he might spend the rest of his life in prison. This real-life event has been compared with Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Misérables (1862), in which the hero, Jean Valjean, serves nineteen years as a galley slave for stealing a loaf of bread.

While in Soledad Prison, Jackson incurred the enmity of prison guards because of his defiant spirit and his outspoken advocacy of Black Power politics. Eventually Jackson and two other black inmates were accused of murdering a white guard during an uprising. They came to be known as the Soledad Brothers. All were held in isolation cells awaiting trial. Conviction for murdering a prison guard would bring automatic death sentences.

Jackson undertook a grueling course of self-education in politics, economics, history, philosophy, languages, and other subjects. His letters reveal the evolution of a remarkable intelligence. He became an ardent Marxist-Leninist, advocating violent revolution as the only means of correcting the injustices of the capitalist system in the United States. He blamed all the problems of African Americans on capitalism.

Jackson was killed in a riot in San Quentin Prison in 1971, a riot in which three guards and two other inmates were also killed. Jackson’s many sympathizers claimed that he was deliberately murdered because he threatened to become too dangerous an insurrectionary leader. In many of his letters, he predicts that he will never leave prison alive.

All of Jackson’s incoming and outgoing letters were read by prison censors. He had to be circumspect in expressing himself because objectionable letters would not be delivered, and there was a danger of correspondence privileges being terminated for any individual who was considered a security threat. This makes it all the more extraordinary that the contents of Jackson’s letters are still so hostile and militant. Regardless of political sympathies, one is compelled to admire the strength of character of a helpless individual who refuses to bow his head in defeat and who realizes that anything he writes in his letters may be used against him at his parole hearings.

The reader can sense the much greater anger seething behind the words that appear on the printed page. Jackson’s rage at the mistreatment of African Americans for more than three hundred years provided the motivation for him to survive physical and mental abuse by guards and white prisoners, as well as to pursue his remarkable program of self-improvement.

The letters are dated from June, 1964, to August, 1970. Most are arranged in chronological order, although the first section, which provides biographical and other background information, contains letters written in 1970. Each letter in the volume is headed with a date and the first name of the addressee. An introduction by the colorful French author, career criminal, and revolutionary Jean Genet is included.

Jackson describes his day-to-day existence inside a cell, his views on prison life in general, his efforts to improve his mind with reading and his body with strenuous physical exercise, his memories of growing up in the slums, and his gradually evolving political awareness.

Many of Jackson’s letters are addressed to his mother and father. He blames them for educating him to be humble and subservient like themselves. He blames his mother especially for sending him to Catholic schools, where he believes he was indoctrinated with false beliefs from which he is making a painful effort to free himself. He attempts to argue his political and philosophical ideas with his parents, even though his reading and solitary thinking have obviously elevated him to a sophisticated level of thought that his parents are unable to comprehend.

Part of the irony of his torment is that he finds it increasingly difficult to communicate with the people he loves the most. Like that of most autodidacts, his self-education suffers from lack of dialogue with intellectual equals. He writes, “I feel no love, no tenderness for anyone who does not think as I do.” He describes himself as a “monster” bent on violent revenge. The more dangerous he makes himself appear in his rigorously censored letters, the more he antagonizes his guards and undermines his chances of parole. His rage blinds him to the possibility that he has had anything to do with his own suffering.

None of the replies he receives from his parents or any of his other correspondents are included in the book. The reader is forced to guess the nature of these replies from the ways in which Jackson responds. Jackson’s father, Lester, is an intelligent man but has an extremely conservative attitude, as can be seen in his article published in Ebony after both of his sons had met violent deaths. Judging from Jackson’s letters to his mother, she is a devoutly religious woman who tries to persuade her son to emulate the conciliatory, nonviolent Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of revolutionaries such as Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X. Rather pathetically, Jackson threatens to break off correspondence with his parents, but he writes to them again because his list of approved correspondents is strictly limited.

As the years pass and Jackson grows older, his letters become increasingly objective. At first he thinks mainly of his own unhappiness and writes often about his hopes for parole. Gradually, however, he becomes aware that the only way he can hope to get released is by proving to the custodians and the parole board members that he has been broken in spirit, like so many other convicts. This his courageous character will not allow him to do; he is marked down as a troublemaker and a communist revolutionary. He believes that his life is in imminent danger, either from the guards or from white prisoners encouraged by the guards with the promise of parole or at least special privileges. Jackson’s description of prison conditions in Soledad and San Quentin makes readers realize how bad things were and how much they have improved in some important respects, partly as a result of prisoners’ rights protests.

After the Soledad Brothers had attracted worldwide attention, Jackson came into contact with young radicals who were far more in sympathy with his ideas than were his early correspondents. Chief among these was Angela Davis, a young black revolutionary who seemed almost the perfect female counterpart to the fiery Jackson. Jackson makes it clear how much he suffers by being deprived of heterosexual companionship. His letters to Davis and other young women are often tender and poetic. They are in sharp contrast to his attitude toward the prison authorities, the police, the justice system, and the white power structure in general.

Critical Context

Jackson’s book was a best seller and won the nonfiction book award from the Black Academy of Arts and Sciences for 1971. It attracted both critical praise and condemnation, depending largely on the political sympathies of the critic. Julius Lester, writing for The New York Times Book Review, called it the most important single volume from a black writer since The Autobiography of Malcolm X and added that Jackson made the volatile Eldridge Cleaver “look like a song-and-dance man on the Ed Sullivan show.”

Many commentators, including Angela Davis, Eric Mann, and Bobby Seale, have openly charged that Jackson was murdered in a conspiracy because he was too dangerous to be released from prison and too dangerous to be kept inside. Jackson’s book appeared during a turbulent period in American history, when the war in Vietnam was raging. Soledad Brother was regarded as a book of antiwar protest because of its contention that domestic racial oppression and involvement in wars against former European colonies were both motivated by the same fascist principles being displayed by Americans in Vietnam. Jackson’s book has been credited with helping to force the United States to terminate hostilities against the North Vietnamese because Jackson specifically advised African Americans not to participate in foreign wars. This was a powerful factor in motivating the government to find a way out of the unpopular and divisive conflict.

Beyond the racial question, the letters were regarded as a blanket indictment of the penal system. It was easy for critics to identify with Jackson’s rage. He seemed to be living proof that if men are treated like wild animals they will become like wild animals. Many writers asserted that, regardless of Jackson’s crimes against society, society for its own protection should learn to deal with prisoners more humanely.

Since Jackson’s death, there have been numerous politically inspired prison riots, such as the spectacular one at Attica State Prison in New York in 1971. Largely because of activists such as Jackson, prison conditions have improved in many important ways, including better food, better living conditions, better educational facilities, and better communication with the outside world. Widespread attempts have been made, for example, through the recruitment of nonwhite prison guards, to ameliorate racist abuse of nonwhite prisoners.

Jackson became a self-taught, articulate spokesman for African Americans in general and African American prisoners in particular. His eloquent letters and essays published in Soledad Brother and posthumously in Blood in My Eye (1972) had an incalculable influence in improving the lives of African Americans both in prisons and in urban ghettos. Although the majority of African Americans did not subscribe to a program of violent action, they did recognize the truths that inspired his emotionally charged writings.

Bibliography

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Jackson was influenced by this autobiography of Cleaver, who became one of the leaders of the Black Panthers. Like Jackson, Cleaver found his identity and mission in life while in prison and became an articulate spokesman of Black Power principles through a strenuous process of self-education.

Davis, Angela Yvonne, et al. If They Come in the Morning. New York: Third Press, 1971. A collection of essays, letters, poetry, and articles dealing mainly with African Americans’ experiences with courts and prisons in the United States. A section of the book is devoted to the Soledad Brothers. The consensus of the articles is that the American prison system is racist and that Marxism can be used to explain the cause as well as to prescribe the cure for this social malady.

Jackson, George L. Blood in My Eye. New York: Random House, 1972. This posthumously published collection of letters and miscellaneous writings by Jackson focuses intensively on his ideas about history and politics, in contrast to most of the letters in Soledad Brother, which dealt more with personal relations and life in prison.

Jackson, Lester. “A Dialogue with My Soledad Son.” Ebony 27 (November, 1971): 72-74. The author describes his experiences visiting his son George in prison. He recalls his many arguments with George over politics and religion. The father states his belief that the country’s racial and other troubles can be dealt with by working through the existing political system. Illustrated with many interesting photographs.

James, Joy, ed. Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Anthology of essays about U.S. prison culture and institutions of law enforcement; includes excerpts from Jackson’s work, as well as essays by others that are useful for understanding the context of that work.

Lester, Julius. “Black Rage to Live.” Review of Soledad Brother, by George Jackson. The New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1970, 10. The longest and most informative review of Jackson’s book to appear at the time of its publication. Contains some explanation of the background events and compares the book with The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Soul on Ice.

Mann, Eric. Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. As its title suggests, this book is heavily biased in favor of Jackson and his ideals. It contains much information about his life that is helpful in understanding the thoughts, feelings, and personal references contained in his letters, most of which assume considerable background knowledge on the part of the letters’ recipients.

Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic Press, 1991. The former chairman of the Black Panther Party tells the history of the organization in dramatic terms from a firsthand perspective. Vivid profiles of many prominent black revolutionaries of the 1960’s, including Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton. Contains the Black Panthers’ program for revolutionary reform.