September 18th, 1960, an 18-year-old named George Jackson was arrested for armed robbery at a Los Angeles gas station. $71 were stolen. Nobody was hurt. It was his second robbery charge, but the first as an adult. His courtappointed lawyer told him the move.

Plead guilty and you will get a light county jail sentence. Maybe a year, maybe less. George took the deal. But when sentencing came, the judge did not give him county time.

The judge gave him one year to life under California’s indeterminate sentencing law. Most people did not know what that meant. It meant the parole board would decide when or if George ever got out based entirely on his behavior and attitude. George thought he would do a year, maybe two.

He ended up serving 11 years. He never made it out alive. California sold indeterminate sentencing as rehabilitation. Good behavior earned early release.

Bad behavior extended your sentence. It sounded reasonable until you realized the parole board had unlimited power to keep anyone locked up indefinitely. There were no clear rules for release. It was totally subjective based on whether the guards and prison administrators liked you.

For a young black man who refused to submit to authority, it became a death sentence disguised [music] as reform. George later wrote about that day. He wrote, “I accepted a deal, agreed to confess in return for a light county jail sentence. I confessed, but when time came for sentencing, they tossed me into the penitentiary with one to life.

They sent George to Soladad Prison in California’s Central Valley. He spent 7 and 1/2 of his 11 years in solitary confinement. 23 hours a day in a 6×9 ft cell. One shower per week. A shower meant a bucket of water.

Maybe a second bucket if you were lucky. Guards searched cells constantly, tearing through personal belongings, looking for contraband. But George found something in that cell. The guards could not destroy.

Books. He taught himself. Markx, Lenin, Trosky, Engles, Mao Zaong, France, Fenon, and Cheavara. While locked in isolation, he became a self-educated revolutionary theorist.

In 1966, George met another prisoner named WL Nolan at San Quentin. Nolan was already politically conscious. He introduced George to organized resistance. Together they started study groups teaching other prisoners political theory.

They co-founded what they called a prison organizing group. Teaching self-defense and political consciousness. George transformed from an angry [music] directionless teenager into a disciplined revolutionary intellectual. He wrote in his letters that he met Marx, Lenen, Trosky, Engles and Mao when he entered prison and they redeemed him.

For the first four years he studied nothing but economics and military ideas. The problem was the more educated George became, the more dangerous prison officials considered him. Between 1961 and 1970, George appeared before the parole board at least eight times. He was denied every single time.

The reason was not new crimes or bad behavior. It was his attitude. Guards wrote reports calling him militant, revolutionary, someone who would not submit to authority. In 1968, they told him if he stayed clean for 7 to 8 months, he would be parrolled.

He did exactly that. They denied him anyway, saying they never make deals like that. In December 1968, an institution employee told George he had been granted parole with a release date of March 4th, 1969. George told everyone and wrote his family to prepare.

Then the parole board changed their mind. His education, his [music] reading, his political consciousness became the reasons to keep him locked up forever. January 13th, 1970. A white prison guard named OPG Miller shoots and kills three black prisoners during a yard fight [music] at Soladad.

Miller fired from a tower above the yard. He was an expert marksman. His first three shots killed three black inmates. The prison radio announces that a Mterrey County grand jury ruled it justifiable homicide.

No black prisoners were allowed to testify at the hearing. 30 minutes after the prisoners hear this news, a white prison guard named John V. Mills [music] is found dead. He had been beaten and thrown from a thirdf flooror tier in George Jackson’s cell block. January 16th, 1970.

George Jackson, Fleet Drumo, and John Clechette are charged with Mills’s murder. They became known as the Soladade brothers. The evidence against them, none. They were charged because the prison identified them as black militants.

A conviction would mean automatic death penalty under California law. An activist lawyer named Fa Stender formed the Soladad Brothers Defense Committee. Celebrities and intellectuals joined, including Julian Bond, Marlon Brando, Nome Chomsky, Jane Fonda, and Pete Seager. A young black radical professor named Angela Davis became co-chairperson.

Angela and George started corresponding, sending letters back and forth. She helped him edit the letters he had been writing to his family since 1964. These letters showed his intellectual transformation, his analysis of prison as slavery, his revolutionary consciousness. The book was titled Soladad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.

October 1st, 1970. Soladad Brother hits the shelves with an introduction by the famous French playwright Jean Janae. It becomes an instant bestseller. It sells over 400,000 copies in the next year.

The New York Times calls it the most important single volume from a black person since Malcolm X’s autobiography. The Washington Monthly writes that Jackson emerges transformed from a despair-ridden adolescent into a man of knowledge and passion [music] into a terrible prophet. The book makes George Jackson internationally famous. Prison inmates across America read it, study it, and organize around it.

But the California parole board’s response was to deny parole again. His writing proved he was too radical to ever be freed. August 7th, 1970, just days after Soladad brother is sent to the publisher, George’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, makes a desperate move. He walks into a Marane County courthouse with guns hidden under his coat and takes a judge, a prosecutor, and three jurors hostage during a trial.

His demand is simple. Free the Soladad brothers within 30 minutes or the judge dies. There is a shootout in the courthouse parking lot. [music] Jonathan Jackson is killed. Judge Harold Haley is killed. [music] The prosecutor is paralyzed.

The guns Jonathan used were registered to Angela Davis. She goes on the FBI most wanted list, goes underground, is captured [music] months later, and goes on trial in 1972. A jury acquits her on all charges. The prosecution could only prove that she loved George Jackson.

For George, still locked up, his baby brother died trying to free him. George wrote about Jonathan. He was free for a while. I guess that’s more than most of us [music] can expect.

George was transferred to San Quinton’s maximum security adjustment center. He was locked down 23 hours a day. He was strip searched every time he left his cell. He continued [music] writing and he continued organizing even from isolation.

His trial for the guard’s murder was scheduled to begin in late August 1971. The defense had evidence of unreliable witnesses [music] and no physical evidence connecting him to the crime. The other Soladad brothers, Drumo and Clutchette, would later be acquitted by a jury in March 1972. But George never made it to trial.

August 21st, 1971. 2 days before his trial was set to begin, George met with his lawyer, Steven Bingham. After the meeting, while being escorted back to his cell, guards claimed they discovered a gun. What happened next is disputed to this day. The official story is that George pulled a gun hidden in an afro wig, freed other prisoners, [music] and tried to escape.

George was shot by a tower guard. The bullet struck him in the back. Three prison guards and two prisoners were found dead. George Jackson died in the prison yard at 29 years old.

There are serious problems with that official story. [music] How did a gun get past maximum security strip searches? [music] Why would George try to escape 2 days before a trial he expected to win? Why was he running toward a building instead of toward freedom? James Baldwin wrote that no black person will ever believe that George Jackson died [music] the way they tell us he did. Many believe the state assassinated him because his trial would have exposed prison brutality and political persecution.

August 22nd, 1971, the day after George’s death at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, 700 prisoners gather in the mess hall. They sit in complete [music] silence, not touching their breakfast. Each one is wearing a black armband, usually just a shoelace tied around their arm. A silent hunger strike to honor George Jackson.

This was personal. Prisoners across America had read Soladad Brother. They saw themselves in George’s words, his analysis of prison as modern slavery. September 9th, 1971. 19 days after George’s death, 1,500 prisoners at Attica seize control of the prison.

They issue a manifesto with 28 demands, including better medical care, legal representation at parole hearings, decent food, living wages for prison work, and an end to guard brutality. Many of the demands directly echoed George Jackson’s writings about prison conditions. An Attica prisoner named Donald Noble later said that what really solidified things was George Jackson’s death and that is what brought everyone together. The uprising lasted 5 days before Governor Rockefeller sent in state troopers. 43 people were killed when police retook the prison, but Attekica became the most famous prison rebellion in American history.

It began as a hunger strike for George Jackson. August 28th, 1971, 8,000 people attended George Jackson’s funeral at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland. Black Panthers lined the [music] streets with raised fists.

Huey Newton gave the eulogy, visibly emotional. The crowd included revolutionaries, intellectuals, and community members who had never met George, but felt they knew him through his writing. [music] His mother, Georgia B, had buried her youngest son, Jonathan, in 1970. Now, she buried her oldest son, George, in 1971. Both of them died fighting the system that had swallowed George, when he was 18 years old.

George Jackson served 11 years for stealing $71. He transformed himself from an angry teenager into a revolutionary intellectual. He wrote a book that sold 400,000 copies and inspired a generation. But California’s indeterminate sentencing system never intended to let him out.

The more he educated himself, the more dangerous they considered him. The system claimed to rehabilitate. It actually punished growth and consciousness. His case proved that American prisons feared educated prisoners more than anything else.

What happened to the others? Angela Davis was acquitted on all charges in 1972. She became a professor and a prison abolitionist. She is still active today at age 81.

Fleet Drumo and John Cleette were acquitted of the guard’s murder in March 1972. The jury saw through the frame up. Fa Stender, George’s lawyer who edited Soladod Brother, was shot in 1979 by someone claiming George had been betrayed. She committed suicide in 1980.

Steven Bingham, the lawyer who was meeting with George when he died, lived as a fugitive for 13 years before returning to face trial. He was acquitted of smuggling the guns. [music] California eventually reformed its indeterminate sentencing law. George’s case helped expose how it enabled political persecution. Every August 21st, prisoners across America participate in actions to honor George Jackson.

It is called Black August, a month of remembering revolutionary prisoners and organizing for prison reform. In 2018, [music] prisoners in 17 states launched a coordinated strike on August 21st. They demanded an end to prison slavery, living wages for prison labor, humane conditions, and voting rights for prisoners. The strike lasted from George Jackson’s death anniversary to September 9th, the start of Attica.

Their demands echoed what George wrote about in 1970. Today, over two million Americans are imprisoned. In 1960, when George was sentenced, it was 200,000. In 1971, when he died, 300,000.

His warnings about America becoming a prison nation came true. George Jackson was 18 when he stole $71. He expected to serve one year in county jail. Instead, he got 11 years in solitary confinement, became an internationally known revolutionary author, and died at 29 because the state decided his mind was too dangerous to ever release.

He once wrote these words, “I have no habits, no ego, no name, no face. I feel no love, no tenderness for anyone who does not think as I do.” Solitary confinement tried to break him. Indeterminate sentencing tried to control him. The parole board tried to keep him forever.

Instead, he wrote a book that is still read 54 years later and inspired the largest prison uprising in American history. California killed George Jackson. But it could not kill what he proved that education is the most dangerous weapon a prisoner can have.