The Marin County Sheriff gave an explicit order, do not fire on the van. The guards fired anyway. Four people died including the judge they were supposed to be protecting. Not one of the men who pulled those triggers was ever charged.

The man at the wheel was 17 years old. His name was Jonathan Jackson. That’s where August 7th, 1970 ends, but that’s not where it starts. It starts in 1960 in Los Angeles with a gas station and $71.

George Lester Jackson was 18 years old. He had been in trouble before. Minor things and his court-appointed attorney gave him a deal. Plead guilty to this robbery charge, get a short county jail sentence, go home.

George took it. He stood before the judge expecting a few months. The judge sentenced him to 1 year to life. It was not a fixed term.

It was a California indeterminate sentence. That meant George Jackson did not have a release date. He had a parole board. That board met every year and every year it sent him back.

He went to Soledad prison. Seven and a half of the next 10 years he spent in solitary confinement. For $71. What the state did not anticipate was what George would do with that time.

He read Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Fanon. Organized. He turned black prisoners in Soledad into the most politically conscious population in the California prison system. He wrote letters, hundreds of them.

And in 1970, those letters were published as a book called Soledad Brother. Jean Genet wrote the introduction. The book sold over 400,000 copies. That summer, George Jackson was transferred [music] to San Quentin to await trial on a second charge, murder, that his mother said was manufactured.

George Jackson had a younger brother named Jonathan. Jonathan Peter Jackson was born on June 23rd, 1953. By the time August 7th, 1970 arrived, he was 17 [music] years old and he had been watching his brother disappear into the California [music] prison system for a decade. Jonathan was not a bystander.

He was working with Angela Davis, the former UCLA philosophy professor dismissed from her position after Governor Ronald Reagan and the university’s Board of [music] Regents made her Communist Party membership grounds for termination. Davis was leading the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee at the time. Jonathan was by multiple accounts her bodyguard. He attended hearings, studied the mechanics of what held his brother, and built a plan.

If this is the kind of history this channel [music] covers, hit subscribe. Every video is a case file. The next one is already waiting. On August 5th, 1970, Angela Davis walked into a pawn shop in San Francisco and legally purchased a shotgun two days before the attack.

After the purchase, the barrel was sawed off to make it concealable. [music] Davis would say later that she bought the gun for self-protection. The next day, Davis and Jonathan were allegedly in a rented yellow van outside the Marin County Civic Center, a Frank Lloyd Wright designed courthouse complex in San Rafael, California. The van had engine trouble. >> [music] >> They drove down the street to a gas station for repairs, then they left. On August 7th, Jonathan came back.

He was 17 years old. He wore a long buttoned raincoat in August heat with no rain in the forecast. He walked into the Marin County Hall of Justice, sat among the spectators in Judge Harold Haley’s courtroom, and waited. Haley was presiding over the trial of a San Quentin prisoner named James McClain charged with stabbing a prison [music] guard.

Jonathan opened his bag. He threw a pistol to McLain. He pulled an M-1 carbine from inside his coat. Witnesses reported him saying, [music] “Freeze.

Just freeze.” He told the lawyers, the jurors, the court officials to get on the floor. A San Quentin prisoner named Ruchell Magee, brought to testify as a witness in McLain’s trial, freed three more prisoners from a holding cell. A fourth man, William Christmas, joined them. Journalists had arrived in the hallway.

Jonathan told them, “You take all the pictures you want. We are the revolutionaries.” There were five hostages, Judge Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas, and three female jurors. Jonathan’s demand was direct. He demanded the Soledad brothers, his brother George included, be released within 30 minutes.

Otherwise, the group would go to the airport and find a plane. Judge Haley was forced at gunpoint to call Sheriff Louis Mountanos. The calculation was that the call would stop the police from interfering. Haley made the call.

The group took the elevator down, walked through the Marin County Civic Center parking lot, and loaded the hostages into the rented yellow van. Sheriff Mountanos gave an order not to fire on the van. San Quentin State Prison guards disobeyed that order. This is documented.

The command existed. The sheriff’s authority was clear. >> [music] >> No lawful basis gave the guards the right to override him. They fired anyway, a barrage of 30-caliber rifle fire into the moving vehicle. James McLain in the front passenger seat had already discharged a weapon at the police outside the Civic Center.

A shooting melee erupted. Gary Thomas grabbed a gun from Jonathan and started firing. Judge Harold Haley died from two wounds, one from the sawed-off shotgun taped to his neck, and one from a .357 Magnum pistol fired inside the van. Jonathan Jackson died in the parking lot.

James McLain died. William Christmas died, Ruchell Magee was wounded and survived. Gary Thomas was paralyzed for life. The medical examiner confirmed those paralyzing shots came from 30-caliber rifle fire.

It was the same caliber discharged by San Quentin prison guards, the same guards who had been ordered not to fire. Jonathan Jackson was 17 years old. Four days later, Judge Peter Allen Smith signed a federal arrest warrant, not for the guards, for Angela Davis. The charge was aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley.

The legal instrument was California Penal Code Section 31, which holds that anyone who aids and abets in the commission of a crime, whether or not they were present, is equally guilty as the person who committed it. Davis was not at the courthouse on August 7th. She did not fire any weapon. She purchased a gun legally 2 days before the attack.

Under California’s accomplice statute, that was enough to charge her with murder. On August 18th, 1970, Angela Davis became the third woman in the history of the United States placed on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted fugitives list. She cut her hair, put on a wig, changed her identification, and went underground. An FBI wanted poster described her as armed and dangerous.

She was unarmed when they found her. President Richard Nixon congratulated the FBI on the capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis. She was 26 years old. The manhunt lasted 56 days.

On October 13th, FBI agents found Davis at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City. She was wearing a wig. She offered no resistance. Photographs of Angela Davis in handcuffs ran on front pages around the world the next morning alongside Nixon’s quote.

The Free Angela Davis campaign began that afternoon. >> [music] >> John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote a song. Committees formed in France, in East Germany, in Mexico. Over the next 16 months, Davis remained in custody while her defense attorneys, Howard Moore Jr. and Leo Branton Jr., built her case. In 1972, the trial moved to Santa Clara County.

Lead prosecutor, Albert Harris, argued Davis had planned the entire courthouse operation. The defense countered that owning legally purchased firearms is not a crime, and that no evidence placed Davis [music] in contact with Jonathan on August 7th. Charging a gun purchaser with murder for how that gun was later used, the defense argued, [music] would make every firearms buyer in California potentially liable for any crime committed [music] with their weapon. On June 4th, 1972, an all-white jury returned [music] a verdict: not guilty.

On all charges, after 13 hours of deliberation. One juror, Ralph De Lange, walked out of the courthouse and raised his fist in a black [music] power salute for the crowd. He told reporters it was to show unity of opinion for all oppressed people. 10 of the 12 jurors attended the victory celebration with Davis’s defense team. The state’s case had failed, but the question the acquittal did not answer was the one that had been sitting in the parking lot since August 7th.

The sheriff had issued an order not to fire. That order was documented by UC Berkeley Professor William Drummond in Prison Truth, published in 2020, and corroborated by San Quentin News reporting that drew on firsthand accounts from people who were there. The San Quentin prison guards who fired the .30 caliber rounds that paralyzed Gary Thomas and who discharged rounds into a vehicle whose occupants included the judge the sheriff was trying to keep alive disobeyed that command. Not one of those guards was ever named publicly.

Not one was identified in an inquest. Not one appeared in disciplinary records made available to the public. The California Department of Corrections issued no public accounting of who fired on whose authority and why the sheriff’s order was disregarded. When it was over, the state’s machinery turned toward Angela Davis and stayed there.

George Jackson was watching all of this from San Quentin. His trial for the Soledad brothers murder charge was approaching. Two days before it was scheduled to begin on August 21st, 1971, prison guards shot him in the back in the San Quentin yard. The official story was an escape attempt.

Officials claimed Jackson had smuggled a 9-mm pistol into the prison in an Afro wig he wore during a meeting with his attorney Stephen Bingham. The story of how Jackson obtained the gun changed repeatedly. Bingham spent 13 years as a fugitive before returning to face charges. He was acquitted.

James Baldwin wrote, “No black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did. Jonathan died trying to free his brother. George died two days before his trial was set to begin, shot in the back.” George Jackson’s mother, Georgia, said, “I can tell you exactly what happened. They set him up to kill him and they killed him.

They had been trying for 10 and 1/2 years to do it and they did it.” George Jackson never stood trial. The state killed him first. Ruchell Magee, the only man who survived the parking lot on August 7th, was sentenced to life in prison in 1975 for aggravated kidnapping. He spent 67 years in prison before California released him on compassionate grounds in July 2023.

When Soledad Brother was published in October 1970, two months after Jonathan died, George Jackson included a dedication. To the man-child, tall, evil, graceful, bright-eyed, black man-child. Jonathan Peter Jackson, who died on August 7th, 1970, courage in one hand, assault rifle in the other. My brother, comrade friend, he died on the trigger.

The California indeterminate sentencing law that gave George Jackson a life sentence for $71 was the same mechanism the state used to deny Ruchell Magee parole year after year for 67 years. The accomplice liability statute used to charge Angela Davis with a murder for purchasing a legal firearm is still on the books. The names of the San Quentin guards who disobeyed the sheriff’s order and fired into that van are not in the public record. The California Department of Corrections never provided them.

No inquest produced them. No criminal proceeding demanded them. They fired. Four people died.

The state’s full investigative apparatus turned toward a woman who was not there. >> [music] >> If this video found you, the next one should, too. >> [music] >> Subscribe to the channel so the investigation does not stop here. There is another case on this channel where the FBI ran the same play. A named informant, a named target, a buried mechanism. I will put it on screen right now. [music] The man they used had a file number and a federal handler.

The man he was supposed to destroy had no idea. That video is next. [music] Jonathan Jackson, Jr. was born 8 and 1/2 months after his father died in that parking lot. He never met him.