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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Soledad Brother
George Jackson
Lawrence Hill £8.75
This reprint of Soledad Brother could not have been timed more appropriately. At times the book reads like a rage against the rottenness and racism of American society in the 1980s and 1990s.
There are even some familiar names amongst the cast of characters. Governor Reagan of California was later, as president, to become the architect of the exploitation and oppression that was finally to explode in the LA riots of 1992. Bill Cosby, now one of the world’s richest and most powerful performers, is denounced as an Uncle Tom figure ‘transmitting the credo of the slave to our youth’.
In fact, this collection of letters was written between 1964 and 1970, while Jackson was serving a prison term for stealing $70 from a gas station.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Jackson pleaded guilty in order to receive a light sentence. Instead, he was sentenced to between one year and life and remained incarcerated for the next ten years, the majority of which were spent in solitary confinement, until his murder by a prison guard in 1971.
Jackson’s story is shocking and remarkable, but the experiences he describes – the constant harassment by the authorities, denial of opportunities and, especially for men, the expectation of spending long stretches in prison – are common to successive generations of blacks. In the 1950s and 60s some of the most successful blacks were those holding down regular jobs as bartenders, shoeshine boys and sandwich vendors on trains. For many others, petty crime or gambling seemed the only alternative to unemployment and the ghetto.
George Jackson admits that he was something of a tearaway as a youngster who caused innumerable problems for his long-suffering parents. As a black teenager with two previous convictions, he could not expect to be acquitted on the theft charge. However, he could not have anticipated the draconian sentence and savage treatment he was to receive. These experiences politicised Jackson. He began to read voraciously whilst in prison and was to become a renowned political prisoner and spokesperson against the injustices of the American criminal justice system.
Much of the correspondence is intensely personal letters to family members in which Jackson expresses extremely frank and scathing opinions about his parents and the way they raised him as a child. At the same time, these letters reflect Jackson’s frustration at what he considered the apathy and ‘lack of spirit’ of blacks in America. He set himself the monumental personal task of shutting out all emotions in order to concentrate his mind on his determination to secure his release and his political commitment.
His fury at his own incarceration must have been heightened by the growth in black struggle in these years. However, he was clearly encouraged by them and revised his previous opinions. Whilst respecting Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, he was critical of its non-violence. His own philosophy was close to that of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. In one of his later letters he remarked: ‘When a sucker gets so foolish as to warn you in advance that he is going to kill you, the next sound he utters should come through swollen lips.’
Thanks to his reading of Marx, Lenin, Engels and even Trotsky, Jackson developed a highly sophisticated understanding and hatred of capitalism as ‘the enemy. It must be destroyed. There is no other recourse.’ However, he wrongly characterised ‘Amerika’ (sic) as fascist and had illusions both in black African leaders and Chairman Mao, whose Little Red Book he considered a seminal work.
These attitudes mark Soledad Brother out as a product of its time. We can but speculate that later struggles would have changed the opinions of this thoughtful and intelligent man, just as his dismissal of women as weak and irrational was challenged by his dialogue with the black Communist Angela Davis.
A number of key changes have occurred in the years since George Jackson’s death. The black struggles of the 1960s did force open the door for an emergent black middle class and for a layer of blacks to rise to prominent political positions. Far from leading to an improvement in conditions, the plight of most blacks has worsened over the past 20 years. Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, the life expectancy of a young black man in Harlem is lower than in Bangladesh and more blacks can expect to go to prison than to college.
The other key change is that the United States has become more integrated as have most societies. Most fundamentally, working class blacks and whites suffered together during the era of Reagan, Bush and now Clinton. But they have also fought back together, as the LA riots in 1992 showed.
Soledad Brother is a fitting testament which should inspire anyone who wishes to continue that fight for the liberation which so many millions, both in prison and outside, have been denied.
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