While at San Quentin State Prison in 1966, George Jackson founded the Black Guerrilla Family, a Marxist prison gang with the following political objectives: eradicating racism, maintaining honor and dignity in prison, and overthrowing the United States government. For a symbol he chose a Black Dragon.
“Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice.”
Four years later at Soledad Prison, Jackson witnessed a watchtower guard shoot three Black Muslim convicts in the yard. In response, Jackson (center) and two other inmates murdered a guard. Jackson was placed in solitary confinement where he wrote two books detailing the unjust and dehumanizing conditions of the prison-industrial complex. His writings drew attention from leftist groups on the outside.
Meanwhile, in August of 1970, George Jackson’s seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan, armed to the teeth, burst into the Marin County Courthouse during the trail of several San Quentin inmates accused of assaulting another guard. He tossed guns (purchased by University of California professor Angela Davis) to the inmates and declared to the judge and jury, “Hold it right there. We is taking over!”
Jonathan Jackson demanded the release of his brother George and the other two inmates accused of murdering the guard in Soledad. When nobody would negotiate, he and the inmates he had liberated led the hostages out of the courthouse and down to a van in the parking lot below. It was there that the Marin Sheriffs’ Department began firing on them. In the resulting shoot out, Jonathan, the inmates, and the judge all died. Several jurors were wounded.
“The point now is to construct a situation in which someone else joins in the dying”
One year later George Jackson launched an uprising at San Quentin Prison with a 9mm pistol (that some claim was smuggled in by civil rights lawyer Stephen Bingham). Gun in hand, Jackson released an entire floor of maximum-security prisoners, crying, "This is it, gentlemen, the Dragon has come!"
In the ensuing riot, three guards were killed, as well as two prisoners suspected of being snitches. But when they had taken over the whole cellblock, the prisoners found that there was nowhere else to go. All out of options, Jackson declared, "Its me they want," and ran out into the open, where the gunners in the watchtowers peppered his body with bullets.
Modern critics have suggested that the Left may have used George Jackson. In their letters of encouragement, leftist activists exaggerated the work they were doing on the outside. They led Jackson to believe that the revolution was imminent and that it was time to go to war. For a soldier with nothing to lose, it made sense. But, of course, the revolution never came.