George Jackson’s Perfect Disorder

Abstract

The goal of this essay is to situate the radical George Jackson’s views on violence within his political thought and practice, with particular attention to his position as an incarcerated witness indicted by a legal system he would not recognize. The first section sketches Jackson’s analysis of what he called a “captive society”: a fascist global and American arrangement that classifies and criminalizes black, brown, and poor life. In the second section I explore what Jackson advocated as a mode of revolutionary becoming whereby the captive channel their energies: inward, to form bonds of intimacy and intercommunal solidarity, and outward, to break the bonds of law and order politics with the “perfect disorder” of disciplined and yet spontaneous guerilla violence. This idea of “channeling” distinguishes Jackson’s self-fashioning from redemptive forms of violence and testimony that isolate individuals and their actions. As I consider in the conclusion, Jackson’s legacy nonetheless reveals the varied ways his advocacy for revolutionary love and violence waned in the hands of his inheritors – and how incarcerated activists uphold his ideas today.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Tad Szulc, “George Jackson Radicalizes the Brothers in Soledad and San Quentin,” The New York Times, August 1, 1971, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/08/01/archives/george-jackson-radicalizes-the-brothers-in-soledad-and-san-quentin.html. Jackson claimed the same connection to Turner in interviews leading to Min S. Yee, The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison: In Which a Utopian Scheme Turns Bedlam (New York, NY: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973), 124–25.

2 See Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 165–66; Dan Berger, Captive Nation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 101–10.

3 George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1996), 100. Future citations in-text as (B, #).

4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995), 38.

5 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies (New York, NY: Library of America, 1994), 340.

6 Yee, The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison, 125.

7 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2009), 201.

8 For example: though its editors acknowledge the limitations and intentional controversy of the book’s “provisional canon,” a recent anthology of black political thought includes no mention of Jackson despite entries on Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Angela Davis. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, eds., “Political Theorizing in Black: An Introduction,” in African American Political Thought: A Collected History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 3.

9 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 4. Future citations in-text as (S, #).

10 Jackson uses the term “power elite” in an August, 1965 letter to his father (S, 73).

11 Huey Newton recalls how a poster by Beverly Axelrod inspired the term, what he called “a form of psychological warfare.” Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 175. On the language of “pig,” see Rebecca Nell Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 278.

12 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 332.

13 Emory Douglas, “It’s All the Same,” Black Panther, March 16, 1968.

14 Szulc, “George Jackson Radicalizes the Brothers in Soledad and San Quentin.”

15 See also Jon Jackson’s discussion of “black pigs” (B, 35–40).

16 Jackson’s appraisal of captivity reflects a widespread turn among radicals to see the underclass as not simply laborers but the “lumpen proletariat.” As Rebecca Hill writes, this represents a move from Marx to Lenin and Fanon. Men, Mobs, and Law, 268–69.

17 “George Jackson Speaks from Prison,” Black Panther, October 17, 1970. On California’s penal policy, see Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, chaps. 2, 3.

18 Michel Foucault and John K. Simon, “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview,” Social Justice 18, no. 3 (1991): 28.

19 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York, NY: Dell Publishing Co., 1968).

20 “George Jackson Speaks from Prison.”

21 Jackson, Soledad Brother, ix–x. It is unclear who wrote this introduction.

22 Angela Y. Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons & Black Liberation,” in If They Come in the Morning; Voices of Resistance, ed. Angela Y. Davis and Bettina Aptheker (New York, NY: Third Press, 1971), 31. Davis implies a broader definition of the term, arguing later that “Blacks, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans” increasingly argue that anyone incarcerated in an unjust society is a political prisoner (37).

23 Zoe Colley, “War without Terms: George Jackson, Black Power and the American Radical Prison Rights Movement, 1941–1971,” History 101, no. 345 (April 1, 2016): 270.

24 Jessica Mitford, “A Talk With George Jackson,” The New York Times, June 13, 1971, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/a-talk-with-george-jackson.html.

25 Szulc, “George Jackson Radicalizes the Brothers in Soledad and San Quentin.”

26 Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. Albert Dichy, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 97.

27 Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner: With Related Documents, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (Boston, MA: Bedford, 2016), 52.

28 Colley argues that Jackson also moved away from the Nation of Islam’s emphasis on “self-help” and cultural reform. “War without Terms,” 272.

29 Che Guevara, On Guerrilla Warfare (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1961), 31.

30 Sergey Nechayev, The Revolutionary Catechism (The Anarchist Library, 2009), 1. Greg Armstrong’s preface to Blood describes it as “a book by a man who considered himself doomed” (B, xvii, 3). See also (B, 125–26).

31 Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York, NY: International Publishers Co., 2008), 317.

32 In one of Soledad Brother’s few footnotes, the editor explains of a dismissive early letter that “during his early years in prison, the author explained to the editor that he had completely lost faith in American blacks and their ability to become a true revolutionary force” (S, 38). Contrast this with the book’s last letter commemorating Jon’s death, where Jackson demands that “any reference to Georgia being less than a perfect revolutionary’s mama” be removed (S, 329). As Berger argues, Jackson’s “hypermasculinity” overshadowed the more collectivist and “cooperative, nurturing elements of his praxis”: his devotion to the family reveals a “conservative, patriarchal notion of respectability” mirroring the moral panic over the 1965 Moynihan Report. Captive Nation, 95, 113.

33 See similar remarks to “Z.” (S, 275, 278).

34 This letter is included as epigraph after a dedication: “To the black Communist youth – To their fathers – We will now criticize the unjust with the weapon” (B, v).

35 For example, see Jackson encouraging “black mama” to train men in letters to Stender and Davis (S, 250, 283).

36 On Jon’s upbringing, see (S, 80, 108, 116, 137, 163, 181). Jackson writes similarly to his father that “I know you are teaching him to love just us, and protecting him from this alien ideology. I am certain that you are doing this since you remember clearly the failure of your father, and his father, and so on as far back as it goes” (S, 177).

37 George Jackson, “A Tribute to Three Slain Brothers,” Black Panther, January 16, 1971. He similarly defended Davis two months later as she “whom I and we are forced to love in a very, very special way.” George Jackson, “Comrade George on Angela Davis,” Black Panther, March 13, 1971.

38 Jackson’s views on love were perhaps inspired by James Baldwin. In one letter to his father, Jackson worries “that Baldwin’s warning of ‘The fire next time’ must soon be borne out with all its sinister accompaniments,” suggesting he had read Baldwin’s letter to his nephew (S, 110). He also mentions Baldwin in Mitford, “A Talk With George Jackson.”

39 Huey P. Newton, “Intercommunalism,” in The Huey P. Newton Reader, ed. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 187.

40 See also Jon Jackson’s claim in Blood that “there will be no super-slave,” yet also George’s tendency to call Jon “the real super-nigger” (B, 12, 74).

41 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), 94–96.

42 For example, George cites Jon Jackson on the need for an underground task force (B, 20, 39).

43 Jackson’s foco resembles Newton’s “shock-a-buku”: the “tactic of keeping the enemy off balance through sudden and unexpected maneuvers that push him toward his opponent’s position.” Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 129.

44 Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (New York: MR Press, 1967), 24.

45 Debray, 44–45.

46 John Gerassi, The Coming of the New International: A Revolutionary Anthology (New York, NY: The World Publishing Company, 1971), 62. For a contemporary account of foco theory’s development, see Matt D. Childs, “An Historical Critique of the Emergence and Evolution of Ernesto Che Guevara’s Foco Theory,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 3 (October 1995): 593–624. As Childs explains, Carmichael and Cleaver also invoked foco theory in their writing (598).

47 Gerassi, The Coming of the New International: A Revolutionary Anthology, 81.

48 Jackson’s concern with urban guerilla violence demonstrates his engagement with another significant text at the time, Robert Taber’s 1965 War of the Flea. On Jackson’s reading of Debray and Taber, see Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 196–99.

49 Jackson offers a much more favorable appraisal of King and his critiques of foreign war and poverty shortly after the latter’s death (S, 167–68).

50 Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 164–65. Jackson also participated in gang violence through the early years of his incarceration, none of which is referenced in his books. See Colley, “War without Terms,” 271.

51 Colley, “War without Terms,” 284.

52 Nechayev, The Revolutionary Catechism, 4.

53 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 2–6.

54 At one point Jackson does apologize for stealing, but only because it conforms to Western ways (S, 118).

55 John Edgar Wideman, “Introduction,” in Live from Death Row, by Mumia Abu-Jamal (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1996), xxix.

56 Wideman, xxx–xxxi.

57 See Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York, NY: Viking, 2011), 9.

58 Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 15.

59 On Jackson’s skepticism, see Gregory Armstrong, The Dragon Has Come (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974), 14.

60 Contrast this passage with Newton’s claim that “racism destroyed our family history,” echoing a common assertion in antebellum slave narratives. Revolutionary Suicide, 9.

61 Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 46.

62 Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 129.

63 Szulc, “George Jackson Radicalizes the Brothers in Soledad and San Quentin.”

64 Michel Foucault, Catharine von Bülow, and Daniel Defert, “The Masked Assassination,” in Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 141.

65 See Berger, Captive Nation, 136.

66 See Berger, 131.

67 Genet, The Declared Enemy, 81.

68 Genet, 81–82. This does not seem to fully capture Genet’s views on violence. Elsewhere he writes: “Black people, all black people, want to live. How do you think they’ll go about it if you don’t do something to correct your European animality? It’s simple: the blacks are going to kill you” (69).

69 “George killed that guard. I heard it from his own lips.” Armstrong bases this claim on a paraphrased conversation in which Jackson’s walking through the hypothetical murder gave away his own involvement. A prominent investigation published in 1976 drew from this anecdote proof that Jackson had committed the murder. Armstrong, The Dragon Has Come, 97–102; Jo Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson? Fantasies, Paranoia and the Revolution (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 204–5.

70 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 335. “As I talked with Huey about George’s first letter, I realized that George was, perhaps, the only man Huey really loved… George Jackson was Huey’s hero.” Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York, NY: Anchor, 1993), 270.

71 Davis, Angela Davis, 317.

72 On Dylan, see Lee Bernstein, “The Age of Jackson: George Jackson and the Culture of American Prisons in the 1970s,” The Journal of American Culture 30, no. 3 (September 1, 2007): 311. For Baldwin, see “Messages for George from the People,” Black Panther, September 4, 1971, K.

73 See the covers for Black Panther, August 28, 1971. For a comparison of imagery between Black Panther issues covering Jon Jackson’s death, George Jackson’s death, and Attica, see Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 377.

74 For example, see the series “There is Only One People’s Field Marshal” issued from April-May 1974.

75 Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, chap. 16.

76 Colley, “War without Terms,” 284–85.

77 Quoted in Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 236. On the group as a gang, see also Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 306–10.

78 Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 239–44.

79 Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” New Political Science 21, no. 2 (June 1999): 131. Members of the Weather Underground similarly retaliated for Jackson’s death by bombing state buildings in San Francisco during his funeral. Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 227.

80 Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 144.

81 Coordinating Committee: The Black Liberation Army, A Message to the Black Movement: A Political Statement from the Black Underground, 1975.

82 Daniel Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 86. Note though that the George Jackson Brigade disavowed foco theory in one of their later statements, itself part of an ongoing debate with the Weather Underground. George Jackson Brigade, The Power of the People Is the Force of Life: Political Statement of the George Jackson Brigade (Seattle, WA: The Brigade, 1977), 3.

83 As Colley argues, focus on the heroic Jackson has obscured his and others’ collaborative efforts to resist carceral power and racial structures from within. Colley, “War without Terms,” 267.

84 Summarized in Colley, 274.

85 Brian Conniff, “The Prison Writer as Ideologue: George Jackson and the Attica Rebellion,” in Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2005), 161.

86 Davis, Angela Davis, 317. Davis writes that “George’s death would be like a lodestone, a disc of steel deep inside me, magnetically drawing toward it the elements I needed to stay strong and fight all the harder” (319).

87 See Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2016), 35–36.

88 Angela Y. Davis, “Lessons: From Attica to Soledad,” in If They Come in the Morning; Voices of Resistance, ed. Angela Y. Davis and Bettina Aptheker (New York, NY: Third Press, 1971), 46.

89 Natasha Lennard, “Prison Strike Organizer Warns: Brutal Prison Conditions Risk ‘Another Attica,’” The Intercept (blog), August 21, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/08/21/prison-strike-2018-attica/.

90 This response is exemplified by Eric Cummins’s reading of Jackson’s legacy: his “life had become the property of those who owned his myth.” Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 213.