Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson / Edition 1

by George Jackson, Jean Genet, Jonathan Jackson, Jr.

Overview

"The power of George Jackson's personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the younger generation, black and white, will read Soledad Brother."  —Howard Zinn, author, A People's History of the United States

A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life.
Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556522307
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/01/1994
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	53,292
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

George Lester Jackson was an African-American left-wing activist, Marxist, author, a member of the Black Panther Party, and cofounder of the Black Guerrilla Family while incarcerated. Jackson achieved fame as one of the Soledad Brothers and was later shot to death by prison guards in San Quentin Prison during an escape attempt. Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens.Jonathan Jackson Jr. is the nephew of George Jackson, the author of Soledad Brother.

Editorial Reviews

"The power of George Jackson's personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the younger generation, black and white, will read Soledad Brother."  —Howard Zinn, author, A People's History of the United States

“[George Jackson was] a talented writer, a sensitive man, a potential leader and political thinker of great persuasiveness.” —Tom Wicker, New York Times
 

“Jackson emerges from obscurity transformed from a precipitous, despair-ridden adolescent into a man of knowledge, passion, and control, into a demon energy of absolute commitment, into a terrible prophet.” —Washington Monthly

“When Soledad Brother was first published, many people sensed in George Jackson the successor to Malcolm X.  . . . It showed Jackson, like Malcolm, developing a theory and eloquently expressing a vision of the path to African American freedom through the unity of the peoples oppressed by imperialism. This makes the book extremely dangerous—and therefore, as the author must have known (see his June 4, 1970, letter to Angela Davis), potentially his own death warrant. Though George Jackson was murdered ten months after the book was published, Soledad Brother remains a menace to the powers that killed him. —H. Bruce Franklin, author of Prison Literature in America

“A penetrating and scathing indictment of capitalist American life.” —Ebony

From the Publisher

Jackson gained notoriety shortly before his death in 1970 when his younger brother unsuccessfully tried to free him at gunpoint when Jackson and two others were on trial for killing a guard. Written between 1964 and 1970 while serving time in Soledad Prison for robbery, the letters reveal the brutality and racism faced by prisoners and call for unity among African Americans. This edition contains a new foreword by Jackson's nephew Jonathan. Soledad Brother remains "recommended for most libraries" (LJ 12/15/70) and is a solid title for Black History Month in February.

Library Journal

That prisons have long been a means of containing black male self-assertiveness and anger is a self-evident truth to a large number of African Americans. George Jackson's Soledad Brother gives testament to this, as well as to the reality of the enormous power, talent, and intelligence being restrained behind bars. A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that fuiled to break his spirit but eventually took his life.

At eighteen, Jackson was given a one-year-to-life sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station. In prison Jackson became radicalized and, together with another prisoner, started a Marxist revolutionary cell. Through a series of events, Jackson would be charged with the murder of a white prison guard and would subsequently be killed while allegedly trying to escape—despite the fact that all charges against him had been dropped. At Jackson's death, he was thirty years old. Twelve of those thirty years had been spent in prison, seven and one-half of those years in solitary confinement.

Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down. Although he was a naive petty thief when he was first arrested, Jackson, like men from Malcolm X to Nathan McCall, found redemption behind bars. Soledad Brother was published in 1970; Jackson was killed the following year.

Sacred Fire