Hi, I am Rupert Ayton.
I’d like to recognize that today falls between the 77th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And let me recognize that last week we lost two African American role models in Bill Russell and Nichelle Nichols. Both were originals.
This past week we also lost an archetype of Black political imprisonment. Albert Woodfox was the last surviving member of the Angola 3, Louisiana inmates falsely convicted of killing prison guards in the early 1970s. He served 44 years in solitary confinement before being exonerated.
As Hank mentioned last week, many consider the level of imprisonment of Black men in America institutional racism. And many consider it political. Let me share a complex story with you.
On August 7th, 1970, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson walked into the Marin County courtroom where San Quentin inmate James McClain was on trial for murdering a prison guard.
Jackson was armed, and his goal was to spring 3 inmates and take hostages to exchange for his brother and 2 others, who were incarcerated at San Quentin on murder charges. But that day Jackson died in a hail of police bullets in a van outside the courthouse, along with McClain, inmate William Christmas, and Judge Harold Haley. The other hostages, and inmate Ruchell Cinque Magee, survived.
My 66-year-old self is still stunned that a 17-year-old, or anyone, would try this. But as I think back to the influences in my Leave it to Beaver life, I see that a big part of what I was being fed as a boy was the lore of heroic efforts for freedom against all odds. Davy Crockett.
Perhaps that’s what Jonathan Jackson was attempting. A heroic effort to free Black political prisoners against all odds.
I don’t condone gun violence in aid of freedom. But it seems to me White America does when it is violence against some other. And that other includes Black men.
The story of August 7th started a year earlier at Soledad State Prison, where the superintendent was accused of fomenting racial violence. There was a riot, and his accuser and two other Black inmates were shot dead by a White guard. Days later an all-White grand jury exonerated the guard for the killings, although many years later the State of California would settle wrongful death suits.
The Soledad violence escalated with the alleged payback deaths of White guards and a White inmate. 3 Black inmates, the Soledad Brothers, were charged with murder and transferred to San Quentin. One was George Jackson, Jonathan’s older brother. Like others in this story, he was a political activist and writer, and his work targeted the institutional racism of the prison system.
A year and ten days after Jonathan Jackson died, his brother George Jackson was killed by San Quentin guards in what has alternatively been described as a murderous riot or prison break. But the evidence points to George Jackson possibly being set up and the violence a cover.
The remaining two Soledad Brothers were acquitted of the murder charge.
The infamous riots at Attica followed 3 weeks later. Prison problems were making headlines.
And high-profile activist Angela Davis was accused of supplying the guns to Jonathan Jackson, and charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy. She was put on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list and declared armed and dangerous.
Fearing for her life, Davis hid. After a nationwide manhunt, she was arrested in Florida. President Richard Nixon congratulated the FBI on capturing a quote “dangerous terrorist.”
Looking back, Davis recalled realizing that it wasn’t about her. It was about sending a message to discourage the public from getting involved in the Black freedom struggle.
That didn’t work. The prison riots, the high-profile Davis trial, and subsequent high-profile inmate trials generated an outpouring of liberal protests and public condemnation. Davis, who remains actively outspoken, was acquitted of all charges, as were most of the inmates on trial during that period.
However, Magee, who survived August 7th, is still in prison and considered by some the longest serving political prisoner in America. He will be 85 if he lives to his next parole hearing.
I wonder where all that public condemnation is today.
