Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson

PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2003)

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http://www.proudfleshjournal.com/vol1.2/brown.html

Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson

Elaine Brown

It was two days before his assassination at San Quentin prison, on August 21, 1971, that I saw George Jackson for the last time. He blew me a kiss through the glass divider between us, until the next visit. The radio news commentaries in the early afternoon of August 21st were scattered but wild, reporting a melee had broken out at San Quentin between guards and prisoners. There was no doubt George, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, was at the center of it, attacked, again. He would resist their assault, again. He could not die, I believed. Even shackled, as he always appeared by then, he was more powerful than the reactionaries. They could not kill him. At the end of the day, several guards would be killed, their throats slit.

That night, though, I felt an inexplicable wind that I imagined was George Jackson soaring, free. They had claimed his life that day, but death had not contained him. The spirit of the people was greater than the Man’s technology, we sloganized. The spirit of George lived.

His death became palpable when I accompanied his mother, Georgia, to the mortuary days later, after San Quentin’s pigs finally released the remains. He was her first son, who had been her only son for that last year, the second to die in one year. His younger brother, Jonathan, had been shot down at 17 years old in a valiant attempt to free him. Georgia came to the mortuary with an agenda, to see with her own eyes what they had done to him, to see the wounds, perhaps to touch or heal them, to bring him back to life, Mary at the feet of Jesus. The scalp had been pulled back, the mortician said, rendering the body unfit for viewing. She finally shrugged, resigned, with blood in her eyes, which would become the title of George’s posthumously published book, and demanded photographs be taken. Photographs were taken of the body, of the head that held the brain and the brilliance, now smashed by bullets.

As I have recounted and recalled for all these years, the most distressing moment came in purchasing the clothes for the massive frame of George Jackson. There were the black pants, accessorized by a black leather belt, an item denied him for those last years. He had been confined on a $70 robbery conviction for the last 11 years of his life, which was nearly half his life. There was the powder blue shirt, the black leather jacket and the black beret. His body would be dressed in full Panther regalia.

The 10,000 gathered in Oakland’s crisp August sunshine for blocks around Father Neal’s church, St. Augustine’s Episcopal, where one of the first Free Breakfast for Children Programs was housed, saluting Comrade George with raised fists, blacks and whites and Latinos, silently watching the Panther honor guard transport the casket, draped with the Panther flag, the black panther emblazoned on a field of blue, solemnly proceed inside the building, where four Party members with shotguns saluted the Field Marshal, Nina Simone’s recorded voice filling the auditorium: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free….

Huey P. Newton, founder, chief ideologue, Minister of Defense of the Party, now called Servant of the People, eulogized George:

George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor that’s characteristic of any soldier for the people. He inspired prisoners to put his ideas into practice and so his spirit became a living thing. Today I say that although George’s body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his ideas live…. George’s last statement, his conduct at San Quentin on that terrible day, left a standard for political prisoners and for the prisoner society of racist, reactionary America…. He demonstrated how the unjust would be criticized by the weapon…. George also said once that the oppressor is very strong and he might beat him down, he might beat us down to our very knees but it will be physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson and the people will tear his kneecaps off.
…We know that all of us will die someday. Bu we know that there are two kinds of death, the reactionary death and the revolutionary death. One death is significant and the other is not. George certainly died in a significant way, and his death will be very heavy….
(“Afterword,” George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye [Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990]: pp. 194-96.”).
Less than one month later, over one thousand inmates at Attica state prison in New York, mostly black men, rose up, in the spirit of George, and in honor of George and the Prisoner Movement he had originated: “We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.” The prisoners at Attica took over the prison in protest of the inhumane living conditions there, and took guards as hostages to exchange for promises of decent food and beds and medical care and the like.

After a four-day standoff with the state police, with press from all over the world recording the moment, the prisoners were told they had one last chance to release the guards and return to their cells. The individual, organizational and press negotiators the inmates had requested, including Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, had been ordered out of the prison. No demands would be met. It was over, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared, as his state police sharpshooters and hundreds of other state police positioned themselves to retake the prison. The sharpshooters assembled on the top of the wall surrounding the main yard, D Yard, where prisoners had fashioned a kind of tent city, had held daily rallies and press conferences, urging, demanding improved conditions.

Under Rockefeller’s order, on the signal from their commander, the state police sharpshooters opened fire, automatic rifle fire, onto D Yard, indiscriminately spraying the inmates gathered there. Over 40 men were slaughtered on the spot, including 11 guards. Many, many more were seriously wounded. Order was declared restored.

Even the very spirit of George, as the Prisoner Movement, seemed quelled, as it all came to be quieted over the next years. Ultimately, the Party itself fell away into non-existence, beaten down by years of suffering the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) machinations, fatigue, internal strife and a malaise that would overtake the mass black consciousness and black communities for the next decades. Somewhere in between, I wrote a song for George, a meager tribute to a powerful man:

Oh, I was so in love last year
or, rather, the year before.
And if it wasn’t death that claimed them,
it was the hard, cold prison door.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
But if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confine them.
The criminal justice system in post-Civil War America seems to have been specifically structured to contain the released members of the Slave Class. As my friend and comrade Khalil Osiris powerfully argues in his new treatise on the Black Slave Class in America, articulating finally, fully, the class nature of racism in America, prior to the passage of the 13th Amendment, blacks, African captives and their descendants, as slaves for 250 years, had been the sole members of an economic class of people whose labor was the backbone of the development and institutionalization of the American agrarian market economy. Neither a feudalist peasant class nor an industrial working class, black slaves were a free-labor force that formed a class in the American capitalist construct preceding the Marxist doctrine that the industrial working class was the engine of this new capitalism, and arguing for the dictatorship of this proletariat. As most presidents prior to Lincoln had been slaveholders, as the social fabric of America was interwoven with the Jeffersonian theory about the inherent inferiority of the black to the white, the Jacksonian declaration that America was and ought be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, and Lincoln’s attempts to colonize blacks on the island of Hispaniola rather than “free” them, and as the men of America’s developing robber baron class envisioned their domination as the nation’s, blacks became unnecessary in the industrial capitalist pyramid, a cancer on the skin of the country if not a blight on the memory of America’s wealth-building, or nation-building. America had no further use of this class or race, for this people.

While the small northern black population could be held in check by sheer numbers, unable to compete with the burgeoning population of poor Europeans pouring into New York harbor under the government’s enticement programs to cultivate its industrial fields, the massive southern black population, representing half or more of the population of the former Confederate states, was contained and restrained from entering into the scheme of things via the Black Codes. Using the 13th Amendment’s caveat that slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime,” the South passed laws, criminal laws, regulating the behavior of blacks. The most egregiously oppressive “crime” was “vagrancy,” more far-reaching than the strict definition of the word. “Unemployed” blacks were deemed guilty of vagrancy. The punishment was the chain gang, hard, free labor performed under government contracts with private businessmen to build railways and roads and other privately engineered public works. Desperately, most blacks slipped back onto plantations as sharecroppers, a euphemism at best.

If a black skirted punishment under the Codes, harsher remedies for black “crimes” awaited him or her at the hands of any number of the white terrorist bands organized in the months following passage of the 13th Amendment, and before its ratification at the end of 1865. These included the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Jayhawkers. Lynching became the common punishment reserved for blacks—men and women. The great freedom fighter Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the definitive authority on the lynching of blacks, documented that between 1878 and 1898, there were 10,000 lynchings of blacks.

Dr. Katheryn Russell, in her book The Color of Crime “(New York: New York University Press, 1999).” posits that “blackness itself” became a “crime.” Osiris argues that in America’s transition from agrarianism to industrialization, blacks went from a Slave Class to a Prisoner Class.

Once it was clear at the end of the Civil War that General Sherman’s command that every slave family be given 40 acres of tillable land to begin their lives in freedom would be completely disregarded, as the meager efforts of the Freedman’s Bureau to coordinate the distribution of such lands and effect other legal rights of blacks would be dissipated, blacks on all sides of the law came to be effectively confined and punished—and not to be free. That is, the masses of blacks, struggling to circumvent the Codes and the Klan, as supported by the federal government and the Northern industrialists and their hordes of immigrant European workers in pursuit of their interests, which were not served by the integration of blacks into the society, found themselves scraping for survival in the Sisyphean sharecropping schemes, which resembled their lives as slaves, or sentenced to terms of hard labor on the chain gang. With few, inconsequential exceptions, Northern blacks, too, found themselves confined to lesser lives, unable to overcome the racism permeating the industrial workforce, struggling along mostly as domestic service workers. Finally, this black confinement North and South of the Mason-Dixon line was defined by Plessy, introducing American apartheid and all its terrible ramifications. From that point forward, black life in America centered around a struggle for freedom and justice under the law, through mass efforts led by men like Booker T. Washington and Du Bois and Garvey and A. Philip Randolph and Malcolm X and King, through lawsuits like Brown, and through legislation like the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts.

When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, the focus of its agenda was the 7th Point of its 10-Point Platform & Program: to end police brutality in black communities. This was because the most urgent problem facing blacks was the repressive activity of local police forces to contain them, to restrain black rage over ongoing poverty and wretched living conditions. The famous government study of the time known as The Kerner Report, commissioned on account of the powerful 1965 uprising of blacks in Watts, California, had declared that the cause for such black rage, as was exhibited in Watts, was white racism, which had produced the black ghetto and a divided America, one white and one black, “separate and unequal.” By this time, of course, in the wake of the great black migration North on account of the availability of World War II work, a significant majority of blacks lived in America’s industrial centers—though unable to find work in the industrial workforce after World War II.

After the Watts uprising, the Los Angeles Police Department, in the vanguard of numerous others across the country, began a practice of regularly rounding up young black men in ghetto areas, brutally enforcing criminal codes and ordinances expediently passed in the aftermath of the uprising under which the very street corner gathering in the ghetto of two or more blacks became a crime, notwithstanding the 1st Amendment right to assembly. Young black men were massively arrested on police “suspicions” of criminal behavior, jailed for resisting, or shot down in what the Black Panther Party called a “red light trial.”

When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and the other original Party members stepped out onto the streets of Oakland wielding defensive shotguns against police abuses, urging blacks to resist, they were first identified as “thugs.” When the Party grew, on the heels of what became the Free Huey Movement that erupted when Huey was charged and put on trial for having allegedly killed a white Oakland police officer in 1967, the FBI identified the Party as a criminal organization. The Party’s work became the business of the criminal justice system, not the government or the legislatures. Indeed, it was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-term director of the FBI, who announced in 1968 that the Party represented “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” and who led the effort to eliminate that “threat.” Criminal laws were held forth to justify an agenda to destroy the Party through the assassination of Party leaders, violent police raids on Party offices around the country, and counter-intelligence operations to disrupt and undermine the organization. Numerous Party members were murdered over time and many more were imprisoned—some of whom, like Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, still languish in prison to this very day, over 30 years later. Every month in 1969, alone, there was a State-sponsored assassination of a member of the Black Panther Party, from Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles in January to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in December. Then, in 1971, George Jackson was killed by San Quentin prison guards.

As its numbers dissipated, through assassinations and jailings, fear driving away so many more, the Party concentrated its force in one city, its headquarters, Oakland, California, and de-emphasized the gun, emphasizing its Survival Programs to feed and house and attend to the medical needs of blacks, building its coalitions inside the U.S. and internationally, becoming involved in electoral politics, and focusing all it had on building a powerful, revolutionary base inside the United States of America. Approaching a plateau of victory, though, the Party apparatus seemingly slipped, unable to stand up under the weight of its past. By 1982, the Black Panther Party had become extinct, representing the demise of the last, and perhaps the greatest, effort of blacks in America to find freedom.

In 1983, Little B was born in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the Age of Reagan and the Age of Crack. By the time this black boy, Michael Lewis, called “Little B,” was eight years old, his house had become the crack house, America’s schools had been completely re-segregated, affirmative action programs were being challenged and disappearing, black poverty remained entrenched, black wealth remained an illusion, the black infant mortality rate remained double that of whites, and blacks continued to struggle to live in the ghettoes of America, like “the Bluff” where Little B was born. By the time he was 11 years old, Michael’s mother was declared unfit, and he began living on his own on the streets of the Bluff, and Bill Clinton seduced America into acceptance of his 1994 “three-strikes” amendment to the Omnibus Crime Bill.

This ushered in a new wave of black arrests, in seemingly greater disproportion as to black population figures than ever before. Indeed, under Clinton, more people came to be incarcerated than under Reagan and Bush before him, combined. Blacks were being criminalized and arrested for drug use, particularly for crack cocaine, for petty theft responses to ending poverty that rose to the definition of robbery and “armed” robbery, for “driving while black.” Blackness itself still seemed to be a crime. While the black population was approximately 13%, blacks came to represent nearly 50% of the prison population. Among them, by 1997, was Little B, sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14.

One could barely recall his name by then, George Jackson, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, assassinated at San Quentin prison. I went to see about Little B. Hearing of his case, I wanted him to forgive me, all of us who had promised and meant to change the world for him, and for the millions of black children like him in yet another generation. I went to see about him with no more than the memory of George and the Party and our dream about freedom. I swore I would work for him until he was free, knowing there was no real agenda for all the rest, confined for “breathing while black.” I would fight with an organization I helped form called Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice (MAJJ) to overturn the laws providing for the adjudication and incarceration of children as adults, sentencing them to harsh mandatory sentences and even life in prison. Needless to say, in Georgia, most of those children so adjudicated were black, indeed, 94% were. Needless to say, this reflected a national norm. I would fight for Michael’s appeal, raise money for a lawyer who would get his railroaded conviction overturned. By extension I would fight for all the other boys whose mothers were a part of MAJJ, knowing freedom was more than a parole date. I spoke out in a loud voice, everywhere, and worked with all the others rising up against the new prison-industrial complex and its mass incarcerations, particularly of blacks. I wrote a book about Michael, for him, to him, The Condemnation of Little B. And I cried watching him grow behind the wall, like “E” and Chuck and Lyndon and Dantae and all the other fine young men whose mothers wept every day for the loss of their sons’ lives behind the wall.

Somewhere in this oppressive fog, in the twilight of my life, I suddenly felt the presence of George rising. Khalil Osiris called me and came to talk to me about George, all of whose words he had read and studied, and about the Party, and about freedom. Where had he been? I wondered. He answered: in prison.

In the 15 years he spent in prison, he had read not only George but Huey and Amilcar Cabral and Marx and Mao and Sartre and Gandhi and Audre Lorde. He had educated himself inside, and, almost incidentally, had earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees inside. He had also co-founded an organization while inside: The National Black Herstory Task Force, based in Atlanta. Almost a generation removed, he had not only educated himself about the Prisoner Movement, he had come out four years before ready to resurrect this Movement, to resurrect the spirit of George and organize the soldiers.

I began recalling the second stanza of my song for George:

I was in love with many soldiers,
for they were a part of me,
a part of all I’d grown with,
though they’d somehow grown free.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
And if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confined them.
Then, as George did on August 19, 1971, Khalil Osiris kissed me, as sister, comrade, woman. He brought the power of so much love from behind the wall. I introduced him to Little B, and he became his father, as I had become his mother, as we became an African family lost in America, separated, segregated, chained, on both sides of the wall.

The spirit of George has not died. With Khalil and other former prisoners and others like me, I have become part of the organizing committee of the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, the goals of which are to repeal “three-strikes” laws, those putting our children in prison for life, and all the others used to justify the high black incarceration rate; to produce programs guaranteeing human rights to prisoners and their families; to develop effective programs for the re-entry, re-enfranchisement and economic self-sufficiency of former prisoners. We do this knowing that all black people in America are members of a Prisoner Class, and recognizing that revolutionary love can tear down the walls that divide us, toward ending this oppression and finally finding freedom.