I’ve read and studied the life and work of many revolutionary thinkers – Fanon, Che, Gramsci, Cabral, Huey, Freire. However, without a second thought, George Jackson had the greatest influence on my growth and development.
Over the past two decades, while confined in some of Michigan’s most repressive maximum security prisons, I have had the opportunity to read a couple thousand books. While that may sound like a lot, there are quite a few I vaguely remember. Early in my development I lacked the analytical skill set to comprehend many of them.
Despite being an A and B student most of my school career, I had never read a book from cover to cover. Reading was a bore, which explains why I developed a skill for finding an answer to a question minus mining through the entire book. After all, too many teachers only seemed to be concerned with predetermined answers. Their concern was not whether I was acquiring the capacity to judge, analyze, infer, interpret, reason and the like.
Ironically, while I found reading a bore when I was in school, once in prison I began reading because I was bored. Reading was a way to pass time and escape the attendant activities characteristic of maximum security placement.
The first book I read from cover to cover was “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.” Most of the correspondence in Jackson’s book consists of intensely personal letters to family members in which the author expresses extremely frank and scathing opinions about his parents and the way they raised him. The correspondence also reflects his frustration with what he considered the apathy and the lack of spirit of blacks in America.
As I read that book of letters it was as if George had a front row seat to my life, as if he was writing my story. Little did I know that book would diametrically alter the course of my personal and political journey.
Jackson set himself the monumental task of shutting out all emotions in order to concentrate his mind on his determination to secure a release and broaden his political awareness. He became acutely aware that if his condition was to change, he first had to change himself. He became my first encounter, but surely not my last, with a prisoner intellectual. Not for nothing was a prison movement – an anti-prison movement – named after him and closely investigated by the FBI, as declassified documents reveal.
I never really thought about the precise moment I acquired what a friend called an intellectual life. It seems strange just writing the word intellectual in reference to myself. In Detroit’s Cass Corridor area, a known drug den, where I first began to learn the consequences of race and power and social class and how some people were likely to be at the bottom of American society no matter how determined or driven, no one was considered intellectual. To be truthful, we weren’t considered at all.
No one wondered why the unemployment rate was so high in the Cass Corridor. No one seemed to care that the concentration of drugs, prostitution, and desperate acts to make money made it one of the most diseased and dangerous neighborhoods in America. No one understood how schools that taught about distant worlds, as if the immediate one didn’t exist, were of no interest to me nor to many of my peers. Few thought about why, how and with what authority absentee-cum-slum land owners, together with nearsighted city officials, perpetuated these conditions as a matter of policy and practice.
But I did. And, after getting locked up, I learned to read and study the ideas of like-minded militant intellectuals with my current situation and background in mind. I was and I am still always looking to do more with the ideas of others, and I make no apologies for not being a purist.
Yet, I lived the words on the pages of Jackson’s book.
George wrote in “Soledad Brother” that there are only two types of people ever released from prison, the Carters and the broken men. Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, to whom Jackson’s former category referred, was a gang member turned Black Panther who went on to lead the L.A. chapter of the party after his release from Soledad prison. In contrast, the “broken men,” Jackson wrote, “are so damaged that they will never again be suitable members of any social unit.”
George believed prison either brings out the very best in people – though not without perverse consequences, or it destroys them entirely. “But none are unaffected,” he’d often observe.
George Jackson eventually, literally, became who I wanted to be. The model after which I constructed my first sense of meaningful identity. I emulated the image I had of him in my mind – his face in a book or his mind engrossed in dialogue that not only questioned the world around him but resolved to change it for the better. There was even a period in my life I signed all my correspondence, “George & Me.”
This might sound cult-like or obsequious. On the contrary, it was my way of acknowledging someone whose ideas I had grappled with, digested and applied in my own theory and practice. To draw a present-day parallel, perhaps it’s akin to the way the revolutionary Kurds in Rojava acknowledge the insights of the still-imprisoned intellectual leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, who advocated Democratic Confederalism before some semblance of it was and still is enacted in the autonomous cantons in northern Syria.
George Jackson brought to my awareness that literacy involves more than just phonics, spelling, and well-grooved reading habits. To grasp the words on a page a person has to know a lot of information that is not printed on the pages being read. True literacy requires specific background knowledge about the human and natural worlds.Yet, while my intellectual vocation drew from my desire (need, at the time) to be like George Jackson, the daily rounds of anger and frustration of enduring a 52 to 80 year sentence for a crime I had no knowledge of or participation in deformed my development. I was attracted to George’s militancy, not the ideas behind the man. Wanting to be like George did not equip me with the sort of intellectual skills that could be transferred from one subject to the next, from the concrete to the abstract. It did not lead me beyond information to understanding.
My reading was narrow back then. It was not until I began consulting the writings and ideas of academics, policy makers, activists, social justice agents of varied leanings, radicals, and “ordinary” people weathering a tsunami of crises, that I really started to understand how the world could be engaged critically. And I did not reach this conclusion all at once either.
In “Blood in My Eye,” a book Jackson completed just days before he was killed, the author writes that the highest “expression of law is not order—it’s prison,” adding: “There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace.” He understood imprisonment as part of the class struggle. He grasped the necessity of prioritizing prison abolition as part of a class conscious movement for a classless society – a society which could be freed from the socially constructed horrors of systemic racism functioning to reproduce the existing system.
And in addition to Jackson’s firsthand insights into incarceration, he also wrote extensively about fascism. He identified it “and its historical significance,” as the main objective of his “whole philosophy on politics and its, extension, war.” Discussion of fascism and proto-fascism is popular today, given the current political climate. But George recognized its onset decades ago, and referred to it “as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis.” His work presaged later sociological analysis of capitalism’s terminal crisis.
Yet he always emphasized that our aim was “to understand the essence of this living, moving thing, so that we will understand how to move against it.”
His refusal to divorce theory from action and his experientially-informed, action-oriented theory makes him so relevant today.
I cannot pinpoint the precise moment I became politicized. I suppose when I came to know that problems faced by large portions of the population were my problems too I changed a little bit. But unquestionably after meeting George Jackson it was hard to do anything but proceed full steam ahead.
Lacino Hamilton has been incarcerated since July 1994. He can be reached at the following address: Lacino Hamilton #247310, Chippewa Correctional Facility, 4269 West M-80, Kincheloe, MI 49784, or via www.jpay.com.
James Anderson is a prison abolitionist and an adjunct professor. He is from Illinois but now tries each semester to cobble together classes to teach at various campuses in Southern California.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate