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<b><big><big>George Lester Jackson - New Video (and Audio)</big></big></b><br>
<p><strong><big><big><a
href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/George%20Jackson.html">This
extraordinary video</a></big></big> is from a 16mm film
“work print” made in 1971–1972, and includes interviews with
George Jackson, Georgia Jackson (George and Jonathan Jackson’s
mother) and Angela Davis, while she was still in the Marin
County Courthouse Jail, before her acquittal. We have not been
able to identify the other prisoners. As you will see, the film
has no titles or other credits. The discovery of such amazing,
previously unknown historic materials always leaves us thrilled
and in awe, deepening our understanding of those times and
affirming the mission of the Freedom Archives.</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>"You see, that’s the whole story of America. They take
their violence and turn it back around on somebody else. I
don’t have to talk about American violence, you can look all
over the world and see American soldiers everywhere, fighting
in other people’s countries and killing them. So if I were
running the country, in America, I wouldn’t open my mouth
about violence—as many people as they’ve murdered in Vietnam
in the past 10 years and they’re gonna talk about violence? As
many Black people as get killed every day in this country and
nobody knows or cares—and you tell me about violence? How they
wiped out a whole nation of Indians and then you say something
to me about violence—I don’t wanna hear it!”</strong></p>
<p><strong>— Georgia Jackson, from this film - following the
assassination of her son at San Quentin<br>
</strong></p>
<big><b><big>Ankh Marketing Presents</big></b></big>
<h1 class="headliners summary">The Freedom Archives Benefit
Concert</h1>
<h1 class="headliners">Dead Prez - Kev Choice, Jennifer Johns,
Jahi As PE 2.0, Sellassie, DJ Leydis </h1>
<h2 class="times">Thursday 8/21<span class="doors"> <br>
The new Parish - Oakland - </span><span class="doors">579
18th St<br>
Doors: 8:00 pm</span> / <span class="start dtstart"><span
class="value-title" title="2014-08-21T21:00:00-07:00"></span>Show:
9:00 pm</span> </h2>
<div class="ticket-price">
<h3 class="price-range">$25 DOS</h3>
<h3 class="ticket-link primary-link"><a class="tickets"
href="http://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/638549"
onclick="return tfly_openWindowGA(this);" target="_blank">Tickets</a><br>
This event is all ages </h3>
<p>**************************************************<br>
</p>
<center>
<h2>George Jackson: Black Revolutionary</h2>
</center>
<div align="right">By Walter Rodney, November 1971<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodneyjackson.html">http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodneyjackson.html</a></small></small></b><br>
</div>
<p> To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic
information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of
George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers
that be in the United States put forward the official version
that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum
security in Americas toughest jails and still capable of
killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself
was killed attempting escape this year in August. Official
versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay
of Pigs in Cuba to the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the
common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George
Jackson was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was
given a sentence of one year to life because he was black, and
he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing
conditions because he discovered that blackness need not be a
badge of servility but rather could be a banner for
uncompromising revolutionary struggle. He was murdered because
he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow
prisoners. George Jackson was political prisoner and a black
freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy. </p>
<p> Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black
revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point is
established, since we are familiar with the fact that a
significant proportion of African nationalist leaders
graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of
South Africa hold captive some of the best of our brothers in
that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some
considerable awareness that ever since the days of slavery the
U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African
descendants are concerned. Within this prison, black life is
cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was
murdered by the San Quentin prison authorities who are
responsible to Americas chief prison warder, Richard Nixon.
What remains is to go beyond the generalities and to
understand the most significant elements attaching to George
Jacksons life and death. </p>
<p> When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was
twenty nine years of age and had spent the last fifteen
[correction: 11 years] behind bars—seven of these in special
isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen. He
was not part of the regular producer force of workers and
peasants. Being cut off from the system of production, lumpen
elements in the past rarely understood the society which
victimized them and were not to be counted upon to take
organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society.
Indeed, the very term lumpen proletariat was originally
intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared
with the authentic working class. </p>
<p> Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated
himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where his
clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his
ability to communicate his perspective frightened the U.S.
power structure into physically liquidating him. Jacksons
survival for so many years in vicious jails, his
self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were
tremendous personal achievements, and in addition they offer
on interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the
black mass in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to
the status of lumpen. </p>
<p> Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the
alienation of part of the product of his labour. For the
African peasant, the exploitation is effected through
manipulation of the price of the crops which he laboured to
produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than
unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival depends
upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of
industrialization, workers coined the slogan the right to
work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of
this basic right. At best they live in a limbo of uncertainty
as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The
line between the unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed
as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed. </p>
<p> The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers
served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black people in
the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and
the most threatened as far as survival is concerned. The
greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic
spokesman for the most wretched among the oppressed, and he
was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle. </p>
<p> Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that
guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this most
disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts
to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In Soledad Brother,
George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as
it has evolved over the last few years. Some of the more
recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are
worth recording. On February 27th this year, black and brown
(Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World
Coalition. This came in the wake of such organizations as a
Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of
SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of
mobilisation of the nonwhite prisoners was resented and feared
by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter
formed themselves into a self-declared Nazi group, and months
of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white
authority on the side of the Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers
had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty
on the side of the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and
a majority of white prisoners either refused to support the
Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the
first principle to be observed was unity in struggle. Once the
most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win
allies. </p>
<p> The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider
repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true
revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is
particularly true in the jails of California, but the movement
is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas.
Brothers inside are writing poetry, essays and letters which
strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad
Brothers, they have come to learn that sociology books call us
antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals
are in the social register. The names of those who rule
America are all in the social register. </p>
<p> Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a
remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel threatened by
the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black
intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from any
form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize
the need to ally with and take their bearings from the street
forces of the black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison
inmates. </p>
<p> Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a
response from white America. The small band of white
revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen
decried Jacksons murder by placing a few bombs in given places
and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black
prisoners and the Black Panther Party that the murder was to
be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America
has been disturbed. The white liberals never like to be told
that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed.
Even the established capitalist press has come out with
esposes of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of
black prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator
Muskie out with a cry of enough. </p>
<p> Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the
efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a whole
have had international repercussions. The framed charges
brought against Black Panther leaders and against Angela Davis
have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of
defense and solidarity have been formed in places as far as
Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of
international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and
significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended
with a call to Free All Political Prisoners. </p>
<p> For more than a decade now, peoples liberation movements in
Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held conversations
with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the
duality and respective responsibilities of struggle within the
imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and
neo-colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the
imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform
the capitalist relations of production in the countries of
their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world
imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive
movement there as operating within the belly of the beast.
Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons,
this was not merely a figurative expression. George Jackson
knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and
humanist consciousness inside the belly of the white
imperialist beast. </p>
<p> International solidarity grows out of struggle in different
localities. This is the truth so profoundly and simply
expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of
one, two, three - many Vietnams. It has long been recognized
that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically
incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-imperialist
struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world
imperialism transformed organized labour in the U.S. into a
reactionary force. Conversely, the black struggle is
internationally significant because it unmasks the barbarous
social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the
defensive on his own home ground. This is amply illustrated in
the political process which involved the three Soledad
Brothers—George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as
well as Angela Davis and a host of other blacks now behind
prison bars in the U.S.A. </p>
<div class="footer">
<p> NOTE: George Jackson also authored Blood In My Eye which
was published posthumously, or after this article was
written. </p>
</div>
<p><br>
</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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