Black August: Study, Fast, Train, Fight

Cover Art is from the Black August Planning Organization. 

Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter

A quick google search for “what is August known for” will take you to articles such as this one, outlining each day in August and what it represents: National S’mores Day, National Dog Day, Lemon Juice Day.  I try to keep the blogs on a month-relevant theme and was struggling to find an August-related umbrella under which I could write these posts.  Halfway down the page of an article that I can’t seem to relocate, I came across mention of Black August.  Now, I often don’t know much about the topics before writing them, and I’m guessing that’s similar to a lot of our readership.  You can go back into the posts and read my frequent words on this: Keeping this knowledge away from us is an intentional and critical element of White Supremacy’s operation.  Quite honestly, though, I’m really tired of that sentiment.  We can claim that and talk about it all we want, and if we don’t look at our own accountability, we are contributing to White Supremacy by shifting the blame from our own internalized White Supremacy to the system’s.  We know how White Supremacy functions so we should no longer be surprised at the things we don’t know.  We know the immense importance of understanding our own history so that we can continue to fight for our present and future selves. It’s on us to fill the gap between what we’ve been taught and what we need to learn.  Not just so we can learn it and understand it from a logical space, but so that we can effectively fight and make the changes that we all know need to be made.

When I was in the 7^th Grade, our teacher assigned research reports.  This was before google, so many of us relied on Encarta ’97 and books from the public library.  I chose to write my report on Malcom X.  I tell you this because my interest in this topic started and fizzled out then; my knowledge about Malcolm X hasn’t gone much further than what 12-year-old me learned from very minimal resources.  When I read about Black August, I was hit with this sense that I had missed the construction of an entire world.  I felt left out.  I sat with that for a moment and interrogated it.  That sentiment - white ignorance, a lack of intrigue, that sense of “this isn’t important unless I hear about it on a regular basis from my regular sources” should now be antiquated, but it isn’t.  And while we’re sitting here wondering why it is that we haven’t learned these things and blaming our educational system, other folx are continuing to resist and fight for their own freedom: From the maroon communities to the freedom colonies, to the Black and brown political prisoners and abolitionists today. 

Which brings us back to Black August.  Black August honors these freedom fighters, particularly those Black and brown freedom fighters that are serving time as political prisoners within the US prison system.  There are quite a few. Black August is a month for movement for prison abolition, for improved living conditions for prisoners, for an increased understanding of the prison-industrial complex as the continuation of the system of enslavement and an outwardly violent consequence of capitalism.  Black August is a time to honor the Black resistance against anti-Black state violence. This month particularly honors those revolutionaries that formed the Black Liberation Movement and who began this fight in the 1970’s within California’s prison walls.  Now, there are Black August events in cities throughout the US.

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(Picture from Black Liberation Movement gathering, from here.)

August is a big month, historically speaking.  Many revolutionaries were born in August: Marsha P. Johnson, Marcus Garvey, and Fred Hampton.  And, many historical events occurred in August: The first enslaved Africans were brought to the colonies in August of 1619, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, The Fugitive Slave Law Convention, the Haitian Revolution, Emmett Till’s murder, the March on Washington, the Watts rebellion, the Ferguson uprising. The list goes on. The first official Black August was celebrated in August of 1979.  That story is very expansive and I have barely scratched the surface.

Black August began to commemorate the murder of George Jackson, which took place on August 21^st, 1971.  Jackson was a prisoner in San Quentin, a prison just north of San Francisco.  In 1961, at the age of 18, Jackson received a sentence of “one year to life” for stealing $70 from a gas station.  The crime isn’t relevant, particularly when we are talking about a system that continually abuses Black and brown communities and is based on the cyclically violent presupposition that humans deserve untold punishment for harming others in a system that is itself married to harm.  The “one year to life” sentence is one I hadn’t heard of.  The Sentencing Project explains that this is what’s known as an “indefinite sentence,” meaning there is no definite period of time that the prisoner remains incarcerated.  It is based on the prisoner’s conduct – they could be released after a year, or stay in there for the rest of their lives.  Those who determine the prisoner’s conduct are those who run the prisons, and I don’t think I have to get into all the ways in which that is particularly harmful to minoritized communities. 

While incarcerated, Jackson connected with W.L. Nolan, one of the founders of the Black Liberation Movement within California’s prison system. Nolan was assassinated by a white prison guard in January of 1970, and Jackson maintained the revolutionary fight alongside Fleeta Drumgo and John Cutchette, now collectively known as the Soledad Brothers.  They saw the oppression in the system and rebelled, following their principles of studying, fasting, training, and fighting – principles intended to maintain discipline and focus on Black liberation.  Jackson wrote two books, Soledad Brother, a collection of his letters from prison and Blood in my Eye, completed days before Jackson’s murder, and outlining Black oppression and anti-Blackness throughout the prison system.  Jackson gained global fame through his words, and as one commentator puts it, if you have heroes in the Black Liberation Movement from the 1960s and 1970s, then George Jackson “was the hero of those heroes.”  Huey Newton, who we’ll learn a lot more about in the next post, named Jackson the Field Marshal of the People’s Revolutionary Army within the Black Panther Party. 

 (A brochure from the Soledad Brother's Defense Committee, 1970.)

Jackson was murdered by a prison guard at the age of 29. The circumstances surrounding his murder are controversial, and he was killed during an attempted prison escape in a prisoner insurrection that left six other inmates dead.   As this article notes, he “became a revolutionary leader revered by those inside and outside the walls everywhere.” After learning of Jackson’s death, incarcerated folx in Attica prison (Upstate New York) engaged in a hunger strike, eventually leading into their historic uprising.  There isn’t enough space here to adequately speak about the Attica uprising, and I would like to take the time to write a separate post about it.  In the meantime, please take a look at this documentary.  You can also watch a clip of the directors talking about their work here.

Before George’s murder, his 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, attempted to free George by entering a courtroom in Marin County, California and taking hostages.  The weapons he armed himself with were registered to Angela Davis, who later went on trial but was eventually acquitted on charges of murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy (it was believed that she has conspired with Jonathan to plan the courtroom hostage situation). The police arrived and opened fire, killing Jonathan Jackson, the judge in the courtroom, and two of the three co-conspirators.  George Jackson speaks about his younger brother’s death in this video. Check out that entire website, there is a trove of videos from Angela Davis’s trial, George Jackson’s funeral, and many other important moments.

There is a small clip in the below video of Georgia Jackson, George’s mother, responding to a question about whether or not her son was violent. Her answer, starting around minute 2:12, is incredibly powerful, “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 it].”  I’m reminded of maroon communities and freedom colonies here, of the drive for self-liberation and the freedom to create your own life in a violent and oppressive system.  The work of Black revolutionaries then and now is critical.  This political movement has not ended, and continues through the New Afrikan Independence Party, and the Malcom X Grassroots Movement, among others.

A book of Palestinian poetry, titled Enemy of the Sun, was found in Jackson’s cell after his death.  The title poem has since been attributed to Jackson, and this podcast does a beautiful job explaining Jackson’s legacy as well as the ties between Black and Palestinian resistance movements. 

I’ll leave you with the last stanza:

It is the return of the sun

Of my exiled ones

And for her sake, and his

I swear

I shall not compromise

And to the last pulse in my veins

I shall resist,

Resist – and resist.