Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 11: George Jackson

(Posting a day late.) After having posted about Black Power the other day, this article that recently came to my attention seems like a good supplement: Craig Marine, EXIT THE DRAGON/It's been 30 years since George Jackson died in a pool of blood at San Quentin. His death still reverberates in America SFGate/The Chronicle Magazine 08/19/2001. It's a somewhat sensationalist but still informative report on an iconic figure of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

Prison has been and continues to be used in the United States disproportionately against African-Americans. Just as today the absurdly disproportionately high rates of imprisonment of young black men is a significant issue in voting rights, so the civil rights movement in the 1960s brought a new focus to prison issues and their affect on African-Americans.

The Nation of Islam, whose most famous spokesperson was Malcolm X, gave a particular emphasis to prison recruitment, which is how Malcolm became a Muslim and a part of the group. (He left the group after becoming more acquainted with mainstream Islam; the Nation of Islam's explicit racism made it an heretical sect in most Muslims' eyes.)

George Jackson was a young black man who became radicalized in San Quentin prison. California at that time had a sentencing law calling "indeterminate sentencing," which gave judges and prison officials enormous discretion over how long a prisoner could be held. It was originally instituted as a prison reform policy, but turned into a terribly abusive practice in case like Jackson's. As Marine notes, at the time of his death, Jackson "had spent 10 years in prison - seven of them in solitary confinement - for stealing $70.20."

Jackson was killed on August 21, 1971, in an escape attempt from San Quentin prison.

Marine writes:

But most significantly, George Jackson, and the death of George Jackson at the age of 29, affects every citizen to this day because he was, more than any other person, most responsible for the politicization of the incarcerated. Even today, with the obscene percentage of minorities that are jailed in relation to their white counterparts, it remains true that for many, their only real education comes behind bars. And when they re-enter society - yes, America, some of these people actually do get out - they are changed: educated, politically aware and, understandably, very, very angry.

Marine's version of George Jackson's political education/self-education is more-or-less contemptuous, but gives a basic concept:

Jackson soaked it all up, watched and read as the New Left emerged, embracing whatever bastardized version of Marxism, Leninism and/or Maoism was in vogue that week. Unlike those concerned more about fashion than substance, Jackson went to the source material, negotiating through the less-than-scintillating, if illuminating, works of the great political theorists themselves.

Then, George Jackson added his own twist on the Revolution. Just as Lenin had goosed Marx by figuring a vanguard can manipulate the science of communism, and Mao altered the status quo by using peasants as opposed to workers to lead his revolution, Jackson's idea was that it was America's prisoners who would be the vanguard, the driving force, of the revolution.

George Jackson was a member of the Black Panthers, whose perspective had also been shaped by the prison experience of leaders like Eldridge Cleaver.

George Jackson's case also made philosophy professor Angela Davis famous, or infamous, depending on one's perspective. She was tried and acquitted on charges of having assisted a desperate attempt by George's younger brother Jonathan to free George. As Marine recounts:

Those who may make the association between Jackson's name and the revolutionary struggle of the late 1960s and early 1970s often think of him as the man holding onto the end of a shotgun that was taped around the neck of a terrified judge - an image forever frozen in time in one of the most famous news photographs in history. That was James McClain, freed (briefly) by George's 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, who smuggled guns into a Marin County courtroom in an ill-fated attempt to trade hostages for his older brother.

He quotes Davis in his 2001 article on George Jackson's death:

"George Jackson was murdered," said Angela Davis, now 57, and teaching in Santa Cruz, as she expressed a commonly held belief about what may have happened 30 years ago. "But it's the classic story: you can kill the man, but you can't kill the ideas."

Stripped of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theories that adorned much of his writing, what Jackson did that was perceived as so incredibly dangerous was teach.

"He broke down the structures of the prison gangs as they were organized at the time and re-built them around politics instead of petty criminal activities such as loan-sharking and extortion," said Davis, a former Communist Party member whose love for Jackson, as expressed in the couples' correspondence, was used unsuccessfully by prosecutors in an attempt to provide motivation for what they said was her part in the Marin County courthouse bloodshed that left four dead. Tried for murder, Davis was acquitted.

"The last thing those in power wanted was an organized underclass, ready to fight for revolution," said Davis. "George tried to teach anyone who would listen, regardless of race, that The Man wanted division, wanted prisoners at each others' throats. He scared people to death, as well he should have."

The History Is A Weapon website provides the text online of George Jackson's 1970 Soledad Brother. The same site has the text of an interview with him, Remembering the Real Dragon- An Interview with George Jackson May 16 and June 29, 1971.

Bob Dylan did a song commemorating him, "George Jackson," which Joan Baez covers in this version:

George Jackson was a charismatic figure whose words and militant resistance resonated with many who felt some of the genuine desperation that someone in his position must have felt. It's easy enough to pick out passages from the linked material from him that sound simplistic and narrow. But then he was working in the toughest kind of environment against what were unquestionable overwhelming odds. One doesn't have to idolize him or approve of the execution of the prison guards described in Craig Marine's article to recognize that the anger, despair and radical rejection of peaceful and legal methods of fighting white racism and the institutions that sustained it did resonate with a non-trivial number of African-Americans circa 1970.

And it resonates in negative sense perhaps even more heavily today with the aging whites who take FOX News to be an actual news source. Take, for instance, this one paragraph from the interview linked above in which Jackson says:

You know, guerrilla war is not simply a matter of tactics and technique. It's not just questions of hit-and-run or terrorism. It's a matter of proving to the established order that it simply can't sustain itself, that there is no possible way for them to win by utilizing the means of force available to them. We have to prove that wars are won by human beings, and not by mechanical devices. We've got to show that in the end they can't resist us. And we will! We're going to do it. There's never going to ever be a moment's peace for anyone associated with the establishment any place where I'm at, or where any of my comrades are at. But we're going to need coordination, we're going to need help. And right now, that help should come in the form of education. It's critical to teach the people out there how important it is to destroy the function of the prison within the society. That, and to show them in concrete terms that the war is on - right now! - and that in that sense we really aren't any different than the Vietnamese, or the Cubans, or the Algerians, or any of the other revolutionary peoples of the world.

This is how a lot of Republicans think of Barack Obama, who is routinely described on websites and broadcasts and e-mail chain letters that are generally regarded by Republicans as sensible (if a bit edgy) as an America-hating Kenyan Communist Nazi Marxist Islamist atheist anticolonialist extremist.

A large portion of the Republican Party base, which means a significant number of American whites generally, are stuck in 1969, their fears haunted by images of guys like George Jackson, an army of ghosts waiting to leap out at them from any black person they encounter. Included the President of the United States.

And who says Americans have no sense of history?

Tags: angela davis, black power,
civil rights movement, confederate heritage month 2014, george jackson, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 5: "Black Power"

To say that American whites have a very limited understanding of African-American freedom struggles in American history would be an understatement.

Peniel Joseph in "Rethinking the Black Power Era" The Journal of Southern History 75/3 (Aug 2009) explains that the Black Power era is still poorly understood in mainstream historiography. In fact it was a critical and multifaceted part of the freedom movement:

Black sharecroppers in Lowndes County, Alabama, urban militants in Harlem and Chicago, radical trade unionists in Detroit, Black Panthers in Oakland, Philadelphia, and New Haven, and female antipoverty organizers in Baltimore and Durham, North Carolina, all advocated a political program rooted in aspects of Black Power ideology. A broad range of students, intellectuals, poets, artists, and politicians followed suit, turning the term Black Power into a generational touchstone that evoked hope and anger, despair and determination. These efforts spanned rural and urban America and beyond to global cities such as Dar es Salaam, Algiers, London, Havana, and Stockholm. Best remembered for its racially specific character, the movement nonetheless transcended racial boundaries and inspired "rainbow radicalism" that produced some of the era's leading multicultural coalitions. If Black Power frightened mainstream America, it produced a mixture of intrigue, awe, and anxiety in the New Left by forcing white radicals to confront racial privilege and power in painful and unprecedented ways.

... Standard interpretations of the period separate Black Power militancy from civil rights struggles, ignore the diverse makeup and pragmatic goals of its local character, and render women's contested role in the movement invisible. [my emphasis in bold]

He also argues that the Black Power movement was rooted particularly in the 1950s and connected with events like the now little-remembered Bandung Conference. "The 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, Ghanaian independence in 1957, and the Cuban Revolution of 1959 galvanized black radicals waging war in the civil rights movement's long shadow," he writes.

The State Department's website includes a historical sketch of the Bandung Conference (Asian-African Conference), 1955 (quotes as of 04/05/2014):

In April, 1955, representatives from twenty-nine governments of Asian and African nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss peace and the role of the Third World in the Cold War, economic development, and decolonization.

The core principles of the Bandung Conference were political self-determination, mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, and equality. These issues were of central importance to all participants in the conference, most of which had recently emerged from colonial rule. The governments of Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka co-sponsored the Bandung Conference, and they brought together an additional twenty-four nations from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Because the decolonization process was still ongoing, the delegates at the conference took it upon themselves to speak for other colonized peoples (especially in Africa) that had not yet established independent governments. The delegates built upon the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, worked out in negotiations between India and China in 1954, as they sought to build solidarity among recently independent nations.

The State Department's sketch also discusses Bandung in relation to the US civil rights movement:

The United States Government initially viewed the Bandung Conference, and the nonaligned movement that emerged from it, with caution. Observers in the United States expressed concern that the meeting was a sign of a leftward shift in the ideological leanings of the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia. Moreover, the conference revealed two contradictions in U.S. foreign policy with regard to decolonization in the Third World. First, the United States Government found itself caught between its desire to support decolonization and self-determination in Southeast Asia and Africa and its reliance on the colonial powers of Western Europe as allies against the communist Eastern Bloc. Cooperation with Britain, France and the Netherlands was vital to U.S. policy in Europe, but supporting decolonization would be tantamount to opposing those allies. Second, the conference coincided with a fundamental shift in U.S. race relations. The 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision had declared school segregation unconstitutional, but the process of ending the Jim Crow laws in the American South was long and difficult. Many countries around the world, particularly newly independent nations, followed the U.S. civil rights movement with interest and questioned the extent to which U.S. rhetoric of equality and self-determination matched the status of civil rights in the United States. U.S. leaders worried that the anti-colonialism of Bandung and the discussion of global racial politics taking place there could turn anti-American or anti-Western. [my emphasis]

The US still considered the People's Republic of China a complete pariah nation in 1955. So it was a particular concern for the Eisenhower Administration that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was a delegate to the Conference. The State Department article notes, reasonably enough, that "Zhou Enlai took a moderate line in his speeches to the delegates."

African-American author (and native Mississippian) Richard Wright reported on the conference and published a book on it, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956). He also had a book called Black Power (1954).

Jeffrey Folks wrote about Wright's perspective on Bandung in "'Last Call to the West': Richard Wright's 'The Color Curtain'" South Atlantic Review 59/4 (Nov 1994). The title of his piece comes from an all-caps passage in Wright's book: "THE LAST CALL OF WESTERNIZED ASIANS TO THE MORAL CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST!" Folks discusses how Wright's experiences as a black American influenced his response to the Bandung Conference:

The sympathies that Wright brought to Bandung had been formed very early in his life. Margaret Walker goes so far as to single out Wright's early experiences in the South as the primary determinants of his personality. As Walker writes: "He reflects almost in totality the mirror image of racism in the South as it is seen in both black and white men". As elsewhere in his writing, Wright both analyzes and reacts passionately to the racial issues he encounters at Bandung. Whether he suffered from a "flawed personality" as a result of "the psychic wound of racism" is a question of interpretation; certainly, he struggled with and against his psychological ambivalence all his life. In both Black Power and The Color Curtain Wright in fact assumes a close analogy between his Southern experience and the colonial experience of Africa and Asia. In certain passages of Black Power it is difficult to determine whether he is writing about Africa or the American South, for Wright's views on Africa and Asia as well are often reminiscent of what he wrote concerning African American experience in 12 Million Black Voices (1941), where in his foreword he stressed the movement toward urbanization of twentieth-century African Americans. Socially conditioned by "what we see before our eyes each day," African Americans inevitably become westernized (12 Million 48) yet they have at the same time "never been allowed to be a part of western, industrial civilization" (127).

Joseph notes of the Black Power movement in the United States:

Far from experiencing a decline in the late 1960s, Black Power activism surged and became a defining organizing principle for the African American community. Carmichael, Black Panthers, urban riots, Tommie Smith's and John Carlos's defiant Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and Angela Davis's towering Afro defined the movement in the popular imagination. Beyond 1968's enduring iconography of revolutionary protest, Black Power thrived well into the early 1970s as movement leaders and organizations embarked on an ambitious effort to transform American domestic and foreign policy agendas by enlisting, at times successfully, the aid of black elected officials.

However, the movement's major impact resonated in the grassroots activism of thousands of community organizers, students, trade unionists, prisoners, intellectuals, low-income women, and preachers who adopted Black Power's ethos of self-determination as an organizing tool. From Harlem to Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina, out west to Los Angeles and the San Francisco and Oakland Bay Area, Black Power transformed American race relations. [my emphasis]

Joseph also has a 2006 book, The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and a 2007 one, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

Tags: bandung conference, black power, confederate heritage month 2014

bandung conference