George Jackson Death Essay

• George Jackson’s life and death

George Lester Jackson was born on September 23, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois to Lester, a U.S. Postal Service employee, and Georgia. The neighborhood George grew up in heavily influenced him, especially after being beat up by a white student while in kindergarten. After the incident, George was enrolled in a segregated Catholic school, St. Malachy School. During his teen years, George was often picked up by police for questioning, had a lacking school attendance, and acquired an increasing amount of violent threats, which caused the Jacksons moved again. Shortly after moving, George was arrested and released twice, before being shot and apprehended by the police after burglarizing a furniture store. Fifteen

Jackson pled guilty and was sentenced to one year to life in prison, which he would serve in Soledad and San Quentin State Prisons. He soon became known as a revolutionary, after never able to get parole and always sentenced for minor first offence violations. After being transferred to San Quentin in 1962, became more involved in the racial conflicts that were occurring in California’s prisons. Jackson was transferred to maximum security after banding with six other African-American inmates in attempts to fight the racial discrimination and injustices in the prison systems. In total, Jackson spent eight and a half years of his eleven-year sentence in solitary

George was also shot and killed the following summer by a corrections officer, who claimed Jackson was staging a dramatic escape from San Quentin. The Department of Corrections claimed that Jackson's attorney, Stephen Bingham, smuggled in a gun to Jackson, which he hid in a wig, and then used them to force officers to open thirty cells in San Quentin's maximum-security Adjustment Center. After some of these inmates killed three guards and two white prisoners using razor blades, Jackson was shot and killed by a tower guard as he attempted to flee toward a twenty-foot wall that was topped barbed wire. Despite the Department of Corrections claims, Jackson’s supporter believe that his murder was part of numerous events of police violence which were attempted to stifle political discord. Jackson’s death influenced the inmates’ seizing of the Attica Correctional Facility in September of 1971, along with the “Black August” movement.