Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  The stories of Jackson’s prowess as a prison fighter, especially after he began studying martial arts, are legion. The time he was seen swinging a length of pipe during a riot in 1967. The times he took pals into the showers and, just for the fun of it, screamed, “ATTACK!” and began beating other inmates bloody. “He was pound for pound the toughest guy I ever knew,” an inmate named Johnny Spain recalled.

  No doubt part of Jackson’s anger arose from his 1965 parole review, where his own father testified that his son was better off in prison. It was in the wake of this setback, during long months in solitary confinement, that Jackson began reading radical literature an older inmate gave him. Like a generation of black inmates from Malcolm X to Dhoruba Moore to Sekou Odinga, he discovered not only the power of the written word but the revolutionary views espoused by Frantz Fanon, Malcolm, and Che. He began to see himself as a victim of white society, a viewpoint he developed at length in letters to his family.

  On January 13, 1970, as Jeff Jones and Bernardine Dohrn were settling into a San Francisco apartment two hours north, came the events that would transform George Jackson from anonymous convict to the Bay Area Left’s messiah. Racial tensions were running high that day when Soledad officials released fifteen black and white prisoners into a new exercise yard alongside the notorious O Wing, the prison’s maximum-security ward. A fistfight broke out. Standing above the yard, a white guard named O. G. Miller raised his carbine and—with no whistle being blown, no warning rounds being fired—shot four bullets. All, an investigation showed later, were aimed at the black prisoners; a supervisor would freely admit that Miller had been trying to protect the whites. Three black inmates fell dead.

  Immediately talk of reprisal flashed through the black population not just of Soledad but of San Quentin, Folsom, and every other significant California prison. At Soledad George Jackson’s voice was among the loudest. Revenge among inmate gangs had always been the law: If a white prisoner killed a black, the blacks would retaliate, and vice versa. Jackson argued that this policy should now be extended to the guards. “There had been talk goin’ around for some time that the officers were subject to the same treatment that the inmates were getting,” one inmate recalled. “And I think there was a kind of concerted kind of thing goin’ on to where one would be taken from all the institutions. It was a thing like when one [prisoner] gets knocked in Folsom, then one [guard] will go in Quentin, one will go in Soledad, one will go in Tehachapi, all down the line.”2

  Meanwhile, a grand jury began reviewing the killings. On January 16, after a television report that the grand jury had ruled the deaths “justifiable homicide,” the Soledad inmates took their revenge. A young, inexperienced guard named John Mills was alone on the floor of Soledad’s Y Wing, where Jackson was housed. A group of inmates grabbed him by the throat, beat him up, and threw him over a third-floor railing. Mills struck the concrete floor below with a thud, tried to rise, then fell dead. The cell block exploded in cheers.

  Jackson and two other inmates were detained, placed in solitary, and charged with Mills’s murder; as a serial offender, Jackson faced the gas chamber. The case of the “Soledad Brothers,” as the three were soon dubbed, would have a profound impact on the California prison system, the Left, and ultimately the underground. The key figure was a radical attorney named Fay Stender, who agreed to represent Jackson after she made a name for herself as Huey Newton’s co-counsel in his murder trial. A plain woman with a smoldering sexuality, Stender was utterly entranced by the black inmates she represented. Although married with two children, she would enter into a sexual relationship with Jackson, as she had with Newton.

  She was a genius at public relations. As she’d done with Newton, she intended to put the entire white “system” on trial by portraying Jackson as an innocent victim being persecuted for his revolutionary beliefs. Enlisting white activists from across California, Stender formed the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, which soon blossomed into a full-blown bureaucracy with seven subcommittees and a Who’s Who of radical-chic supporters, including Jane Fonda, Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Hayden, and a striking UCLA professor named Angela Davis. The committee turned Jackson into a cause célèbre for the radical Left, pumping out a stream of posters, pamphlets, buttons, bumper stickers, and fund-raising letters while staging bake sales, poetry readings, and art auctions. The Grateful Dead even played a benefit concert.

  Under Stender’s guidance, George Jackson emerged as the living symbol of everything the Bay Area Left yearned for: strong, black, prideful, masculine, and undeniably sexual. John Irwin, who was called to testify for Jackson’s defense, noticed how naïve and starstruck Stender and her supporters were. “It was mostly women who were doing the organizing,” he told the writer David Horowitz years later. “They had each picked their favorite Soledad Brother and were kind of ooh-ing and ah-ing over them, like teenagers with movie stars. I couldn’t believe it.” A New York radical named Gregory Armstrong met Jackson and summarized his appeal this way:

  Everything about him is flashing and shining and glistening and his body seems to ripple like a cat’s. As he moves forward to take my hand, I literally feel myself being pulled into the vortex of his energy. There is no way I can look away. He gives me a sudden radiant smile of sheer sensual delight, the kind of smile you save for someone you really love. As we take each other’s hands, I have a sense of becoming almost a part of his very physical being.

  But Jackson’s most valuable asset, as Fay Stender saw, was his writing. It was she who discovered the letters he had penned to family and friends and contacted Bantam Books about publishing them; Gregory Armstrong, in fact, was Jackson’s editor there. He and Stender combed through Jackson’s writings, editing them heavily—they chose, for instance, not to publish the letter in which Jackson fantasized about poisoning Chicago’s water supply—in an effort to portray him as an American Dreyfus. Stender draped him in the trappings of an intellectual, giving him a set of horn-rimmed glasses and luring the French philosopher Jean Genet to write a preface for his book. It worked spectacularly. Published in October 1970, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson was an immediate best seller, a critical and commercial sensation. The New York Times called it “one of the most significant and important documents since the first black was pushed off the ship at Jamestown colony.”

  Soledad Brother made Jackson an international literary sensation, much as Soul on Ice did for Cleaver. But in the end it brought little but heartache to Jackson himself. The first blow fell on his brother, Jonathan Jackson, a bright, sensitive student at Pasadena’s Blair High School. Jonathan became obsessed with the Soledad Brothers case; he regularly visited George and attended his hearings. George, in turn, assigned Jonathan to be Angela Davis’s bodyguard. It was Angela who gave Jonathan his first gun, a .380-caliber Browning with a thirteen-round clip. On August 5, 1970, after a long visit with George, she bought him another, a shotgun, at a San Francisco pawnshop.

  Whether a conspiracy was afoot to help George escape from prison would never be proven. What is known for certain is that two mornings later, at ten forty-five on August 7, Jonathan walked into the Marin County Courthouse and took a seat at the rear of Judge Harold Haley’s courtroom. In the dock were three of George’s revolutionary friends, all San Quentin inmates. One, James McClain, was in the process of being retried for the stabbing of a guard. The other two, Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, had been called as witnesses.

  Suddenly Jonathan stood up, pulled a sawed-off shotgun from beneath his overcoat, and shouted, “All right, gentlemen. I’m taking over now.” He produced several more guns and tossed them to Magee and McClain, then called Judge Haley forward and taped the shotgun to his chin. After several minutes of confusion, the four men took the judge, a prosecutor, and three woman jurors as hostages and walked outside to a yellow van Jonathan had rented. A witness later said McClain shouted, “Free or release the Soledad Brothers by twelve
thirty or they all die!”

  Several minutes ticked by when McClain couldn’t figure out how to operate the van, and he and Jonathan were obliged to switch places. By that point police and sheriff’s deputies had surrounded the area. As Jonathan drove toward the frontage road, a shot rang out. In a flash dozens of officers opened fire on the van. Jonathan, wounded, pulled the trigger on the shotgun, blowing off Judge Haley’s face. By the time the shooting stopped, Jonathan, McClain, and Christmas were dead. Ruchell Magee and the prosecutor were badly wounded. Angela Davis was arrested in New York two months later and brought back to trial; she was eventually exonerated of all counts linked to the shoot-out, emerged as a radical icon herself, and remained famous for years after the world had forgotten Jonathan Jackson. Jonathan, who was given a Black Panther funeral, became the radical Left’s newest martyr; more than one underground group would ultimately take his name as theirs.

  George Jackson spent the year after his brother’s death writing the book that he believed would be his legacy. He never lived to see it published. On August 21, 1971, with his trial already under way, someone, almost certainly one of Jackson’s attorneys, managed to slip him a gun. He used it to take over San Quentin’s internal detention block. As he did, witnesses later reported, he repeatedly shouted, “The Dragon has come!” Six guards and two white prisoners were taken hostage; five were later found dead in Jackson’s cell, their throats slit. Jackson later bolted into the prison yard, where snipers immediately killed him with a single shot to the middle of his back. Six men were dead. It was the bloodiest day in the history of the California prison system.

  In a split second George Jackson went from messiah to martyr. Two thousand attended his funeral at a church in Oakland; during the services the Weather Underground detonated bombs in protest, one in San Francisco—the incident Marvin Doyle wrote about—and a second in Sacramento. At San Quentin officials so feared a violent reaction that they prepared for an armed invasion of the prison. In the end not much happened. But although he was quickly forgotten by mainstream America, the memory of George Jackson—and his brother—would inspire several underground groups in the next few years, the last of which would not be broken up until thirteen years later, in 1984. There are Bay Area radicals who hang George Jackson’s picture in honor to this day.

  Jackson’s final literary offering, Blood in My Eye, was published six months after his death, in February 1972. It is an amazing document, a straightforward call for a bloody black-led revolution in the streets of America and a vivid testimony to how thoroughly he had internalized everything he had read in Debray and other revolutionary sources. Jackson had written much of it while in solitary, grieving for his brother, and later friends would come forward to say how totally he had lost touch with reality there.

  Jackson wrote:

  We must accept the eventuality of bringing the U.S.A. to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death.

  Blood in My Eye was largely dismissed by critics; the Times reviewer said it suffered from “slapdash urgency” and “lacks the visceral brilliance, the epistolary panache” of Jackson’s first book. It was avidly read, however, by prison revolutionaries, especially in California, where it was viewed as a messiah’s final call to arms. Among its most passionate readers was a slender, soft-spoken inmate at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, the state prison system’s psychiatric treatment center, an hour north of San Francisco.

  His name was Donald DeFreeze.

  • • •

  Of the hundreds of self-styled revolutionaries in the California prison system, Donald DeFreeze was among the least likely to lead an underground army. He was neither a charismatic leader like George Jackson nor a gifted writer like Eldridge Cleaver nor physically intimidating; he hadn’t even done time in a brutal “prestige” facility like San Quentin. Behind prison walls he was never a leader. In the real world he was scarcely remembered at all. But he was a well-read black prisoner, and for the impressionable white radicals he would eventually take underground, that was enough.

  DeFreeze’s story was a sad one. Born in Cleveland in 1943, the eldest of eight children, he was a bright, sensitive child whose alcoholic father, it was later claimed, regularly beat him, sometimes with a baseball bat or a hammer. After a series of arrests for stealing cars and a gun—he said he wanted to kill his father—DeFreeze at fourteen ran away to Buffalo, New York, where he lived with a cousin and then a Baptist minister who pulled the teenager into his raucous fundamentalist church, an experience that would eventually inform DeFreeze’s life underground. Once again, though, he got into trouble, and he was shipped to a juvenile facility in Elmira for stealing a car. He was released at eighteen, and washed up alone and aimless in Newark, New Jersey.

  DeFreeze was a quiet man, five foot nine, slender; he often spoke with the hint of an affected Jamaican lilt. Against all odds, he found stability and structure in Newark. He became a housepainter, a diligent one, and married an older woman, twenty-three-year-old Gloria Thomas, who had three children of her own. They were a mismatched pair, Thomas energetic and immaculate, DeFreeze a sullen loner with wounded eyes. Thomas was every inch a striver, friends recall, and hectored DeFreeze to make more money. He tried for a time, starting his own interior decoration outfit, the House of DeFreeze, but it went nowhere. They began to fight. Thomas did most of the hollering, yelling at DeFreeze as if he were one of her children. He began to withdraw, disappearing at night and sometimes for days at a time. Later there were stories he had turned to house burglary and armed robbery.

  He began buying guns, tinkering with them in a basement workshop at their apartment house in East Orange. It was there, on the morning of March 9, 1965, two years into his new life, that the trouble began. Neighbors heard a loud bang, and the building began to fill with smoke. When police arrived, DeFreeze told them it was just a firecracker. A search revealed an unexploded bomb housed in a bamboo stem, presumably a twin to the one that exploded. DeFreeze was arrested, then indicted for illegally discharging a firearm. His wife was apoplectic. His landlord evicted them. Just as he had done as a boy, DeFreeze reacted by running away, this time to Southern California. Three weeks later he was arrested while hitchhiking on the San Bernardino Freeway; in his briefcase officers found a sawed-off shotgun, a sharpened butter knife, and a homemade tear-gas bomb. After his release he returned to Newark, only to be arrested again, carrying a homemade bomb. To this day, no one has a clue what he was up to. He was years away from being a revolutionary—he wasn’t remotely political, in fact—and there was never an accusation that he used a bomb in anger. People in Newark, however, suspected the worst. After rumors spread that he was a violent Black Muslim, DeFreeze was unable to secure any more housepainting jobs. He convinced his wife they would have a better chance starting over in Los Angeles. And so the family moved to California.

  There, it would appear, while working intermittently as a short-order cook and a painter, DeFreeze indulged his interest in guns by moonlighting as a black-market gunrunner, selling pistols and rifles to street gangs and, it was said, to members of the new Black Panther Party. His home life remained unstable. He drank, he disappeared for days, they fought; the family made do on a $370 monthly welfare check. And DeFreeze’s penchant for bizarre arrests continued. In 1967 he was arrested for running a red light—on a bicycle. In its basket officers found a pistol and two homemade bombs. DeFreeze drew probation. That December he was arrested yet again, for carrying an unlicensed pistol; a check revealed that it was one of two hundred weapons stolen from a military-supply warehouse. DeFreeze cooperated, offering to lead police to the entire cache, but once arriving at an apartment house he leaped from a second-story window and escaped
. Four days later he was recaptured. This time he dutifully escorted the police to his partner’s flat, where they found the guns.

  Once more, thanks to his cooperation, he drew probation. A court psychologist found DeFreeze “emotionally confused and conflicted with deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy.” Afterward DeFreeze tried to go straight, taking a course in aircraft assembly, but Lockheed turned him away when they discovered his criminal record. In the summer of 1969 his wife demanded they leave Los Angeles. This time DeFreeze chose his hometown, Cleveland, but the family’s stay came to an end after only a few months, when DeFreeze was arrested on the roof of a bank with burglary tools. His wife left him. DeFreeze returned, alone, to Los Angeles, where his wanderings finally came to an abrupt end a few weeks later, in November 1969. It was then, police said later, that he robbed a woman of a $1,000 cashier’s check, tried in vain to cash it, then led officers on a foot chase, firing at them until he ran out of bullets. His probation revoked, he was sent to prison, at Vacaville, for a minimum of five years. It is not clear that a soul in the world cared.

  Like Malcolm X and Sekou Odinga and Eldridge Cleaver before him, Donald DeFreeze got something from prison that he had never known: time to read, time to develop his mind. He started with pornography and men’s magazines but, soaking up the revolutionary tenor of California prisons, soon found the book, and the man, that explained it all: Soledad Brother by George Jackson. Reading Jackson, DeFreeze was suddenly able to understand his strange jumble of a life. None of it, he discovered, was really his fault. The black man never had a chance. He never had a chance. Moreover, he wasn’t really a criminal. He had been fighting for his economic freedom, for his dignity, and a repressive white government had jailed him for it. He was a political prisoner. In time DeFreeze branched out, reading the books Jackson recommended—Mao, Lenin, Che, then Fanon and Debray and the rest—and while he never became entirely conversant in left-wing ideology, he found adventure and excitement and purpose. Marxism even explained his wife: She wasn’t a striving harpy; she was just bourgeois.