I am an extremist. I call for extreme measures to solve extreme problems. Where face and freedom are concerned I do not use or prescribe half measures. To me life without control over the determining factors is not worth the effort of drawing breath. Without self-determination I am extremely displeased.

Concurrent with this sense of increasing strength was Jackson's realization of the importance and validity of the love of persons as well as that of people. Since many of the people who became involved with the Soledad Defense Committee were women as was one of Jackson's lawyers. Fay Stender, he had his first opportunity to come in contact with a number of intelligent and committed women. This contact provoked him to reassess some of his beliefs:

I thought of individual relationships as a flight from the existential reality of individual responsibility to the whole, to the people. I considered it selfish to look for same individual to touch and hold and understand, because all my time belonged to all of the people...people who (especially in the joint) looked for another individual to relate to, instead of the people's struggle--full time, (were) lonely, (were) weak.

But I've gone through some changes since then, I saw and read about Angie Davis and some other females of our kind...The look of love from a rebel breed--I like it. I'm weak.

Eventually, Jackson met and corresponded with Angela Davis. In her, he came to see himself--his past and his future--with a new slant. His past, the years that he had spent in the joint, was not the prelude to a danse macabre as it had sometimes seemed, but rather the first steps in a courtship: "Every time I've opened my mouth, assumed my battle stance, I was trying in effect to say I love you, African--African woman...If my enemies, your enemies, prove stronger at least I want them to know that they have made one righteous African man extremely angry. And that they have strained the patience of a righteous and loyal people to the utmost."

Jackson envisioned that after he was cleared of the Soledad charge--he repeatedly said that he would be--he and Angela Davis would become a revolutionary Mr. and Mrs., bound to each other by their dedication to the people's struggle and their own private alliance.

However, Jonathon Jackson did not believe that this common outlaw arrangement could ever be consumated. He did not believe that his brother would ever leave prison alive. He was right, but he himself died in the parking lot of the San Rafael courthouse.

The San Rafael incident--regardless of whether it was an appropriate tactic--illustrates the loyalty George Jackson was able to inspire. Though most of the coverage given to it by the Establishment media focused upon the bloodshed that resulted from Jonathon Jackson's cool arrogance. George Jackson, his mother, and people who knew the specifics of the case or were themselves prisoners were struck more by the motive than the result of the action.

Although the San Rafael incident failed to free George Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers, it did rivet national attention on their case and on George Jackson as a man. Through this attention Jackson's reputation among prisoners spread through the joints across the country.

The publication of Soledad Brother, which has now sold over 300,000 copies plus Jackson's affiliation with the Panthers served to make him even more widely known. Though his writings are prohibited reading material in many joints, copies of his work are smuggled in. Many of the younger cons read him before they came to the joint and informed older inmates about him. As a result, George Jackson became well known in the joints outside California as he had become inside the state as one of the most remarkable of the rational and unbroken.

V

The news spread quickly through the crowd in Will Rogers Park. Most seemed stunned by it; a few moved in a deeply intimate way. But the celebration continued. It was late on an August Saturday afternoon in Watts, and the news was that George Jackson was dead.

The celebration was the sixth Watts Festival, held annually during the six days in August that Watts burned in 1965. Around the park, people shook their heads or stood silent for a moment. A woman whose baby had been crying, cried herself when she heard. But the celebration continued. George Jackson had been in the joint for five years when Watts burned in '65. He became five years further removed from here by the time he died. George Jackson was dead, but tonight was Jazz Night, and Miles Davis would be playing.

By chance, I had met a man earlier that afternoon who had done time in Quentin while Jackson was there. We had been talking generally about prisons when the news of Jackson's death got to us. After not saying anything for awhile, Fred said, "George Jackson was the most rational man I ever knew."

That statement was the fountain of his disbelief. He had known Jackson in the cauldron of the joint, and had observed his responses. To believe that Jackson would have tried to escape from the Adjustment Center was an act of faith, a willful suspension of disbelief that Fred was not willing to perform.