Abstract
Early in the morning of August 7, 1970, a young slender Jonathan Peter Jackson walked quietly into the Marin County, California, courthouse carrying a small satchel.1 He entered a second-floor courtroom, where a trial was currently in progress for three San Quentin inmates: Ruchell Magee, William Christmas, and James McClain. At San Quentin, the guards threatened and tortured the three men for reporting police brutality.2 That morning, McClain was being tried for assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder for stabbing a San Quentin prison guard. Inmates Magee and Christmas were his defense witnesses. Although the stabbing was nonfatal, it carried severe penalties under the law, and possibly severe extralegal penalties from the prison guards. But, Jackson was no typical spectator. Rather, he was in the courtroom for a specific reason—he planned to free all three black prisoners.3
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Notes
Joy James, review of “The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, by Bettina Aptheker,” The Black Scholar 32, no.1 (Spring 2002), 53;
Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 182.
Gregory Armstrong, The Dragon Has Come (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 133.
Angela Davis, Ruchell Magee, the Soledad Brothers, and Other Political Prisoners, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: Third Press, 1971), 176.
John Irwin and Willie Holder, “History of the Prisoners’ Union,” The Outlaw: Journal of the Prisoners’ Union, 2, no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1973), Thomas James Reddy Papers, Box 1, Folder 8, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, John Murrey Atkins Library, Special Collections, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1.
Lee Bernstein, “The Age of Jackson: George Jackson and the Radical Critique of Incarceration,” in America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 66.
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© 2012 Donald F. Tibbs
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Tibbs, D.F. (2012). A Crisis Erupts. In: From Black Power to Prison Power. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_5
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