num_pages: 291
description: When he was eighteen, George Jackson was sentenced from one year to life for stealing $70 from a gas station. In all he spent over ten years in prison, seven and a half of them in solitary confinement. In 1970, when he was twenty-eight, he was charged with the murder of a prison guard in Soledad Prison and faced a mandatory death sentence if he was convicted.On 7 August 1970, just a few days after George was transferred to San Quentin and seven months after he was accused of the murder of the guard, his brother Jonathan, who had just turned seventeen, invaded the San Rafael courthouse single-handed, with a satchel full of handguns, an assault rifle and a shotgun hidden under his raincoat. As he left the courtroom with the three black convicts he had armed and the five hostages they had taken, Jonathan shouted 'FREE THE SOLEDAD BROTHERS BY 12.30.' Within minutes Jonathan was dead.Finally in the course of a prison riot in August 1971 George Jackson himself, the author of these moving letters, was killed, and a martyr born.
language: English
title: Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
titlecomplete: Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
genres: History, African American, Memoir, Theory, Autobiography, Social Justice, Race, Politics, Biography, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 3576
publisher: Penguin Books