Blacks in the 60s: A Centennial Reprise

Abstract

This image is one of a visionary intent on throwing off the white oppressor, who is at the same time a loving son and brother. What makes Jackson's ideas so easy to take in at an emotional level is that they are expressed within a domestic context. He was jailed several times prior to the oneyear-to-life sentence that had kept him behind bars from 1960 to the time of his death ten years later. Indeterminate sentencing allows authorities to keep a prisoner in jail until they deem it unlikely that he will repeat his offense. Jackson's idea, which many of us on the left shared, is that a corrupt system has no right to try or jail people, that not only he but all blackmen are political prisoners. Now I try to hold two truths in my head at the same time: the system condemns the poor, and especially black youth, to a life of servitude in or out of jail, but it is equally unjust that I and the gas station attendant Jackson robbed at gunpoint in 1960 should bear the brunt of that inequity. Seeing the movie Brothers, released by Warner Brothers in the mid-70s, brought home to me the difficulty of the task. The movie stars Bernie Casey as a beautifully muscular George Jackson surrounded by equally good looking black prisoners (who were actors) and scruffy white men who were actual prisoners. They were all in for rape, armed robbery, and murder, but the blacks were just the nicest guys you could possibly meet. I walked home late at night after the movie, my heart pounding when I heard steps behind