GEORGE Jackson would have sneered at Black History Month, which was introduced in 1976 and is celebrated in February in the United States. Jackson wanted revolutionary action against white oppression and was impatient with Martin Luther King’s passive resistance.

Jackson writes that he was a slave in the United States, but his middle passage was an unusual one; it had no destination and it was extremely lonely. Slave ships were horribly cramped, the slaves locked in involuntary,  suffocating embrace, though only 20 Africans were taken to Virginia in 1619 from the area now called Angola. It was the beginning of the slave trade in the United States.

Jackson loved to wander, but he was shut up in a prison cell. He writes in Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson: ‘Being captured was the first of my fears. It may have been inborn. It may have been an acquired characteristic built up over the centuries of bondage.’

Jackson admits he was a tearaway and was held in a youth detention centre. In 1960 at the age of 18, Jackson was sent to jail and he left it in 1971, as a corpse, shot dead by prison guards. He had spent 11 years in prison for allegedly holding up a petrol station and taking $70 dollars.

He had been promised a light sentence if he pleaded guilty to the charge and he kept his own side of the bargain. But he was sentenced to a term of tormenting indeterminacy, from one year to life. His yearly appeal for release was repeatedly rejected and he spent eight years in solitary confinement, locked in for 23 hours, day indistinguishable from night.

Jackson wrote many letters from his lonely cell. Some of the letters, especially the two long letters—they are actually treatises—he wrote to his lawyer in April 1970, show a mind that is a rich mine, a mine that has not been touched with the pickaxe of pretentious punditry, and prose of balletic grace.

Jackson had a difficult relationship with his father because of what he saw as his cowardly caution.  He believed his father was terrified of white people. Jackson loved his father with manly detachment, contempt gradually becoming understanding. His father did not utter a word of reproach when he wrecked his car.

The prisoner loved his mother and siblings, especially Jonathan who was only seven years old when he went to prison. He wrote Jonathan letters of dry-eyed practicality. He also loved Angela Davis, the University of California lecturer he called his ‘tender experience.’  But there was always glass, a transparent barrier of tantalising nearness and elusiveness, between Jackson and his visitors in prison.   

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan was killed after he took a judge and three jurors hostage in an attempt to force the release of the Soledad Brothers. His brother George was a Soledad Brother. George was very proud of his younger brother and The Prison Letters ends with 17-year-old Jonathan’s words when he entered the courtroom: ‘All right, gentlemen, I am taking over now.’

Prison is a familiar, cursed heirloom in the homes of many blacks in the United States. Jackson writes: ‘Black men born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations.’

The Guardian of London recently published an article on black Americans in prison. Jeffrey Gamble told the newspaper: ‘If I hadn’t had that accident, I would be dead—or in jail for the rest of my life, just like my brothers.’

Gamble said the accident that left him paralysed was a lucky break. A wheelchair, he said, was better than a prison cell. There are close to one million blacks in jail in the United States, about half of the prison population.

John Howard Griffin, a noted novelist, is the author of Black Like Me, a work of non-fiction. The title of the book comes from a poem by Langston Hughes: Rest at pale evening/ A tall slim tree/ Night coming tenderly/Black like me.

Griffin, who died in 1980 at the age of 60, was a white man. He darkened his skin with the expert help of a dermatologist and successfully passed himself off as a black man. Griffin, who had regained his sight after 10 years of blindness, saw America in a new, troubling light.

He was treated like a stinking skunk in places where he had been courteously received in New Orleans before he darkened his skin. A black man was seen as belonging to a subhuman species and this was in 1959.  In Alabama, Griffin was almost murdered by a white man who boasted that he slept with black women before employing them. He told Griffin: ‘You can kill a nigger and toss him into that swamp and no one will ever know what happened to him.’

Black Like Me brought Griffin and his parents great hostility after it was published. He had stopped taking the drug that darkened his skin, but he was seen as a traitor by some white people and his parents had to move to Mexico.

Dick Gregory, a black man who grew up in poverty in St Louis, Missouri, and Griffin discussed strategy during the campaign for civil rights in the United States. Gregory, a comedian, is the author of nigger, an autobiography. But Gregory did not find it funny when a bomb was thrown into a church where he was about to give a speech in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He was in the town to encourage blacks to register to enable them to vote. Also in Clarksdale, the police shoved a 98-year-old black woman into the gutter.

In Birmingham, Alabama, Gregory was arrested with other marchers and jailed. One of the detainees was a four-year-old boy. Gregory’s business suffered and his wife understood why he had to return to Jackson, Mississippi, a day after his son, 30-month-old Dick Gregory, Jr, died in Chicago

Gregory tells the story of Clyde Kennard who was falsely accused of theft because he insisted on attending a university in Mississippi, a segregated institution. He was accused of stealing five bags of chicken feed and, according to Gregory, ‘the price of the feed was raised to make the charge a felony and Kennard was sentenced to seven years at hard labour.’

A fellow black man was compelled to give false evidence against Kennard. Justice Dahiru Musdapher was the only witness in the Salami case. He had everything to lose by testifying in Justice Salami’s favour. If he had done so, it would have been a case of sacrificial stupidity. And is perjury not a crime restricted to the courtroom—telling a lie in court after swearing to tell the truth?

Mr Barack Obama is called the first black president of the United States, but he is actually a person of mixed race. His father was a Kenyan and his mother a white American. Many blacks still live in embarrassing poverty in the United States. Teenage pregnancy is common in the black community.

Africa belongs to another planet compared with the United States. Millions of people go hungry in Africa, victims of the casual corruption of their rulers. Blacks are not respected and black footballers suffer racial abuse in Europe because Africa ‘makes [no] honest efforts to be decent and comfortable,’ as W.E.B. Du Bois puts it in The Souls of Black Folk.  
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Koran 9:5, 29, 111 and 47:4: ‘Kill, fight Christians, let them find harshness in you. Allah orders you to continue to kill them (Jihad) till they embrace Islam.’
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