Every August, in Oakland and in cities across the country, people gather for block parties, film screenings, study groups and fasts under a name that rarely appears in mainstream national coverage: Black August.
The observance began in 1979 at San Quentin State Prison, initiated by incarcerated men to honor prisoners who had died in the struggles of the previous decade. Chief among them were two brothers: Jonathan P. Jackson, killed August 7, 1970, and George Jackson, killed August 21, 1971, at San Quentin. The tradition also honors William Christmas, James McClain, W.L. Nolen and Khatari Gaulden, whose death at San Quentin on August 1, 1978, helped catalyze the founding the following year.
The detail that anchors the story needs no embellishment. In 1960, at 18, George Jackson received an indeterminate sentence of one year to life for a Los Angeles gas station robbery involving about $70 — a figure that traces to the front matter of his own book and is repeated across published accounts. According to the publisher’s note accompanying his letters, he pled guilty on the advice of court-appointed counsel because of a prior record. He served more than ten years, roughly seven and a half of them in solitary confinement, by the standard published account. Inside, he became a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party and wrote “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson,” published in 1970 with an introduction by Jean Genet; it sold more than 400,000 copies.
Jackson is also a genuinely disputed figure, and the record must be stated plainly. In 1970, he and two other prisoners — the “Soledad Brothers” — were charged with the murder of corrections officer John Vincent Mills at Soledad Prison, allegedly in retaliation for a guard’s shooting of three Black prisoners, a shooting ruled justifiable homicide. The charge was never resolved as to Jackson: he was killed two days before his trial was to open.
On August 7, 1970, his 17-year-old brother Jonathan entered the Marin County Hall of Justice armed and, with prisoners James McClain, William Christmas and Ruchell Magee, took hostages — including Judge Harold Haley — demanding the Soledad Brothers’ release. In the shootout that followed, four people died: Jonathan Jackson, Christmas, McClain and Judge Haley. The guns were registered to Angela Davis, who was charged and acquitted.
On August 21, 1971, George Jackson, 29, was shot and killed by guards at San Quentin during what officials described as an escape attempt. Six people died that day: Jackson; correctional officers Jere P. Graham, Frank DeLeon and Paul Krasenes; and prisoners Ronald Kane and John Lynn. Officials said a pistol had been smuggled to Jackson, allegedly by attorney Stephen Bingham. Jackson’s supporters have long disputed the official account, and critics noted at the time that the official story changed. Bingham, who fled the country for 13 years, returned in 1984 and was acquitted of all charges by a Marin County jury in June 1986. In the related San Quentin Six trial, jurors returned 40 acquittals on 46 charges. No source resolves what happened that day; both accounts persist, attributed to those who hold them.
The observance’s origins are tied by several accounts to the Black Guerrilla Family, a group law enforcement designates a prison gang; other movement sources credit a broader organizing committee of incarcerated men formed after Gaulden’s death. Whether Jackson founded the BGF, and when, is disputed among historians — sociologist Brittany Friedman, cited in Jacobin, dates the founding to around 1970 and describes an organization whose history was later reframed as purely criminal.
The traditional practices are summarized as “study, fast, train, fight”: fasting from sunup to sundown, abstaining from alcohol, drugs and commercial entertainment, daily exercise and political study. Early observers wore black armbands.
The tradition endures. This month, Oakland is marking Black August with block parties, film showings and workshops, including the fifth annual BOSS Black August Block Party at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. Coverage of the observance today lives almost entirely in the Black press, movement outlets and academic guides — a story kept alive for more than four decades by the communities that started it, and still largely absent from the mainstream national record.
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