Voices from Solitary: The Legacy of Black August at San Quentin Prison
The following piece, co-published with Davis Vanguard, is written by incarcerated journalist Kevin D. Sawyer. For 24 out of his 28 years in prison, Sawyer has observed Black August, a month that commemorates the legacy of Black liberation fighters, political prisoners, and revolutionary leaders. Black August originated in 1979 to pay homage to George Jackson, a young Black man who was sentenced to one year to life in prison in California in 1960 for allegedly stealing $70 from a gas station. While incarcerated, Jackson became a leader in the Black Panther Party and the author of the bestselling book Soledad Brother. He served ten years at San Quentin and then at Soledad Prison, including seven and a half in solitary confinement—a tactic used to try and quell the influence of Jackson and other movement leaders. In August of 1970, after being accused of killing a white prison guard, Jackson was transferred back to San Quentin, where he was killed in a prison uprising a year later. The legacy of Jackson’s resistance lives on every year through the Black August tradition to “study, fast, train, fight.”
Kevin D. Sawyer is former associate editor of the San Quentin News and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). He is a 2024 Stillwater Award recipient for a Best News story, a 2019 PEN America Honorable Mention for nonfiction, and a 2016 recipient of the James Aronson Award for Exemplary Community Journalism. Prior to incarceration, Sawyer worked for 14 years in the telecommunications industry. He is a certified electrician and a trained audio engineer with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mass communication. Sawyer’s work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Post, UCLA Law Review (Discourse), Columbia Journalism Review, Prison Journalism Project, Cal Matters, Bay City News, the News Station, El Tecolote, Filter Magazine, Harvard Journal of African American Policy, The Guardian, and many others. —Valerie Kiebala
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This month I am enduring my annual solo sojourn of self-sacrifice to not eat meat or drink coffee. Some days I fast while adhering to a strict regimen of exercise, political education, study of Black history, and the observation of spiritual unity. It is a renewal of my will to resist the indignity of incarceration and the overall prison industrial complex.
These are some of the tenants of the month-long “Black August” I have come to understand and embrace inside the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).
During my 28 years of imprisonment, I have faithfully undertaken the practice of paying homage to my ancestors. This year marks the 24th time I have participated alone in this call to awareness, rebellion, and resistance to repression, and the injustices inside the United States prison industrial complex.
This year marks the 45th anniversary of Black August, created to honor Black prisoners cut down inside California, and so many others beyond the gates and walls of prison who would otherwise remain forgotten. They are: George Jackson, who was assassinated by prison guards at San Quentin; then there was W.L. Nolen, Fred Billingsley, Khatari Gaulden, and the late Ruchell Magee. The latter was the only survivor of what has been termed the Courthouse Slave Rebellion in Marin County on August 7, 1970. Three revolutionaries perished on that day. They are: Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, and William Christmas. In recent years, Hugo “Yogi” Pinell was assassinated inside prison, weeks after being released from solitary confinement as one of the longest held prisoners in California’s SHU (Security Housing Unit).
The idea of Black August is an outgrowth of the Blacks’ need to acknowledge their own heroes for posterity, irrespective of the system’s attempts to vilify and erase them from history.
“I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engles and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me,” George Jackson wrote in his critically acclaimed book Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.
Why is any of this important to me? It is because as a Black man, born in 1963, and imprisoned for so long by the politics of the day, it is my firm belief that my ancestors and history admonish me to fulfill a duty that is greater than myself. If I forget them, I forget me.
Today I stand on their shoulders and in the very place where history was made: San Quentin State Prison, where I have been confined for the last 13 years. It is one of the state’s 32 gulags where schemes are hatched to create false narratives such as that of the San Quentin Six: David Johnson, Hugo Pinell, Johnny Spain, Luiz Talamantez, Willie Sundiata Tate, and Fleeta Drumgo. They were accused and charged with assault and murder inside the prison’s Adjustment Center (the hole) stemming from the violent events on August 21, 1971, when George Jackson, three prison guards and two white prisoners were murdered.
For the first eight years after my arrival, San Quentin attempted to connect me with the defunct Black Guerilla Family prison gang simply because of the reading and writing I did in the past and continue to do in the present.
“Black August material and other revolutionary documents referencing George Jackson, indicative of membership or association with the Black Guerilla Family prison gang,” was placed on a receipt inside a box of what was left of my confiscated writings.
In proximity of their vision for me, I resisted, muted my pain, and concealed my rage. The power structure underestimated me. I was supposed to be incapable of expression. When all grievances fell on deaf ears and no communication was possible, Sawyer v. MacDonald (768 Fed-Appx-669 9th Cir. (2019)) settled the matter. It seems they are no longer interested in me any more.
Black liberation in August is a recurring theme that has manifested itself in a myriad of revolutionary actions. In August, freedom fighter Harriet Tubman started her Underground Railroad. On August 21, 1791, enslaved Africans in Haiti rebelled and freed themselves from bondage. On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion started.
“Their sacrifice, their despair, their determination and their blood has painted the month for all time,” the imprisoned Mumia Abu-Jamal stated.
So, it is in August that we honor our fallen heroes and prepare ourselves emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually for the time when our predicament may worsen. We do not shrink. We do not allow bodies to become immobile figures on a prison yard. We do not allow our mental interior to become an inexpressive feature, corroded by the ravages of time in our existence.
Instead, we succeed with an abiding conviction to communicate with each other, love each other and pass the torch to the next generations. George Jackson did the same and left us with: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done; discover your humanity and your love of revolution.”
One day I too will show up in history. There will be those who consult my writings, follow in my footsteps, and write stories about me and the movements of this epoch. Until we are free, this is Black August!
Banner image: Drawing of San Quentin Six Defendants Fleeta Drumgo, John Larry Spain, and Hugo Pinell in court. (Online Archive of California)
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I wrote about a road trip I took on a prison bus in late 1968-1969 as a 17 year old juvenile ward of the California Youth Authority.
Here is a relative excerpt from that trip down to L.A. for a court appearance. One of many stops was at Soledad.
The Correctional Training Facility at Soledad
“When the prison doors are opened, the real dragons will fly out.”
Ho Chi Minh
Unknown to me at the time, the legendary George Lester Jackson, prison number A-63837, commonly referred to today as the Dragon, (from the Ho Chi Minh’s quote above) had arrived from San Quentin in January of 1968. He would later be charged with killing a guard in retaliation for the shooting deaths of three black inmates. The inmates had been shot by a lone white guard during a brawl three days prior, in what is now known as “The Soledad Incident” of January 13, 1970. Jackson along with two “Soledad Brothers” Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette, as they were called by the press at the time, would dominate the newspapers of the era.
Jackson had cofounded the Black Guerilla Family prison gang in 1966 and
following the “Soledad Incident” his Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary, ideology and guerilla foco tactics, took hold on both sides of the prison walls and resulted in the deaths of nine more prison guards and 24 inmates over the next year earning him the rank of Field Marshal in the Black Panther Party.
On August 21, 1971, Jackson himself died a violent death in San Quentin’s Adjustment
Center, reportedly during an escape attempt. Three guards and two white building tenders also died in what is now called the “Bloodiest Day” in San Quentin’s history, after being repeatedly stabbed and having their throats cut. Three other guards similarly wounded, would recover.
Jackson’s coconspirators Hugo Pinell, Johnny Spain, Willie Tate, Luis Talamantez, David
Johnson, and Soledad Brother Fleeta Drumgo were known as The San Quentin Six and they
would dominate the news cycle during their trials. The legend is that when Jackson released his fellow AC revolutionary convicts, he shouted, “The Dragon has come!”
Convicted of the 1965 brutal rape of a 22 year old white woman in San Francisco Hugo
Pinell was already serving two life sentences, one for this rape, and one for the stabbing death of yet another Soledad C.O. in March of 1971. Following his convictions and subsequent additional life sentences for the gruesome San Quentin murders and assaults, Pinell was placed in various solitary confinement units at Folsom, California State Prison-Corcoran, and Pelican Bay State
Prison. Finally, Pinell was transferred from Pelican Bay Solitary Confinement Unit to California State Prison-Sacramento on January 8, 2014, where on July 29, 2015, he was placed into the General Population after over four decades of isolation. Gang related grudges have long lives in prison, so it was not much of a surprise when two weeks later the 71-year-old Pinell was promptly stabbed to death on the prison yard at approximately 12:55 p.m. on August 12, 2015. A riot involving 70 inmates from multiple prison gangs erupted immediately after the attack.
During this era (1950’s through 1970’s) within the California penal system most of race based prison gangs were founded. The violence between these gangs and by these gangs both inside and outside of prison walls resulted in ever more repression by the establishment.
There is no doubt that the conditions that Jackson rebelled against in our free society is no longer as dire in 2024. So how can those still incarcerated tone down the threat of violence that created the need for Superman prisons in the mind of the establishment in the first place be addressed. Surely not by reminding the establishment about those violent acts in August no matter how one feels about the reason behind them. Finding other methods to lessen the repression is something worthy of discussion.