"A BLADE IN THE THROAT OF . . . " THE FBI: GEORGE L. JACKSON’S "BLOOD IN MY EYE"

The Freedom Archives would produce “The Struggle Inside” which in 2001 would become “The Murder of George Jackson” for Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation, an audio documentary on the 30th anniversary of the death, or murder, of “Comrade George,” George Lester Jackson, “The Dragon.” The revolutionary thinker, activist, organizer and author of Soledad Brother (1970) and Blood in My Eye (1972) did not die a natural death, of course. As Jonathan Jackson, Jr. recites, “prison guards at San Quentin ruthlessly murdered George Jackson.” Mother of George and Jonathan, Georgia Jackson offered more on what happened on August 21, 1971: “They set up his murder just like they do everybody else that speaks out against them; and they’ll probably do me the same way because I am going to speak every chance I get. . . . People don’t love this country so much; they’re afraid of what their own country will do to them.” Now, who should be surprised that this is not the story told by the un-freedom archives of the FBI, whose first “automatic declassification” of documents of the U.S. government some would celebrate at the close of 2006?

An FBI file on “George Jackson” (along with a separate listing under “George Jackson Brigade”) has been released under the guise of declassification, nevertheless. It can be found in the “Reading Room” at the J. Edgar Hoover Building at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. But it is also found at the FBI’s “Freedom of Information Act” website, their “Electronic Reading Room” which was established so FBI documents can be read from “the comforts of home,” as this website boasts—solicitously. In reality, it is not clear when this file was officially released, exactly. It may (or may not) have been released even before any automatic declassification deadline, to little fan fare, for good FBI reasons, to be sure. It may never become clear, either, when and why this file should surface for public presentation.

File 44-HQ-50522

“George Jackson: File 44-HQ-50522” is divided into five parts, electronically, in any case. This division appears to be arbitrary, however. There are 114-119 pages in this file whose system of pagination is odd, even chaotic, if not arbitrary itself. The obvious deletions (or exemptions from declassification) may account for this fact, to whatever extent. The file is scandalously, insultingly or, at the very least, absurdly thin, a matter even more significant than the notorious blacked-out portions of these pages which traditionally put virtual blinders on their readers. Interestingly, a file on Tupac Shakur amounts to 93-100 pages. The file on Malcolm X or “Malcolm Little” is no less than 11,408 pages itself. The mere 100-plus pages on George Jackson are themselves padded with an array of non-FBI materials. They include a 40-page civil complaint filed by “Soledad Brothers” Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette against various California authorities in their effort to mount a defense against the state. That public document is not a document to be declassified by the FBI. Yet it accounts for almost a half of what pretends to declassification here. And that’s not all. Other, establishment press materials inflate this paltry public file as well. The bulk of the FBI’s own materials must be filed under exemption, officially speaking. Its investment in surveillance was not for surveillance’s sake, after all. How much of a COINTELPRO murder plot could they document and declassify, in principle?

Nowhere to be seen in this file is any communication surrounding the activities of, say, Louis Tackwood, the double agent provocateur, or saboteur, whose “confession” of state-sponsored crimes was circulated in The Black Panther newspaper, or “My Assignment Was to Kill George Jackson” in 1976 and 1980. He had testified to this effect at the trial of the “San Quentin 6,” in 1976, and the details of his treachery were published in book form as The Glass House Tapes under the name of Louis E. Tackwood and the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee in 1973. Yet there is no trace of any of this in what we are allowed to read of the FBI at the J. Edgar Hoover Building or, electronically, at http://foia.fbi.gov.

Critically, the contents of this file may fall into four categories of analysis. First, there is the FBI’s support for the state of California in the civil action-suit launched by Jackson, Drumgo and Clutchette. The materials relevant to this topic represent a pseudo-investigative denial: No, inmate witnesses who agree to testify for the state were not rewarded with promises of parole or preferential treatment; witnesses who refuse were not harassed; no poisonings, no set-ups and no Nazi-style race tactics were used to coerce anyone, anywhere. Second, there is the document of the actual suit submitted to the courts by Soledad Brothers lawyer, Faye Stender. It amply contradicts or subverts the FBI denial and the logic of the “United States Attorney,” who would soon conclude that no further investigation was necessary. Third, there is a scandalized review of Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, a text that traditional and non-traditional scholars seem to have never reviewed themselves. It takes the form of a memorandum to E.S. Mills from G.C. Moore and it is structured in four sections: “Synopsis,” “Review of FBI Files,” “Book Review” and “Mention of the FBI.” The review of the FBI files is of immediate interest insofar as it apparently presupposes the existence of files on George and Jonathan Jackson which will not materialize here, for “declassification.” In fact, no file at all appears on Jonathan Jackson in the FBI’s “Reading Room Index.” Fourth, and finally, there is evidence of posthumous surveillance, aggression, damage control and neutralization in the aftermath of the physical liquidation of the person under surveillance. The FBI stalks the dead—like a necrophiliac vulture. Yet they feel stalked, hunted and haunted by Black radicalism, a force digging their gravedigger’s graves. Soledad Brother speaks volumes, once again: “The author of my hunger, the architect of the circumstantial pressures which are the sole causes of my ills will find no peace, in this existence or the next, the one following that; never, never. I’ll dog his trail to infinity” (Jackson 1970, 127). The closing pages of this file are related to the posthumous publication of Blood in My Eye. They include some newspaper and magazine clippings and a draft of a letter to The Washington Post from then FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, both of which reflect the bedrock connection between the work of state repression and the work of the establishment press.

This is how Jackson is introduced in abstract, in the name of “Freedom of Information,” nominally outside the file:

The subject of human consideration in this “bio” is obviously and only the repeatedly named Mills, a white cop-prison guard. When it is revealed that Jackson was serving a preposterous “one year to life” prison sentence, it is never revealed why or under what pretext such a preposterous sentence was imposed. This, his life is of no concern. It is simply a potential distraction, for the FBI, at best. Then, Jackson is named as the author of but one book, Blood in My Eye, in an erasure of his other, most famous book, Soledad Brother. How ironic and symptomatic. It is as a Soledad Brother that Jackson achieves his popularity and renown, worldwide. While the FBI will proffer its version of a review of Blood in My Eye, privately, it steers clear of any mention of Soledad Brother. The idea of their “George Lester Jackson” as a man of ideas is an idea almost too dangerous to entertain, especially since he could never separate ideas from action.

What drives Soledad Brother is exactly what cannot be recognized by the government and its governing fictions in the second part of this FBI file, especially. Most explicitly, Soledad Brother addresses how Jackson came to prison, what it means to be imprisoned, and how imprisonment is elemental to the Black experience of life under U.S. rule in North America and global capitalism. Soledad Brother is centrally about “neo-slavery,” not “convicts,” “crooks” or “criminals.” The civil complaint is therefore telling when it reiterates over and again that a fundamental right of these prisoners has been abrogated, their right to “freedom from the bonds of slavery.” Each of the plaintiffs identifies himself as “a black citizen of the United States” in an apparent, strategic effort to snatch a right to rights, human rights, their rights as people (or the “rights of peoples”) over the “rights of man” as white Western men—to quote Frantz Fanon’s Toward the African Revolution or Pour la révolution africaine (1964). They make an attempt to snatch some rights in a social order defined by legal rights, ostensibly, however much it denies them rights, citizenship and humanity by defining them as “neo-slaves.” The critical emphasis of Soledad Brother on this “neo-slavery” is antithetical to the criminological thesis of the U.S. state and its whole system of policing, including the FBI and its “Civil Rights Division,” which prompted a pseudo-investigation into Jackson, Drumgo and Clutchette’s Soledad Brother claims of inhumane violation at the hands of the state. This is the state that Blood in My Eye would subsequently characterize as “the greatest slave state in history” (Jackson 1972, 10).

If this FBI file suppresses the existence of Soledad Brother and its political-intellectual revolt against neo-slavery, the file superficially recognizes the existence of Blood in My Eye only to the extent that this book leaves FBI agents horrified, scandalized and terrified with its unabashed and brilliant commitment to guerrilla warfare, a warfare to be waged in the urban centers of this country, moreover—beyond mountainous regions of very faraway lands. According to the relevant memo, Blood in My Eye was “being placed in the Bureau Library” as of April 4, 1972. What is the function of an FBI library? It is no space of edification. The question or comment conjures up the notion of a criminal investigative as opposed to some grand intellectual library. This library is a bibliographical extension of FBI files, an institutional surveillance of writers or authors—much like “Homeland Security” has come to police readers, too, or those who check out books unsanctioned by the state. Still ignored or evaded by academics at large and the many liberals who had “sympathy” for Soledad Brother, Blood in My Eye stirs up an acute capitalist Negrophobia at the FBI. The memo synopsizes, almost in disbelief: “This book is dedicated to the black communist youth and openly advocates an end to capitalism in this country by armed revolution and violence.” In Jackson, there is a dedication page which reads as follows, to be accurate:

Soledad Brother had been dedicated to brother Jonathan Peter Jackson; to mother Georgia Bea; and to Angela Y. Davis. The FBI recasts the text of Blood in My Eye as a confession, asserting that the author “admits” to “extremism” and “communism.” It goes on to fear the Black Panther Party and the “chaos” it promises; and, to the extent that education is understood to be revolutionary, the FBI fears and demonizes the education of Black people in general and Black (potentially “communist”) youth in particular. Evidently, education is cause for alarm and criminalization under neo-slavery as it was under official, chattel slavery, proper—or, as Walter Rodney might call it, “raw slavery” (1972), an open and undisguised slavery, slavery which calls itself slavery, “natural slavery,” one only officially abolished by world-historical resistance to slavery as such. An education determined not by mis-education but by Black liberation struggle might lead to what this file wants to believe are “unfounded attacks against the FBI,” whether apart from or as a part of unabashed and brilliant guerilla warfare promoted by Jackson’s Blood in My Eye.

The actual book review section of this memo/review is crude and short. The introductory synopsis is almost as long. Their internal review of the real FBI files of George and Jonathan Jackson is roughly the same size of the alleged book review, which is certainly telling. The one-paragraph review of the book then just bemoans the “communist,” “extremist” commitment of Jackson to overthrow “our existing society.” Any literate reading of Blood in My Eye makes many points plain; for instance, this “society” is not “ours” and, as Jackson is at pains to insists, this is not a “society” in point of fact: U.S. “society” is not a “society,” it’s a hierarchy. This is an important, fundamental distinction in Blood in My Eye disregarded in a review crafted by an institution that construes a library to be a house of surveillance. Knowledge or education is to be crudely subordinated to power, control and capitalist white-supremacy, as neo-slavery would have it. Hierarchy is the decadent historical attempt of a racist elite to secure their elite living above and at the expense of the exploited masses. Blood in My Eye demystifies this current bourgeois ideal of “society above society” (or anti-social hierarchy); and, in doing so, it demystifies chapter by chapter “The Amerikan Mind,” “Amerikan Justice” and, most of all, “Fascism.”

In another chapter, “After the Revolution Has Failed,” Jackson signs off in total identification with the new Black communes which will breed what fascism, capitalism and white-supremacy would view as chaos: “A BLADE IN THE THROAT OF FASCISM” (Jackson 1971, 126). An open-mouthed shock and speechlessness follows the implications of this entire text in the closing subsection of the FBI review, “Mention of the FBI.” Embodying revolutionary agency in writing, Jackson creates a completely surreal situation for agencies of surveillance and state repression. The FBI agent is forced to read Jackson’s most radical thoughts about him or her, them; to compile the litany of his condemnations of them, their class elite, their country; to look into a mirror, intently, and yet find a way to look away at the very same time. There is outrage and recognition, undoubtedly, as a result. No longer capable of narrative, G. C. Moore has to report unspeakable quotations to secretive superiors. So, even corrupt FBI statistics confirm Jackson’s revolutionary philosophy of crime (97). J. Edgar Hoover is “freak” whom he would not want to run into without arms (103). The FBI is comparable to German Nazis and Italian Black Shirts in their fascist suppression of revolt, or revolutionary vanguards, for the maintenance of the ruling class. The U.S. ruling class is composed of a few power elite families who rule by means of the military, the CIA, the FBI, private foundations and financial institutions (169-70). The agents of the FBI are “hired goons” of “our fascist country,” Moore’s memo-review continues, linguistically assuming Jackson’s ideological characterization; and they are hired goons because they are working “to infiltrate and destroy any establishment vanguard movement” (173). This is the official policy of the FBI, of COINTLEPRO. How will an FBI agent disavow, deny or disagree—in the act of a murderous surveillance campaign, no less? Lastly, Blood in My Eye maintains that “Africans were the first communists,” and that this was not “primitive communism,” as “freak” Director Hoover once proclaimed it (182). The actions of the author make the FBI study his words after physical death, after his murder; and he delivers a dizzying, dumbfounding blow to the minds of his enemies: “A BLADE IN THE THROAT OF FASCISM,” for real.

Since all of Jackson’s texts were produced under the direct eye of prison-house surveillance, at the outset, his capacity to turn the table on harassment by FBI surveillance rhetorically should not surprise readers of Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.1 L. Patrick Gray III was undeniably unnerved about the shelf-life of a self-identified Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Fanonist’s book on guerilla warfare against fascism in contemporary North America. Gray was appointed Acting Director, more precisely, by Richard Nixon after de facto Director-for-Life Hoover died on May 1972 (at the age of 77). Gray was Acting Director for less than a year when he resigned in April 1973—in the wake of Nixon’s Watergate scandal. He confessed to destroying documents, burning them, and handing over other internal FBI files to Nixon’s White House. In a situation full of ironies, it was FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt who would turn out to be “Deep Throat,” the secret informant for Bob Woodward’s exposé at The Washington Post. Silent about this affair for some thirty two years, Gray stated a month before his own death in 2005 that he thought Felt was vengeful about being passed over when Gray was named Hoover’s preliminary successor by Nixon, who was responsible for much of Gray’s political career and had even appointed him to his presidential cabinet committee on desegregation in an earlier period. Gray was never indicted, at any rate. Neither he nor Nixon nor white elites as a rule would ever get classified as a convict by the U.S. legal system, of course. If most establishment media commentators remember Gray’s brief tenure as Acting Director of the FBI for its implication in Watergate crimes, he might equally be remembered for his attempt to manage the crisis effected at COINTELPRO’s headquarters by the appearance of Blood in My Eye.

Conclusion

This is not the brand of literature analyzed by literary critics or other academics, traditionally. They have ignored the texts of state repression even as they have rushed to discuss almost everything else under the sun as texts. They have avoided Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, or their inscription of revolt against slavery and fascism in the present tense; in North America. In general, they have ignored George Jackson, his brilliance, his murder and his martyrdom outside liberal-conservative and academic-intellectual circles of the white West.

The FBI narrative is not the narrative told by Stephen Bingham, the lawyer accused and, in 1984, acquitted of aiding and abetting the alleged “escape attempt” at San Quentin State Prison on August 21, 1971.2 Speaking to Socialist Worker after Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state of California’s execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, Bingham would recall: “We know from the trial discovery that George was a key target of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), but we were never given any documents” (Allen 2006).3 To ask where these documents are in the recent pseudo-declassification of records is to ask a rhetorical question.

A former political prisoner and Black Panther, Dhoruba Bin Wahad writes in “The Cutting Edge of Prison Technology,” an article from Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries (1993): “George Jackson’s murder by the California Adult Authority, the prison system, marked a change in state policy towards political activists who were in prison. This change was codified in a program known as Operation PRISAC—that’s an acronym for ‘prison activists’—instituted in 1973-1974” (Bin Wahad in Fletcher, Jones and Lotringer 1993, 79). He observes that Operation PRISAC grew directly out of the accomplishments of the COINTELPRO (80), which had framed so many activists into prison to be subject to additional surveillance and “neutralization,” after the fact.

Supplementing the radical scholarship on state repression is Mumia Abu-Jamal’s We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (2004). Its sixth chapter, “The Empire Strikes Back: COINTELPRO” is a special, anti-imperialist case in point. It includes a call to rethink or theorize the nature of the state itself. He investigates a series of operations organized to prevent Black unity and Black self-determination so that the FBI functions “as political and race police—agents for the preservation of white-supremacy. . . . The nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one said to be investigating crimes, had itself been committing crimes motivated by hatred against Black Americans for decades” (122-23). COINTELPRO is understood as “a war against the people,” all people, since dissenters and dissidents and all who advocate significant social change are construed as “enemies of the state” in the systematic yet rarely acknowledged practice of “governmental crime” (24). The U.S. state apparatus uses tactics designed for conflicts with foreign powers or adversaries against alleged citizens and pseudo-citizens when any people or the people act in the collective interests of the populace as opposed to the interests of those who rule—the government representing nothing but their elite, counter-insurgent instrument of race and class domination. When the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI storage facility in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, they broke the story of COINTELPRO crimes, not the corporate media. Abu-Jamal revisits their findings in a fashion that does not yield an alibi or ideological pardon for the state or the FBI, a “police substructure that acts as a social and, indeed, political power unto itself, without even a hint of control by the political branches, despite public protestations and claims to the contrary” (124). If, as he notes, the majority or 40% of FBI activity was devoted to the surveillance of political activists, while 30% was dedicated to administrative affairs; 25% to bank robberies; 20% to murders, rapes and interstate thefts; 7% to draft resistance; and mere 1% to organized crime (mostly gambling), then the domestic imperialist beast is indeed exposed (156). This is a major conclusion and contribution of We Want Freedom.

And this confirms the revolutionary work of Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, more than three and half decades after their initial appearance from behind prison walls. In “Amerikan Justice,” George Jackson testifies:

These thoughts on white capitalist domination deliver the best explanation of the FBI, COINTELPRO, Operation PRISAC, and the FBI’s pseudo-declassification of files pertinent to all of the above. The FBI both enforces and breaks colonial and neo-colonial bourgeois law to protect the race and class interests of the ruling race and class. It cannot declassify any documentation of this process inasmuch as it would demystify that process and this whole project of domination. Nevertheless, what the release of “George Jackson: File 44-HQ-50522” reveals more than anything else is the truth of his radical criticism of neo-slavery and fascism in Soledad Brother, Blood in My Eye and beyond.

For Maji Maji in Dar es Salaam, Walter Rodney penned “George Jackson: Black Revolutionary” in November 1971, an epitaph and polemic cast across hemispheres and geopolitical divides grounded in empire and African bondage.4 He dismissed the official version of stories told by news agencies of Occidentalism: “George Jackson was a political prisoner and a Black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.” The obligatory and laudatory comparison is made to the late, great Malcolm X/El-Hadj Malik El-Shabazz/Omowale, who may have the most voluminous FBI file of all. Likewise, “The Dragon” had “educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him.” Another African revolutionary who spanned Guyana and Jamaica and London and Tanzania and then Jamaica and Guyana again in his militant praxis of Pan-African Black liberation, Rodney also dismissed the myth of the “anti-social” “convict” or “criminal” since, despite sociological alibis, “the criminals are in the social register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.” He too denounces fascism—via Attica. He too denounces liberalism, whose proponents “never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed.” Neo-slavery is not to be reformed—evaded or avoided. An arch-critic of neo-colonialism, himself assassinated by a CIA-backed government in the Caribbean on June 13, 1980, Rodney affirms: “ever since the days of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned.”5 An anti-slavery rebel if there ever was one, George Jackson died at the hands of the enemy in a prison within this vast prison, resisting; and, despite the FBI or the state of Western empire in an international system of repression, he is one anti-fascist revolutionary whose spirit and ideas must live on.

Works Cited

Abu-Jamal, Mumia. 2004. We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party. Boston: South End Press.

Bin Wahad, Dhoruba, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur. 1993. Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries. Eds. Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones and Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e).

Fanon, Frantz. [1964] 1988. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. New York: Grove Press.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). n.d. “George Jackson: File 44-HQ-50522.” http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/georgejackson.htm.

The Freedom Archives. 2001. Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation. San Francisco, CA: AK Press/Alternative Tentacles.

Jackson, George. [1970] 1994. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Rodney, Walter. 1972. “Problems of Third World Development.” Ufahaamu 3 (Fall): 27-47.

Tackwood, Lewis E., and the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee. 1973. The Glass House Tapes. New York: Avon Books.

Notes

1 For instance: “At this point, I must make clear that I am certainly not warning the military establishment or their capitalist masters, nor am I advocating the overthrow of the established Amerikan government; when I use the initials U.S.A. in these observations, it must be understood that I could quite as easily be referring to the Union of South Africa (U.S.A.!!)” (Jackson 1972, 54).

2 Bingham fled the legal implications of the state’s charges and lived in exile Europe and Canada for almost decade and a half. He is currently a welfare rights lawyer in San Francisco.

3 Joe Allen, “The Assassination of George Jackson: Lawyer Stephen Bingham Remembers,” Socialist Worker (March 3, 2006): http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/578/578_04_GeorgeJackson.shtml.

4 Maji Maji was a journal of the TANU Youth League at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania; TANU was the Tanzania African National Union, which was founded by Julius Nyerere.