George Jackson's December 1964 Letter to His Father: Agency from within the Prison Walls

The problem is that not enough has been completed to analyze the ways in which rhetoric functions to uncover the revolutionary roots of anti-prison rhetoric specifically, and revolutionary thought in prisons generally. This problem is important for several reasons. First, if scholars confine themselves to only looking at anti-prison rhetoric that originates outside of the locus of the prison, then a good deal of prisoners' revolutionary ethos falls by the wayside.¹ Furthermore, such a focus may leave prisoners' voices muted in favor of anti-prison elites, nonprofit groups, and academics.² Second, failing to account for the way in which revolutionary ideas are developed, or even the ways in which they are expressed, misses the development of an important rhetorical tradition that spans millennia.³ Third, agency should be located in prisoners, not in their champions. Although agency is always mediated, to view activists outside of prisons as the primary agents of study and primary actors and thinkers denies the agential capacity of the prisoner.

Furthermore, an investigation of agency is well aligned with the broader discussion regarding the rhetoric of prisons and prison abolition movements. Gerard A. Hauser argues that agency "raises questions of voice, power, and rights, which place it at the center of this era's major social, political, economic, and cultural issues."⁴ The ideas implicated in questions of agency are the very questions implicated in discussions of prisoners' rights and anti-prison activism. Agency should then be a central concern for those interested in rhetorically investigating prisons. Without a focus on agency, anti-prison rhetoric will fall short, and the analysis of that rhetoric will also miss a central facet of the prison abolition and reform movements.

I chose George Jackson among many potential revolutionary agents.⁵ George Jackson presents a particularly useful case study because of his ponderous correspondence and his well-established ties to revolutionary arguments and actors. Because Jackson was well read in revolutionary theory (Marx, Mao, Lenin, etc.) and also a prodigious writer, studying Jackson becomes both easy and fruitful. Jackson also avails himself to study because he was incarcerated during a time when black nationalist movements were in full swing, allowing him to be studied in light of the backdrop of larger currents of unrest prominent beyond the prison's walls.⁶ My argument is not that George Jackson radically reconfigured agency but rather that to understand prisoner agency, scholars must recover, through careful historical and rhetorical analysis, the words of prisoners.⁷

The particular letter I have chosen, a December 1964 letter to his father (see Appendix 1), is representative of Jackson's writing.⁸ Choosing a representative letter from a collection of letters is always difficult, but the letter under study contains sufficient similarities in style and content to serve as a conduit to Jackson's other writings. It contains the passion of his ideas and heartfelt tenderness for his family. The letter is full of revolutionary musings and anti-prison rhetoric. Other letters could have been chosen, but there are several reasons why this letter is worthy of further analysis. First, it is a letter to his father, an important figure in his life and someone with whom he corresponded openly and often. Second, the letter reveals both the depth of Jackson's reading as well as the depth of his anti-prison rhetoric. Third and finally, the letter falls in the middle of his ten-year incarceration, only two years before he formed the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), which suggests at this stage Jackson was in the formative years of his revolutionary thinking. A letter from his formative years would be more likely to contain the fullest version of his revolutionary zeal. For these reasons, the letter is ripe for rhetorical study.

The 1960s and 1970s experienced a flourishing of black power sentiments. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in 1960, the impetus coming from the Nashville and Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins. Marion Berry, Charles McDew, and John Lewis were leaders of SNCC, active throughout the...