The three inmates became known as the Soledad Brothers. In 1970, he and two other inmates were accused of killing a guard. Jackson was returned to Soledad Prison in January 1969. Jackson spent the next few years being transferred between California prisons, often in solitary confinement, and became immersed in radical political theory that he learned from fellow inmate W.L. He was imprisoned at the California Training Facility in Soledad, California. The criminal activity rapidly caught up with Jackson, who received a sentence of one year to life in prison for the $71 armed robbery of a gas station on February 1, 1961. After his release, he was suspected in another string of robberies and again arrested. After several other burglary attempts and subsequent arrests, Jackson was sent to a California youth authority facility in Paso Robles. At the age of 15 he was arrested for stealing a motorcycle. In 1956, the Jackson family moved to Los Angeles to escape bad influences in their Chicago neighborhood.īefore long though, George Jackson had joined a street gang called the Capones. Malachy School, a black Catholic school that he attended for ten years.ĭuring the summers, Jackson would visit his grandmother and aunt in the rural areas of southern Illinois every summer where he developed an independent streak, learning to use firearms and hunt animals.

After he encountered violence in a public school, his parents moved him to the St. The second of five children, Jackson’s parents provided him with a relatively stable home. George Lester Jackson was born on September 23, 1941, on the west side of Chicago, Illinois. Author George Jackson is best known for his memoir Soledad Brother, containing the letters that he wrote from prison between 19.

Blood in My Eye by George L. Jackson