Black August: How Grief Inside San Quentin Became a Movement the State Couldn’t Bury

Every institution has a version of its own history that it would prefer nobody remember. California’s prison system spent the better part of two decades trying to bury the events that produced Black August: a guard’s rifle in a Soledad exercise yard, a grand jury that called it justified within three days, and a chain of deaths that the state’s own paperwork treats as unconnected incidents rather than what incarcerated organizers experienced as a single, continuous campaign against them.

The Grand Jury Ruling That Started It

On January 13, 1970, corrections officer Opie G. Miller opened fire from a guard tower onto a Soledad State Prison exercise yard during a fight between Black and white inmates. No warning shot was fired. Three Black prisoners were shot. W.L. Nolen and Cleveland Edwards died in the yard; Alvin Miller died in the prison hospital hours later. Nolen, who had co-founded the Black Guerrilla Family with George Jackson in 1966 and had filed a prior civil rights petition against Soledad officials over guard-enabled violence between prisoners, was the man widely credited as Jackson’s political mentor.

A Monterey County grand jury convened three days later and ruled the shooting a justifiable homicide. No Black prisoner who witnessed the shooting was permitted to testify. Thirty minutes after prisoners heard the ruling announced over the prison radio, guard John Vincent Mills was found beaten and thrown from a third-floor tier onto a television room below. George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette, three Black prisoners with no direct evidence tying them to the killing, were indicted for Mills’ murder on February 28, 1970. They became known as the Soledad Brothers, and the case turned into a national cause among prison-abolition and civil rights organizers who argued the men were being prosecuted for their political organizing rather than for anything provable in court.

August 7, 1970: The Marin County Courtroom

Seven months later, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson, George’s younger brother, carried weapons into a Marin County courtroom where a Soledad prisoner was on trial. He armed that prisoner and two others who were present as witnesses, and took Superior Court Judge Harold Haley and several others hostage in an attempt to force the release of the Soledad Brothers. In the shootout that followed as the group tried to leave the courthouse, four people died: Jonathan Jackson, Judge Haley, and two of the armed prisoners, James McClain and William Christmas. A fifth participant, Ruchell Magee, survived, was later convicted, and remains in California custody today, one of the longest-held prisoners in the state’s system.

The event is remembered differently depending on who is telling it. Black August’s founders and the organizers who honor Jonathan Jackson each year frame the courthouse action as a sacrifice made in an attempt to free political prisoners from a system that had already shown it would kill them without consequence. The plain record is that a sitting judge and three other men died that day. Both facts are part of the history; neither cancels the other out.

August 21, 1971: George Jackson at San Quentin

George Jackson never went to trial for Mills’ death. Three days before jury selection was set to begin, on August 21, 1971, Jackson was shot and killed inside San Quentin during a violent disturbance that prison officials characterized as an escape attempt. Three guards and two prisoners also died. Jackson had spent ten of his eleven years in prison at Soledad and San Quentin, more than seven of them in solitary confinement, and had become a nationally known author and organizer while incarcerated. His death, coming almost exactly one year after his brother’s, closed the loop that Black August was later built to remember.

Attica, Weeks Later

George Jackson’s death did not happen in isolation. Roughly two weeks later, on September 9, 1971, approximately 1,500 prisoners at Attica Correctional Facility in New York seized control of the prison and issued a list of demands centered on basic conditions of confinement: medical care, religious freedom, and an end to censorship and racist treatment. Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state police to retake the facility on September 13. The retaking killed 39 people, prisoners and hostages alike, in what remains one of the deadliest prison uprisings in U.S. history. Attica is remembered separately from Black August, but the two events are part of the same national moment: a prison system meeting organized Black and Brown resistance with lethal force, then writing the official record in a way that minimized state culpability.

1979: Grief Becomes a Practice

Black August did not emerge immediately after Jackson’s death. It took incarcerated organizers most of the decade to formalize it. By 1979, prisoners at San Quentin, associated with the Black Guerrilla Family that Nolen and Jackson had co-founded in 1966, established the observance to honor Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson, Nolen, McClain, Christmas, Khatari Gaulden, and Fred Billingsley, incarcerated men whose deaths the state’s records treated as isolated incidents. Later, Hugo “Yogi” Pinell, one of the longest-held prisoners in California’s security housing units, was added to that list after he was killed inside prison weeks after his release from solitary confinement.

Why the State Wanted This History Buried

Black August Today

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Black August had spread beyond San Quentin to prisons and organizing spaces across the country. Its clearest modern expression came in 2018, when incarcerated organizers launched a coordinated national prison strike timed to the 47th anniversary of George Jackson’s death, running from August 21 through September 9, the anniversary of Attica. Participants used work stoppages, hunger strikes, and sit-ins to demand improved conditions, an end to what they characterized as prison labor exploitation, and restored voting rights for people with felony convictions. The strike echoed the same demands Attica prisoners made in 1971, a near half-century apart.

The throughline from a Soledad guard tower in 1970 to a strike coordinated across dozens of state prison systems in 2018 is not sentimental. It is evidentiary. Institutions that police themselves tend to clear themselves, and the record they produce becomes the only history most people ever encounter. Black August exists because incarcerated people decided that was not going to be true of their dead.