Malcolm X’s prison letters not only chronicle his relationship with his relatives, most significantly with Ella, but also provide a portal through which readers begin to gather some notion of the profound thinker and activist he would become. The letters are a bedrock of his growth and development, a form of self-discovery and rumination that will guide him to a higher level of social and political commitment. The exchange of missives between him and Elijah Muhammad is like a graduate course in history and Black Nationalism, all of which shaped his quest for enlightenment and leadership. Readers get a chance to look over his shoulder as he grapples with his incarceration and how best to use this time to improve himself as a writer, thinker, and debater. In effect, this is the beginning of Malcolm X who would evolve into El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, an internationalist and spokesperson for the oppressed and marginalized.

Angela Davis, George Jackson, and other prominent Black intellectuals and radicals shaped abolition in different ways. The evolution and popularization of abolition promoted by Angela Davis was influenced by her own traumatic incarceration. Jon Jackson, the younger brother of George Jackson, had worked with Angela Davis to support the incarcerated men through the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. Without her permission, in August 1970, Jonathan Jackson took guns belonging to Angela Davis to wage a raid at Marin County Courthouse in order to take hostages that could be exchanged to free Black prisoners. Prison guards shot and killed Jon Jackson, two Black prisoners, and a white judge in a stationary van. Davis fled the state, fearing reprisal from reactionaries, and was arrested by the FBI in October. During her incarceration, George Jackson was also killed by prison guard(s) in August 1971. Acquitted of all charges in 1972, Angela Davis advocated for abolition and over decades aligned abolition with advocacy academics; her work also increasingly focused on gender leadership of women and feminism, as noted in Women, Race and Class.

George Jackson inhabits a central position in the living archive of diasporic Black radical and global revolutionary intellectuals. This chapter examines how Jackson’s political thought emerged through his consistent self-identification as an ordinary Black person inhabiting the historical, structural antiblackness of the United States. Against the telos of many carceral/prison narratives, Jackson’s Soledad Brother reflects the developing thought of a Black liberationist, carceral insurrectionist, and diasporic revolutionary whose primary political and cultural work is not focused on achieving his personal freedom (i.e. release from prison) but rather on organizing and proliferating radical ruptures of an existing oppressive order – what Jackson famously identifies in Blood in My Eye as “perfect disorder.” To study Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye is to meditate on the consistency and militant commitment with which Jackson exhibited characteristics that made him an influential educator, organizer, and political intellectual during and beyond his lifetime, especially among contemporaneous and subsequent generations of politically activated (Black) captives of the state.