By Monica Moorehead
August 25, 2025

Monica Moorehead, a Workers World managing editor, gave the following excerpted remarks at an August 22, 2025, Workers World Party meeting in New York City in honor of Black August.

Our program tonight is to honor Black August, launched in 1979 by incarcerated members of the Black Guerrilla Family in San Quentin Prison, located in California. The political motivation for Black August was to honor the memory of comrade George Jackson, assassinated by prison guards in San Quentin on Aug. 21, 1971. This atrocity took place exactly one year and two weeks after Jackson’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, was murdered at a Marin County courthouse along with two other prisoners in an attempt to free George from prison.

George Jackson entered prison at the age of 17 for the so-called crime of taking $70 from a gas station in 1960. He was subsequently sentenced to a one-year to life sentence due to the repressive “three strikes you’re out” law in California, which stipulated that anyone found guilty of three charges automatically received a life sentence without chance of parole.

But it was behind the walls that a dynamic revolutionary was born. Jackson found liberation — politically and ideologically — thanks to readings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao-Tse Tung, Che, Fidel and many other anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and socialist thinkers throughout the Global South. Jackson applied these writings to the role of prisons under capitalism and the oppressive conditions of workers and oppressed peoples.

George came to the conclusion that revolution was the only solution to all the ills within a class society. So it became inevitable that he also found the Black Panther Party that fully embraced him.

The BPP held George in such high esteem that its leadership, led by Huey P. Newton, gave him the title of General and Field Marshal of the organization in 1969. He was in charge of recruiting other Black incarcerated workers to the Party.

During Jackson’s funeral, which brought out thousands of people in Oakland, California, Huey gave the eulogy, which stated in part: “George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He inspired prisoners, whom I later encountered, to put his ideas into practice, and so his spirit became a living thing. [H]e will go into immortality, because we believe that the people will win as they advance, generation upon generation.”

Jackson’s murder sparked the heroic Attica Prison Rebellion in upstate New York that began on Sept. 9, 1971. Prisoners united around demands to be recognized as workers with union rights and to be treated as human beings. This four-day liberated siege of the prison ended in the massacre of 40 inmates by then Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Black August lives on today

Since the founding of Black August almost 50 years ago, its historic significance has encompassed other important liberation struggles of Black resistance. For example, it was exactly 30 years ago when another great imprisoned leader and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal, was sentenced to death on Aug. 17, 1995, by then Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. August 17 just happened to be the birthdate of Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist leader of the largest Black organization of 1 million people in the Back to Africa Movement during the 1920s that came under attack by the racist status quo.

Our party was called upon by Safiya Bukhari, a member of the Black Liberation Army and a founder of the Jericho Prison Movement, to help organize an emergency demonstration in Philadelphia on Aug. 12, 1995, five days before Mumia was scheduled to be executed. That demonstration brought out 10,000 activists, the largest for Mumia at that time. This action forced Ridge to rescind the death warrant, and Mumia is still alive today, off of death row and still fighting to be free.

The legacy of Black August still means resistance against a dying capitalist system on a worldwide scale. It means resistance against police occupation of oppressed communities in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn and now the real threat of martial law in the form of the National Guard in D.C. and other urban cities with large Black populations.

The reality is that Black August should not be relegated to just one month, similar to Black History Month. Black August is every minute of every day whenever white supremacy, in any form, raises its ugly head. It is anchored of course in the Black struggle for liberation, but Black August should incorporate the struggles of oppressed peoples on a global scale, whether it is the migrant struggle against ICE and the Border Patrol terror or the Palestinian resistance against U.S.-backed Zionist occupation and genocide.

And there are struggles against neocolonialism in Africa, especially in the Sahel countries that are militarily giving the boot to Western imperialism as an important step towards winning their independence and sovereignty. All of these struggles and more have also felt a close affinity to the Black struggle.