The George Jackson Brigade formed in Seattle in 1975 out of the city's prison-abolition milieu — the circles around Left Bank Books, the anti-Bakke and Walla Walla prisoner-support committees, and collectives like Men Against Sexism. Its members were unusual for the armed underground: several were ex-convicts politicized inside Washington's prisons, several were openly gay or lesbian, and the group spanned anarchists and communists who hammered out each action's politics together. They took their name from George Jackson, the Soledad Brother killed at San Quentin in 1971.
Unlike the student-born undergrounds, the Brigade's communiqués spoke the language of the prison yard and the picket line, and its actions were pegged to local struggles — a sensibility that made it, in the words of its own history, "the guerrilla group that the prison movement built."