George Jackson — sentenced at eighteen to one-year-to-life for a $70 robbery, and kept eleven years by the indeterminate-sentence board as he became a revolutionary writer — was charged with two Soledad Brothers, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, in the 1970 death of a guard, days after a tower guard killed three Black prisoners with impunity. Soledad Brother made him the prison movement's voice worldwide; his seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan died raiding the Marin courthouse that August, the case that swept up Angela Davis, acquitted in 1972.

George Jackson was shot dead by San Quentin guards on August 21, 1971 — the surviving Soledad Brothers were acquitted months later — and six prisoners were then tried for the day's guard deaths in the 16-month San Quentin Six trial, shackled to the courtroom floor. The Jackson cases made "political prisoner" a category American courts could no longer pretend not to understand.