The SLA grew out of the Bay Area's prison-visiting and tutoring programs of the early 1970s, where young white radicals from Berkeley met Black prisoners politicized by George Jackson's writings. Donald DeFreeze, who had been part of a Black Cultural Association program at Vacaville, walked away from Soledad in March 1973 and, sheltered by movement contacts, took the name "General Field Marshal Cinque." Around him gathered a dozen radicals — Nancy Ling Perry, Patricia Soltysik, Angela Atwood, Bill and Emily Harris, Willie Wolfe, Camilla Hall, Joe Remiro, Russell Little — under a seven-headed cobra symbol and the slogan "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."
Unlike the Weather Underground, which bombed property with warnings, the SLA embraced armed action against people from the start — a choice that isolated it from almost the entire left and defined everything that followed.