Soledad Brothers

George Jackson met W. L. Nolen in San Quentin State Prison, where the pair co-founded the Marxist-Leninist Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) in 1966.

[5] Officer Opie G. Miller, an expert marksman armed with a rifle, watched over the inmates from a guard tower 13 feet (4 m) above the yard.

[5] In a letter from June 10, 1970, George Jackson described the scene as seeing three of his brothers having been "murdered [...] by a pig shooting from 30 feet above their heads with a military rifle.

On February 14, 1970, after an investigation into Mills' death by prison officials, George Lester Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Wesley Clutchette were indicted by the Monterey County grand jury for first-degree murder.

[5] The Soledad Brothers Defense Committee was formed by Fay Stender to assist in publicizing the case and raising funds to defend Jackson, Drumgo, and Clutchette.

Among the several celebrities, writers, and left-wing political activists that supported the SBDC and their cause were Julian Bond, Kay Boyle, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Hayden, William Kunstler, Jessica Mitford, Linus Pauling, Pete Seeger, Benjamin Spock, and Angela Davis.

On August 7, 1970, George Jackson's seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan held up a courtroom during the trial of prisoner James McClain, charged at the time with the attempted stabbing of a Soledad guard at the Marin County Civic Center.

Jonathan Jackson, after having armed McClain, temporarily freed three San Quentin prisoners, and took Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas, and three women on the jury hostage to secure the freedom of the "Soledad Brothers".

[12] On August 21, 1971, days before his trial in the guard's killing, the 29-year-old Jackson allegedly launched a riot at San Quentin with a 9 mm pistol.

Inconsistencies in the stories, although common among eyewitnesses in many crimes, fueled the controversy and helped to set off an uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York three weeks later.

Bingham's acquittal in 1986 on charges that he smuggled Jackson a gun and a wig, and was thereby responsible for the escape attempt and murders, occurred after he emerged from hiding for 13 years in order to stand trial.

[3] After Jackson's death, on March 27, 1972, the two surviving Soledad Brothers—Clutchette and Drumgo—were acquitted by a San Francisco jury of the original charges of murdering a prison guard on the grounds that the state had failed to completely prove its case.