In an Age of Repression, Black August Reminds Us That Rebellion Is Necessary

[S. E. Anderson]

In an Age of Repression, Black August Reminds Us That Rebellion Is Necessary

The legacy of George Jackson, Jitu Sadiki, and imprisoned freedom fighters calls on us to reject obedience, build collective power, and fight for liberation.

 

Melina Abdullah

laprogressive.com

08.01.2026

“I always loved Black people, but coming to consciousness helped me to understand, intellectually, why.” Jitu Sadiki’s love, like his voice, his body, his being, is deep, heavy, infinite. It rumbles, like the earth’s core. And envelopes, like the night sky.

I have been deeply blessed to be in community with Comrade Jitu of the Black August Resistance Collective, former political prisoner, a founder of Black August, and righteous brother in struggle. Up until his passing two years ago, Jitu and Black Panther elder Harold Welton, who continues to organize with Black August Los Angeles, would spend the evening with us for every Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles August meeting.

They taught us…clearly and firmly…that Black August was initiated inside the California prison system in 1979 to commemorate our political prisoners, awaken all of us to our own revolutionary power and potential, and adhere to the call to “free ‘em all.”

Black August was initiated in the spirits of Black-man-child Jonathan Jackson, who led the 1970 Marin County Courthouse uprising at just 17-years-old “courage in one hand, assault rifle in the other,” and Comrade George Jackson, Jonathan’s older brother, supreme guerilla and premier strategist of the prison movement, who was assassinated inside San Quentin State Prison on August 21, 1971. We “fast, study, train, and fight” for the entire month, abstaining from meals from sunup to sundown, reading and engaging in intellectual work, building strong bodies, and (re)committing ourselves to the struggle for Black liberation.

Blood in My Eye was completed just days before George Jackson’s martyrdom. The brilliant and insightful work, which outlines what it means for Black and oppressed people to survive in occupied communities, righteously resist, and ultimately liberate our people, serves as the Black Lives Matter Grassroots Black August read each year. As a de facto war is raging on Black people, coupled with overwhelming repression by a militarized state – theories of guerilla warfare found in the text are foundational. To be clear, this is not 1971; we cannot outgun our oppressor or beat their army with rocks. Yet guerilla warfare remains an “invulnerable” praxis, instructive to our resistance.

Guerilla warfare is invoked with when lands – be they countrysides in Vietnam and Cuba or urban centers like Watts and DC’s Southeast – are overtaken by fascist, parasitic, and violent forces. It comes when oppressed people are inspired to rebel, despite the unevenness of the match up, rather than accept their collective super-exploitation and death. At a moment when trump and his regime have called for the rounding up, imprisonment, and deportation of intellectuals and movement workers, when racist police and white supremacists have been granted open season on Black lives, trans bodies are criminalized, the autonomy of women and girls legally revoked, dialectic extremes of wealth and poverty cemented as policy, and any semblance of democracy upended, rebellion is no longer optional.

Black August is a time of great responsibility and, too, opportunity for oppressed people to come together and free ourselves by resisting on every front. We must refuse to follow the rules made by our oppressor. Guerilla warfare means assessing our collective power and striking wherever and however we can.

Black August also requires that we focus specifically on those who sacrifice their freedom for ours. Political prisoners are those caged because of their political work, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Black revolutionary journalist, former Panther, and MOVE supporter, who has spent the last 44 years inside a Pennsylvania prison, with nearly 30 on death row.

Political prisoners are also those who, like George Jackson and Jitu Sadiki, came to consciousness inside prison, as has Jay Burton – co-founder of three BLM Grassroots prison chapters. Jay was imprisoned after having been accused of a crime when he was only 16. At 53, he remains behind the walls largely in retaliation for his jailhouse lawyering – which has freed dozens, and his Black liberation work that transcends prison walls.

And we must heed the call to “free ‘em all.” Inasmuch as police descend from paddyrollers, prisons stand as new-fangled plantations. Wallace Pack Unit in Grimes County, Texas sits on land where enslaved Black people picked cotton to enrich white “owners.” Over the cries of our Ancestors from the ground, Black teenager Karmelo Anthony has been sentenced to 35 years there after being forced to defend himself from white attackers.

Guerilla warfare as a praxis, especially during Black August means that we must do all that we can to free our Brothers, as well as our siblings not named here. It means that we operationalize the “every means necessary” approach and it means we fight until we win.

I pray that I do right by Comrade Jitu’s teachings and that our ongoing Black freedom work, including our Black August commemorations, help us rethink and engage around our roles as guerilla warriors.  ///

 

 

 

 

 

 

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s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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