Where Black August comes from
Black August was born in California prisons in 1979, specifically San Quentin, the oldest prison in California.
But what was its impetus?
On August 7, 1970, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson stormed the Marin County courthouse trying to free his older brother George and two other imprisoned men. He was killed that day, along with William Christmas and James McClain.
One year after Jonathan's death, on August 21, 1971, George Jackson, a Black Panther field marshal imprisoned since age 18 for a $70 robbery and author of Soledad Brother (read it), was shot and killed by San Quentin guards.
If we mean what we say when we talk about supporting the most marginalized, we cannot leave behind the people the state has most thoroughly isolated: those locked away from their communities, subjected to state violence, and denied their most basic freedoms.
For this reason, this month we stand alongside other comrades keeping Black August alive to speak truth to power and honor Black political prisoners, Black freedom struggles, and resistance against racial, colonial, and imperialist oppression.
Forced Labor & Domestic Colonialism
More than 2,000 incarcerated people live in California's conservation fire camps, where they can be deployed to fight wildfires threatening communities and property. In a 2017 CDC study of incarcerated California wildland firefighters, 25% were Black and 55% were Hispanic or Latino.
These are people already caught in a prison system that disproportionately cages Black and Latino people. Now their bodies are used to fight the consequences of a climate crisis they did not create. And when climate disaster reaches the prison walls, incarceration can turn environmental catastrophe into lethal captivity. During Hurricane Katrina, guards abandoned Orleans Parish Prison as floodwaters rose, leaving people locked in their cells without food, water, electricity, or adequate medical care. Some stood in sewage-contaminated water up to their chests or necks. At one point, over 500 incarcerated people were unaccounted for on evacuation lists. The people who were supposed to be under state custody became people the state itself could not, or would not, account for.
These are not isolated failures. We are living within a centuries-old system that has repeatedly treated land, labor, and human lives as resources to be controlled and extracted from.
We are all caught in an extractive capitalist-imperialist system spearheaded by the United States government, built through the violent seizure of Indigenous land and the kidnapping and chattel enslavement of Indigenous African peoples. This colonial order turned land into property and human beings into property, making both land and labor available for accumulation.
This order continues today in who controls land and resources, who performs dangerous work, who is confined in places where environmental hazards can become deadly, and whose suffering is treated as an acceptable cost.
Environmental destruction is therefore not only just an environmental issue. It is an issue of race, class, colonialism, and power: who controls the land, who profits from its exploitation, and whose bodies are left to bear the consequences.
Racial Terror & Political Dissent
The kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans created enormous wealth for the white ruling class through stolen labor and the slave trade, while establishing a racial hierarchy that survived the abolition of slavery.
That hierarchy has been repeatedly rebuilt through law, policing, labor, and punishment. Black Codes and segregation gave way to convict leasing, prison labor, racial terror, discriminatory policing, and mass incarceration. The people most vulnerable to the system have been controlled by it, while people who organize against it have repeatedly been targeted for punishment.
The Black working class has been at the center of resistance to that system for generations. The liberation of Black people in the United States will be necessary to dismantle American capitalism and imperialism. The ruling class knows this, and they're doing everything they can to keep that from happening.
We're now watching a new wave of neo-McCarthyism: political dissent is once again being framed as a threat to national security.
Last September, the Trump regime designated "antifa" a "domestic terrorist organization," even though no such legal category exists. In Texas, activists who protested outside an ICE detention center were sentenced to 30 to 100 years under terrorism statutes. Their alleged crime was not simply opposing the state. They were protesting the imprisonment of immigrants and standing in solidarity with people held captive inside.
Within detention centers, Black immigrants are disproportionately represented among people facing deportation on criminal grounds, making immigration detention another site where race, imprisonment, and criminalization converge.
The state is increasingly treating solidarity with imprisoned people as a threat in itself. In Minnesota, 15 more organizers were indicted this summer, with evidence reportedly including a sweatshirt and a Signal message.
The machinery changes, but the logic doesn't: contain the people who resist the system, especially those who organize around the people it has already contained, then call that safety and liberty.
The Criminalization of Survival
Mass incarceration doesn't make society safer. It removes people from their communities, subjects them to state control, and concentrates violence against people already made vulnerable by race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and other forms of marginalization.
We observe that those deemed dangerous by the state are often people already made vulnerable by the same social order: the poor, the racialized, immigrants, survivors, queer and trans people, and people who refuse to accept their assigned place within it. And increasingly, those who organize around them are being treated as threats, too. People who defend survivors, protest imprisonment, resist state violence, and insist that those society has discarded are still worthy of care, have all been marked as terrorists.
George Jackson wrote in a letter from inside San Quentin that,
“Those who are in prisons are destined to be there under the capitalist system. They are guilty of trying to survive as righteous human beings who will not submit to the hideous dehumanization of the system.”
More than 50 years later, the people most targeted by imprisonment are still overwhelmingly ripped from the working class and communities marginalized by the racial and social order. Imprisoning them does not make those communities safer. It protects the system that produces their dispossession.
Meanwhile, the planet is being pushed toward catastrophe by the same systems of extraction and accumulation. The planet is burning under the same system that cages and exploits us. We can accept the world it is building, or we can fight to build another one: a world where care, solidarity, and love for the most marginalized are not treated as threats.
They disappeared him. Then they moved him 3,000 miles away.
Malik Muhammad is a Black Palestinian anarchist and antifascist serving a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the 2020 George Floyd uprising in Portland.
In March 2026, after a call-in campaign demanding that Malik be released from solitary confinement, their profile disappeared from Oregon's prison messaging system and the state's inmate database. Oregon officials would only say that Malik had been moved to a "confidential location."
What followed made the state's silence harder to ignore.
In April, Malik managed to get a letter out from Kirkland Correctional Institution in South Carolina, roughly 3,000 miles from Oregon. Their attorney had not been told about the transfer and was unable to reach them through normal channels.
The Intercept later reported that Malik's attorney believes the transfer was retaliation for Malik's organizing and advocacy for other incarcerated people. Oregon has denied that the transfer was retaliatory. This August, it was found that Malik received a Disciplinary Report six days before being transferred to South Carolina, citing that writings on their blog were having “an impact on the safety and security” of the facility.
The state didn't make Malik disappear from the world. It made them disappear from within a system that their family, supporters, and attorney relied on to find them. This is a system that cannot be reformed.
Ways to support Malik's fight:
- Write to Malik:
1 - Write their full name, DOC number, and address:
Malik Muhammad #400523
Marion 183
Broad River Correctional Institute
4460 Broad River Road
Columbia SC 29210
Please state your intentions clearly — what your capacity is for helping out, how often you are able to communicate, and what methods of communication you’d like to use.
2 - Make sure your envelope has a clear and complete return address in the top left corner. Mail without a return address may not be delivered.
3 - Follow mail guidelines. Do not discuss Malik’s case or any ongoing legal matters. Avoid any inappropriate or inflammatory content.
- Send Malik reading materials: malikspeaks.noblogs.org/support
- Donate to their commissary/living expenses: tinyurl.com/malikfundraiser
Still fighting for Chrystul.
We told Chrystul's story last Black August. We're telling it again because her fight is not over.
Chrystul was 17 when she killed Randall Volar, the man who had trafficked her since she was 16 and who police already knew was abusing multiple Black girls. In 2024, she was sentenced to 11 years, ineligible for early release. She won't be free until roughly 2033.
The state criminalized a survivor for defending herself.
Sex trafficking and prostitution charges used against Black women have a legacy going back to chattel slavery: controlling Black women's bodies, then punishing them for fighting back.
We will never stop advocating for Chrystul and neither should you.
Letters remind our imprisoned comrades that they are not forgotten. Your words can break the isolation, lift Chrystul's spirit, and connect her fight to every fight: against extraction, against exploitation, against a system that was never built to protect us.
Write to her. Show her the people are still here with her until she's free.
How to send mail to Chrystul:
1 - Write Chrystul's full name and DOC number:
Chrystul Kizer #00675639
Use the official mailing address:
Taycheedah Correctional Institution
PO BOX 189
Phoenix, MD 21131
2 - Make sure your envelope has a complete return address in the top left corner.
3 - Do not discuss Chrystul's case or ongoing legal matters. Avoid inflammatory content.