The expression “domestic terrorism” is a stark confrontation for those of us who live in and expect peace in our day-to-day lives, a reminder that others within our domesticity don’t live in peace and don’t expect that anything other than violence will change things.
Marin County has diversity; it holds both San Quentin State Prison and George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. On 7 August 1970, the 17-year-old brother of a jailed black activist burst into a Marin County courtroom and abducted the white judge, the white prosecutor and three jurors. Jackson, the judge and others were killed, the prosecutor paralysed and a juror seriously injured.
The black activist was one of the Soledad Brothers, black inmates at Soledad Prison charged with the murder of a white guard allegedly in retaliation for another guard’s shooting of three black inmates three days before during a riot with the Aryan Brotherhood.
The prosecutor, who was the nephew by marriage of the judge, later became a superior court judge. He had gotten back to work quickly and by February 1971, he was prosecuting a man who had laid a booby trap against home invaders:
As a prosecutor, I’m definitely against burglary. [But if you allow a trap like this] in effect you would allow a ‘revolutionary’ to set up one in his house and then trick a policeman into entering.
The activist, George Jackson, died a fortnight later attempting to break out of San Quentin. The trial of others involved, at Marin County courthouse, was the longest in the state’s history and the defendants are known to history as the San Quentin Six.
Two days before the kidnapping, ex-UCLA academic Angela Davis had bought a shotgun used in the event from a pawn shop in San Francisco. She was later captured, tried and acquitted, and is, five decades on, an academic at UCSC.
“Tamu” means Swahili for sweet, and Davis has noted that many activists at that time took up African names. Ironically, a Californian co-operative which had launched as a black empowerment effort in 1968, released its “Talking Tamu” doll in the following years.
