Letters: Race and imprisonment in history

Re “Brothers in crime,” Opinion, April 28

As a historian, I must take exception to Megan Marshall’s ahistorical piece comparing Jonathan Jackson with Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

When Jackson stepped into the Marin County courthouse that day in 1972, he was attempting to redress what he and hundreds of thousands of other Americans saw as a criminal justice system that was little more than an instrument of white hegemony. While the young Jackson’s actions may have been strategically flawed, suicidal or just plain wrongheaded, the fact remains that any thinking American on that day knew precisely what Jackson was protesting and why.

Clearly this is not the case with the Tsarnaev brothers.

And Marshall is wrong to claim that Jonathan Jackson’s brother George has been largely forgotten. Last Monday, my upper-division UCLA history seminar, which is focused on black nationalism in the context of global anti-colonialism, spent much of the class discussing George Jackson’s “forgotten” letters, and students found remarkable how prescient they are in light of what we now see as the prison industrial complex and the criminalization of race.

Mary F. Corey

Beverly Hills

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