This Black August, Americans will study, meditate, fast, exercise – and read – for Black liberation

A black-and-white image taken from above of a crowd of hundreds of people raising their fists. — Mourners give the Black Panther salute as the body of George Jackson is carried from St Augustine's Episcopal church in Oakland, California, on 28 August 1971. Photograph: Robert Klein/AP

In the 1960s and 1970s, California was brimming with radical energy and potential, which also meant it was brimming with extreme backlash. The Black Panthers, a revolutionary Black political activist organization founded in response to police brutality, were organizing members at the same time Ronald Reagan, then the California governor and the future US president, and others were working to repress the group and its growing political influence.

At the same time, several young men, some incarcerated at San Quentin prison, and some elsewhere in the California prison system, were under attack, being assaulted and murdered by the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist group, and sympathetic guards. Some of the men – WL Nolen; George Jackson, a field marshal of the Black Panther party who also founded a prison chapter of the organization; and others – decided they needed to band together to defend themselves and formed the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), a Marxist-Leninist prison gang.

Many of the early members of the BGF, most barely in their 20s, would not live to see the 1980s: Nolen was killed, along with two others, by San Quentin prison guards on 13 January 1970, George Jackson was killed in San Quentin prison on 21 August 1971; George’s brother, Jonathan Jackson, was killed on 7 August 1970; and Khatari Gaulden was killed in San Quentin prison on 1 August 1978.

“As a result of these deaths, the group known as Black Guerrilla Family decided they needed to commemorate the deaths of their comrades Jonathan, George and Khatari, and they began the process of deciding how they were going to do so,” said Jalil Muntaqim, a community organizer and former Black Liberation Army (BLA) member. He was convicted and imprisoned for several decades for the murder of two New York police department officers. “They began organizing what was called Black August,” Muntaqim said.

Since its creation, Black August has spread beyond prison walls and is commemorated both by people who are and are not incarcerated today. True to its roots, people study, meditate and hone their activism during the month. It is a time when people push for the release of Black political and revolutionary leaders, many of whom are now in their 70s and 80s, from prison.

Today, organizations across the country use the month as a means of activation for their local communities. Each year in Tallahassee, Florida, the Tallahassee Dream Defenders host a Black August showcase. Black August in the Park, held annually in Durham, North Carolina, blends music, dancing and film screenings with educational opportunities. In Oakland, California, the Black August Arc of Liberation Commemoration honors the legacy of Black August through art. Using the tenets of the original Black August commemoration, the Brooklyn-based Free Black Women’s Library created a challenge to engage readers, along with hosting events throughout the month of August.

The historian and author Gerald Horne said that “there’s a striking confluence that occurs in August”. It’s when, on 1 August, many Caribbean nations celebrate Emancipation Day; when, on 11 August, the Watts uprising began; when, on 21 August, Nat Turner’s rebellion began; and when, on 23 August, the Haitian revolution began, but it’s also the birth month of pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey, Black Panther Fred Hampton and Black liberationist Chokwe Lumumba.

“It’s important for us to understand that Black August does not come out of a vacuum. It comes out of a movement, out of a determination of people trying to defend themselves against harm and the reality of the US penal slave system,” Muntaqim said.

BGF members looked at the month of August, noted its almost divine confluence of births, deaths and events that are significant to Black history and Black liberation, and decided that the month needed particular acknowledgement.

“They evolved a concept of study, exercise and fasting for the month of August, and by virtue of them promoting Black August, it has now become a national and an international institution,” Muntaqim said. “People are to fast, they are to exercise. They are also to study and reflect, meditate. The primary principle of Black August and the golden objective is to restore our capacity for our humanity, and our ability to resist systems of white supremacy, racial capitalism, colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism.”

The commemoration remains “a way to talk about freeing Black political prisoners generally”, Horne, the author and historian, said. Several Black Panthers or other members of Black radical organizations who, despite now being in their 70s and 80s and, in many cases, in failing health, are still in prison, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Thomas “Tahaka” Gaither and Veronza Bowers Jr. Many others have died in prison within the last several years.

“You’re protesting injustice when you protest the fact that people like Mumia [Abu-Jamal] are still behind bars,” Horne said. “By protesting injustice, you’re also protesting the spread of injustice. In other words, ultimately, it’s an act of self-preservation because if you allow injustice to fester, it can obviously spread right to your front door.”

It’s also an opportunity for international solidarity.

“Black August is truly important because it creates a foundational basis for our resistance to other people’s resistance and in foreign people around the world, we are resisting,” Muntaqim said. “That’s the reason why we have to have international solidarity and build our relationship with others around the world … Black August is one of the areas which we can show or prove our capacity to resist.”

Each year, people across the country and world use Black August as a time to be intentional about engaging with Black radical literature. They study Black precolonial history and learn about slave rebellions and the ongoing fight for liberation. Here are some texts to read this Black August:

Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B Wells
by Ida B Wells

The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 BC to 2000 AD
by Chancellor Williams

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
by WE Burghardt Du Bois

Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Negroes With Guns
by Robert F Williams

A Fighting Dream: The Political Writings of Claudia Jones
by Claudia Jones

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
by Walter Rodney

Black Skin, White Masks
by Frantz Fanon

Harlem Shadows: Poems
by Claude McKay

Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
by Ashley D Farmer

The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
by Gerald Horne

Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State
by Edward Onaci