“We are cozy cuddly/armed and dangerous/and we will/raze the fucking prisons/to the ground.” In an attempt to deliver on this promise, the George Jackson Brigade launched a violent three-year campaign in the mid-1970s against corporate and state institutions in the Pacific Northwest. This campaign, conceived by a group of blacks and whites, both straight and gay, claimed fourteen bombings, as many bank robberies, and a jailbreak. Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving members of the George Jackson Brigade, Guerrilla USA provides an inside-out perspective on the social movements of the 1970s, revealing the whole era in a new and more complex light. It is also a compelling exploration of the true nature of crime and a provocative meditation on the tension between self-restraint and anger in the process of social change.
Daniel Burton-Rose is the editor of Creating a Movement with Teeth: A Documentary History of the George Jackson Brigade, and coeditor, with Dan Pens and Paul Wright, of The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry, among other books.
“In this astonishing micro-history, Daniel Burton-Rose captures the pathos of the New Left's bizarre sequel: the gang who bombed Seattle.”—Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians
"In allowing the members of the George Jackson Brigade to speak for themselves through interviews with the author or through their written statements and diaries, the motives, emotions, and commitment of the young self-described revolutionaries come alive and the era is revealed as in no other work that I have read."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Outlaw Woman
"Guerrilla USA is an engaged and engaging work, an intimate account of a buried piece of American history. Daniel Burton-Rose combines exhaustive scholarship with passionate partisanship to create an excruciatingly honest portrait of a moment when hope and history almost rhymed. Tacking back and forth between the tiniest of local details and the concentric circles of economic condition, historical flow, and cultural context, he captures with precision and immediacy the contradictions at the center of a recent radical upsurge."—Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-war Activist
358 pp.6 x 9Illus: 28 b/w photographs, 1 map
9780520264281$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Jun 2010