This article originally appeared in Reckon. Reprinted with permission.
Dennis Haywood has spent the past two months preparing to fast during the Blackest month of the year.
Meal planning and sticking to a strict morning exercise schedule are a must for Haywood during Black August, an annual, month-long commemoration of the lives and legacies of Black political prisoners who challenged the prison industrial complex and the freedom fighters who continue the resistance against today. For 35 years, August has become a pivotal time of self-reflection, discipline and communal liberation for Haywood. Fasting from sunrise to sunset is one of the principles of the holiday along with studying works by Black revolutionaries, training and fighting in solidarity to the struggles we are still enduring today as a community. Black August was created following the deaths of activist and author George Jackson and his younger brother Jonathan Jackson. The siblings were both killed in the early 1970s by law enforcement as they challenged the injustices of mass incarceration.
Haywood experienced inequality behind bars while incarcerated at 20. Now 57, his creativity is uplifting the Black legacies and history of his hometown of Pasadena, Calif. He’s bringing that love to the screen as the founder of the Black August Film Festival, which will feature 51 films both virtually and in person at the Flintridge Center in Pasadena on Aug 17 and 18. Haywood started the event in 2022 after noticing the lack of Black films in white-led film festivals. The movies explore a range of social issues affecting the Black Diaspora from mass incarceration, housing and mental health.
“We have to understand that our struggle is not just our struggle, it’s all over the world,” Haywood said. “I hope it inspires people to look at other people’s struggle and see if you can support them in some kind of way and to respect what we have gone through as a people.”
The selections for this year’s festival span multiple genres, including an Afrofuturism film, a vampire series and a film produced by Hip Hop artist and actor Ice T. “Put The Guns Down: A World Epidemic” dives into the pains and societal issues of gun violence in South Central Los Angeles. Haywood is looking forward to viewers cheering on a California hip hop artist from the projects determined to stop the cycle of poverty and incarceration in his family while watching “HoodTrophy Bino Story: Breaking the Generational Curse.”
A documentary called “The Untold Isis Brantley Story” follows the journey of a Dallas woman during her 20-year court battle after being arrested, jailed and fined for braiding without a license during the natural hair movement. Haywood said the woman didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars to get a license.
“That’s the struggle to even do our own hair freely,” Haywood said. “Like, Who are you to tell me I can’t braid this lady’s hair? That’s just our culture. And you got to make us pay to be a part of our own culture? That don’t make sense.”
With this month being the 45th anniversary of the prison-based holiday, other organizations, such as Black August Los Angeles, are honoring the milestone year. But Haywood isn’t planning anything special, because to him it isn’t about that.
“For me, it’s not really about celebrating the years,” Haywood said. “It’s just about celebrating what it means. And celebrating the life of George and John. What they meant to the black struggle at that time.”
The film festival fits the spirit of Black August, which started by exposing the problems within the California prison system. In 1960, an 18-year-old George Jackson was accused of stealing $70 from a Los Angeles gas station. According to his book “Soledad Brother,” there was evidence of his innocence. But due to previous offenses, he listened to his court-appointed lawyer’s advice and took a plea deal to get less jail time. He instead received a one-year-to-life sentence and spent 10 years in Soledad and San Quentin prison. The majority of that time was spent in solitary confinement, which has been proven to cause long-term psychological damage in incarcerated individuals.
While his body was imprisoned, George Jackson made sure his mind remained free. He connected with two other Black revolutionaries in jail and he transformed his mind by studying Marxist text. He became a leading voice of the prison resistance movement by co-foundering the organization Black Guerilla Family and a field marshal for the Black Panther Party.
In his 1872 book “Blood In My Eye,” George Jackson wrote, “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.”
On Jan. 13, 1970, three Black incarcerated men were killed by a white prison guard who opened fire during a fight in the recreational yard. According to witnesses, no alarm whistles rang nor did the guard give a warning before making the fatal shots. Most of the imprisoned men went on a hunger strike to protest the deaths of their fellow inmates. A white prison guard was found dead three days later. George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette were accused of killing the guard and were put on trial for murder. The three men became known as the Soledad Brothers.
On Aug. 7, 1970, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson, educated about the radical teachings through his brother, rushed into the Marin County Courthouse while a judge was conducting a trial of San Quentin prisoner James McClain. With guns in hand, two other incarcerated men who were there as witnesses for the trial helped Jackson take the judge, the district attorney and three women jurors hostage. The plan was to use the captives during a negotiation for the freedom of the Soledad Brothers. Jackson, the judge and two of the imprisoned men were killed during a shootout with law enforcement. George Jackson would meet the same fate on Aug. 21, 1971 when he was shot and killed by a prison guard during an uprising at San Quentin Prison.
To honor Jackson brothers’ legacies, San Quentin inmates started the first Black August in 1979. They meditated and fed their minds with revolutionary works as they continued the fight of prison rights. Uprisings stirred in prisons across the nation following George Jackson’s death.
One of them being the Attica Prison Revolt in September 1971, where imprisoned men called for better living conditions – a demand that is being made by prisoners across the country to this day.
To Haywood, people need to pay attention to those issues. He’s noticing a growth in interest in Black August. But he is wary the holiday will be commercialized, leading to a detachment from its values.
“You also have to reflect and try to better yourself in this month. That’s what fasting and the reading is about,” Haywood said.
Learning about Black August was a life changing moment for Haywood. He was only four years old when George Jackson died, but he was taught about the importance of resistance at an early age. He lived down the street from the Jackson brothers’ mother. Haywood’s mother went to the same high school as Jonathan Jackson. She made sure her son knew about all things Black power and taught him about Johnathan Jackson’s legacy.
“She said he was quiet and brave,” Haywood said. “She just taught me to be that way growing up. That means listen more than you talk and do not let anybody walk over you under any circumstances.”
“We have to understand that our struggle is not just our struggle, it’s all over the world. I hope it inspires people to look at other people’s struggle and see if you can support them in some kind of way and to respect what we have gone through as a people.” — Dennis Haywood
Haywood admits he slipped away from his community-based teaching after falling for the allure of money and cars in his 20s. He resorted to selling drugs and he was caught with crack cocaine, powder cocaine and a gun at a time when the federal government was waging its “war on drugs.” Haywood said he was the 108th person charged under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which pumped billions of dollars into drug enforcement and created heftier sentences for drug-related crimes. Haywood was shocked when he was given a 15-year sentence.
“So at that time in 1987, I was like, ‘What’s going on?” Haywood said. “People I knew were getting like six months, eight months and stuff like that for cocaine and then all of a sudden I got 15.”
During his incarceration, Haywood watched the prison population swell with young Black men. He started connecting with older men who were imprisoned while George Jackson was still alive. Once they found out he was from the same neighborhood as Jonathan Jackson, they pulled Haywood in and started teaching him about Black August. They sat and meditated with Haywood while he was strengthening his discipline during his first fast at 22. They broke bread together and communed together before sunrise and after sunset.
By the time Haywood got out of jail in the 90s, he said the Black August teachings taught him about being a servant to his community.
“It made me want to rebuild what I helped destroy,” he said. “Crack cocaine really destroyed a lot of the Black community. So how can you atone for being a part of that destruction? The only way you could really atone is to help rebuild. So the film festival is a part of rebuilding through culture.”
So when Haywood created the film festival, he made sure it was for the people. The Flintridge Center conducts workshops for formerly incarcerated individuals. The festival also functions as a fundraiser for the Pasadena African American Film Foundation, which teaches teens filmmakers how to get better at the craft. The $25,000 Haywood has raised so far has helped buy cameras, computers and a studio space.
It was also important to have a Black event in Pasadena, especially since it is the city of Jonathan Jackson, science-fiction wordsmith Octavia Butler and Black Panther Party leader Michael ZinZun.
“We have all these groundbreaking African Americans who come from this community, but we don’t have any Black events,” he said. “So I’m just trying to preserve our history – our local history – while at the same time introducing it on a national level.”
