An ambitious account of a day that changed America forever, the vast family history that led up to it, and the lives it changed--told from the perspective of Black Panther George Jackson's nephew, Jonathan Jackson's son. In thirty-six minutes on a sweltering day in August 1970 there occurred one of the most mysterious and violent acts in American history. The protagonist that day was a boy, barely a man, seventeen years of age, named Jonathan Peter Jackson. He was attempting to free the Soledad Brothers, who included his older brother and hero George Jackson, then 28 years old and in prison. Jonathan's son, the writer of this book, wasn't born yet. Jonathan Jr. would only learn who his father was nine years later, when he and his mother were still fugitives. In order to understand the actions of that day, and to know himself, the younger Jonathan Jackson had to research and restore the history of his family on both sides, going back a hundred years and more, and he had to write this book, telling one of the last great stories of our time from the point of view of those who came after.
The act of resistance that day in August 1970 could only be understood alongside the condition of slavery that his forefathers had escaped a hundred years earlier. His white mother's love for his father could only be understood through the lens of her own history, including her father's abandonment of her mother and herself, and her Kansas roots.
Notes of a Radical Son is many things: the story of the beginning of the end of the Black Panther Party in America, the story of one young man's crusade to free his brother, but most urgently it is the story of a child who becomes a man who comes to understand himself through the legacy of America's last great freedom movement.
