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Stone presents academy's scroll to Mrs. Georgia Jackson, who accepts for her deceased son.

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Academy President Lincoln and entertainer Cosby address the second annual gathering of backers.

BLACK ACADEMY CITES JACKSON'S BOOK, OTHER WINNING WORKS OF ART

BY CORDELL THOMPSON

During his tormented lifetime, George Jackson would hardly have been wooed or called an associate by some of the people who now have come to see a systematic pattern in his death and the spiritual murder of so many Black men in and out of America's prisons. Be they professors or poets, pimps or pushers, many Black Americans are beginning to believe that the American system has the same fate in store for them that it had for Jackson and are beginning to realize that the one salvation may be the unity of Black people.

It was perhaps, with this realization in mind that the Black Academy of Arts and Letters named the former Black inmate, who was killed at San Quentin (Calif.) Prison last month, winner of its first non-fiction book award. At its second annual awards dinner in New York, the Academy, founded in April, 1969, and made up of 58 Black scholars, intellectuals, authors and entertainers, chose Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, as the best non-fiction work by a Black American last year. The work was chosen not only because of its "right on" and stringent analysis of white America set to a beautiful prose, but also because of a realization of the need for unity at which a great many Black Americans are finally arriving.

Coming less than a week after the Attica (N.Y.) Prison tragedy that claimed the lives of 40 prisoners and guards, the mood of



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Accepting award from Bennett is Weaver, Douglass' kin.

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Symphony conductor Lewis presents Ellington's award to his grandson, Edward.

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Awardee Dunham is given a surprise kiss by one of her former dancing troupe stars, Janoye Aikins.

the banquet was pervaded by sober reflections on the conditions of Black men imprisoned in the nation, and speeches by the participants reflected the new and growing concern of Black Americans on the outside for their brethren on the inside of prison institutions.

Chuck Stone, former special assistant to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and now director of minority affairs at Education Testing Services (ETS), in presenting the award to Jackson's mother, Mrs. Georgia Jackson, offered: "To George Jackson.... In your work, we have found the eloquence so often observed in the forbidden writings of Black slaves; we see the ominous clarity the horror that forever surrounds our existence; we see, as you saw, that we too are pressed for time. All the time."

Accepting the award that carried a cash prize of $500, Mrs. Jackson announced that she has indeed become a revolutionary mother, dedicating the rest of her life to destroying all that which kills Black men. "I only wish that George was alive and that he could be here. He had so little happiness in his life," she said. "I agree with (the late) Dr. (Frederick) Douglass, that we have been happy and clapping too long, while we watch white men put away and kill our Black men. I expected more from Black leadership in this country, but all we've gotten from them is excuses for what happened at San Quentin. At least they could have condemned the people responsible for