By Stephen Oduntan

When George Ray “Bogard” Thomas first encountered Black August in 1987, he wasn’t at a rally, a university lecture or a community commemoration. He was entering California’s prison system.

Thomas had grown up in Watts’ Imperial Courts housing projects, one of five children raised in a single-parent household. His father sold drugs, he has said, and his mother relied on public assistance. By 13, Thomas was cycling through the juvenile justice system. He later became a co-founder of the Eastside Crips, part of a street organization he says initially drew inspiration from the community-protection politics of the Black Panther Party. A previous profile of Thomas in The Wave chronicled that journey from the streets of Watts through prison, cancer and eventually youth mentorship.

He would return to prison years later. A 2010 drug case led to a sentence of 31 years to life. The case grew out of a traffic stop in the Palmdale-Lancaster area in which sheriff’s deputies found cocaine base during a search of his person. Thomas later challenged aspects of that search, arguing that the search of his buttocks exceeded the consent he had given and that its manner and location were unreasonable. A suppression motion filed by his attorney was denied.

Thomas continued fighting his conviction through the courts. When his appeal reached California’s Second District Court of Appeal, Kamala Harris was the state’s attorney general. The 2013 opinion lists Harris and attorneys from her office as counsel for the state; it does not indicate that Harris personally participated in Thomas’s prosecution or appeal. The appellate court affirmed the judgment with modifications.

Nearly four decades after he first encountered Black August, prison remains written on his body.

Thomas speaks by pressing an electronic device against his throat, the result of stage 4 cancer and surgery that took his natural voice. He spent years in solitary confinement. Thomas says he endured sexual abuse in custody, lived amid mold and poor ventilation and received medical treatment he came to distrust. He believes conditions inside contributed to his illness.

“You ain’t alive to nobody out there because nobody don’t even care,” Thomas said of serving life in prison. “You a dead man walking.”

Yet Thomas said prison never broke his spirit.

He studied law behind bars, working through legal books and filing motions. Another incarcerated man offered to show him how to fight his case but made one thing clear: Thomas would have to do the work himself.

He did.

Thomas still keeps one of the legal books he studied—a book containing the same laws he says had helped put him behind bars.

“It’s the same book that got me out,” he said.

For Thomas, one of the central disciplines associated with Black August—study—is anything but theoretical. Knowledge became an instrument of survival.

Since emerging from California’s prisons more than four decades ago, Black August has traveled far beyond the walls that produced it. Its roots, however, lie in a prison movement that confronted racial violence, isolation and the treatment of incarcerated Black people—conditions organizers believed the outside world too easily ignored.

Now, as Black August enters its final days, longtime practitioners and formerly incarcerated people say the more important question is what happens when the month ends: Has the tradition spread faster than its meaning—and what remains when August is over?

Thandisizwe Chimurenga has been considering those questions for decades.

An author, multimedia journalist and activist who co-founded Black August Los Angeles, Chimurenga has observed Black August with other members of the group since the 1990s. She sees something encouraging in its growing visibility.

“What I’m seeing differently is more of an acknowledgment of Black August’s origins,” Chimurenga said.

Those origins matter, she said, because many of the men who developed the tradition were already incarcerated, organizing under conditions that gave prison officials enormous control over communication, discipline and daily life.

Its purpose was never celebration.

“It’s commemorating,” Chimurenga said. “It’s remembering, it’s honoring, and it’s recommitment.”

Even the increasingly common greeting “Happy Black August,” she said, misses some of that solemnity.

“It’s not a happy time,” Chimurenga said. “It’s a very heavy time. A solemn time.”

The exchange she learned is simpler. One person says, “Black August.”

The response: “Resistance.”

For veteran organizer Kalonji Changa, preserving that meaning requires more than knowing the history.

“Black August is not just a month,” Changa said. “It is a lifestyle. It’s a way of life.”

Changa, founder of Black Power Media and the FTP Movement, has spent August leading a study of George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, examining Jackson’s ideas about state power, political consciousness, and organizing.

But Changa worries that revolutionary politics can become easier to display than to practice. A Jackson quotation can be shared. Someone can fast. Neither necessarily requires sacrifice.

“Revolution is not a sexy thing,” Changa said. “Revolution is not cute. It’s not about being seen.”

Chimurenga is less pessimistic about Black August entering music, social media, and popular culture. Greater visibility, she believes, can lead people toward history they might otherwise never encounter.

The question is what they do once they find it.

Black August emphasizes four principles—study, fast, train, and fight. Someone who fasts without studying political prisoners, prison conditions or Black liberation movements, Chimurenga said, is “just not eating.”

Political prisoners remain central to that study.

Chimurenga cited Geronimo Ji-Jaga, Leonard Peltier, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Sundiata Acoli and Assata Shakur while discussing figures whose names became widely known in part because supporters outside prison kept their cases in public view.

But she is equally concerned about the names people don’t know.

She pointed to Khatari Gaulden and Shaka At-Thinnin, incarcerated organizers associated with the history from which Black August emerged. They represent what Chimurenga called the “nameless, faceless” brothers whose organizing behind prison walls never generated the public profiles of better-known figures.

That invisibility has another dimension: California places unusual restrictions on journalists seeking formal interviews with specific incarcerated people. Reporters may write to prisoners, receive calls from them or apply to visit them during regular visiting hours. Journalists on approved media visits may also conduct random interviews with consenting prisoners. But CDCR—California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation cannot arrange a one-on-one media interview with a specific incarcerated person, and ordinary visits cannot be recorded.

The restrictions have survived repeated attempts to change them. Between 1998 and 2012, California lawmakers passed nine bills seeking to restore greater media access to prisons. All nine were vetoed across four successive gubernatorial administrations—those of Pete Wilson, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown.

The effort continued under Gov. Gavin Newsom. In 2024, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 254, which would have required CDCR to permit prearranged interviews with specific incarcerated people, allowed journalists to document prison conditions and prohibited retaliation against prisoners for communicating with the media. Newsom vetoed it, citing concerns that included costs and the resources CDCR would need to safely accommodate increased media access.

For a tradition rooted in remembering people behind prison walls, the restrictions raise a larger question: Who gets to tell the public what happens inside when the people living there cannot easily speak directly to reporters?

Thomas understands what it means to become invisible that way.

He remembers Black August being widely understood among Black prisoners when he entered the system in the 1980s. Correctional officers understood its significance, too, he said.

Asked whether the tradition gave incarcerated Black men an identity or source of power that the institution could not entirely control, Thomas did not hesitate.

“Exactly,” he said. “Exactly right.”

Changa has seen why outside attention matters. He has worked on campaigns involving political prisoners, including Leonard Peltier, and said sustained contact and advocacy can make prison officials aware that someone outside is watching.

Thomas now tries to keep young people from following him behind the walls.

He works through the Tony Bogard Foundation, named for his late younger brother, Tony “Bogard” Thomas, a prominent Watts figure who helped sustain the 1992 gang truce between Bloods and Crips before being shot and killed in Imperial Courts in 1994.

George Thomas now teaches young people about Jackson and the history that produced Black August.

“Learn your history so you won’t never have to be incarcerated,” Thomas said. “You gotta look behind you to see what’s in front of you.”

That idea of looking backward also animates Changa’s view of the present. Technology has transformed surveillance, communication, and organizing, but he sees continuity in the systems Jackson wrote about.

“Nothing changed but the timestamp,” Changa said.

And so another Black August approaches its end.

The fast will end. Events will conclude. Social media will move on.

But incarceration will not.

For Chimurenga, August 31 has never represented a finish line. The history carries almost immediately into the 1971 Attica prison uprising, which began on Sept. 9, less than three weeks after Jackson was killed at San Quentin. The connection reinforces what she sees as a history that cannot be neatly contained within a single commemorative month.

So when August ends, she doesn’t.

“I just ride it through,” Chimurenga said.

Then she put it more simply.

“It doesn’t really end for me.”

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