The Drum Remembers: Sound Medicine for Black August

What Black August Remembers

George Jackson was killed by prison guards during a Black prison rebellion at San Quentin on August 21, 1971. He had spent ten years incarcerated, seven and a half of them in solitary confinement, and had become a leader in the Black Panther Party and the author of Soledad Brother — a book that turned his letters into one of the most widely read accounts of Black political imprisonment in America. His younger brother Jonathan was killed the year before, on August 7, 1970, attempting to free Black prisoners from a Marin County courtroom. Jeffrey “Khatari” Gaulden was killed inside San Quentin on August 1, 1978.

In 1979, a group of San Quentin prisoners named August in honor of all three men — and in solidarity with other Black political prisoners of the era, including the Pontiac 17, Earnest Graham and Eugene Allen, the Reidsville Brothers, and Imani Harris, all of whom faced life sentences or death. What they proposed was not a memorial service. It was a discipline: study, fast, train, fight — a month of reading, physical readiness, and self-restraint, practiced together across prison walls that were built specifically to keep people from practicing anything together. By the late 1970s, the observance had spread far beyond San Quentin, and it is still kept today by organizers, educators, and communities across the country.

The Drum They Tried to Silence

Long before Black August had a name, the drum had already been recognized — correctly — as a threat. Traditional talking drums across West Africa could carry a message from village to village by imitating the pitch patterns of spoken language, moving news up to 100 miles in an hour. That capability crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people, and enslavers noticed. After the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, in which rebels used a drum to signal one another, the colony’s 1740 Slave Act explicitly banned “using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together, or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs or purposes.” Most plantations enforced a version of this ban by the early 1700s.

New Orleans’ Congo Square became one of the only sanctioned exceptions in North America — a single gathering place where enslaved people could drum, dance, sing, and trade, starting in the 1740s. Everywhere else, the drum went underground, encoded into hand-clapping, foot-stomping, and the ring shout — rhythm surviving in whatever form the law hadn’t thought to outlaw yet. The through-line to Black August is direct: what was banned was never really the sound. It was the organizing the sound made possible.

They didn’t ban the drum because it was loud. They banned it because it was organizing.

A Body That Remembers How to Resist

Modern research on rhythm and the nervous system — the same science Ubuntu Village has traced in Music, Ritual, and the Science of Belonging — shows what communities who kept drumming alive already knew: shared rhythm regulates the body, synchronizes breath and heart rate across a group, and turns isolated nervous systems back into a collective one. That is not a coincidence next to Black August’s own discipline of study, fast, train, fight. Both are practices for keeping a body — and a body of people — from breaking under conditions designed to isolate them. George Jackson wrote his way through solitary confinement. Communities drummed their way through plantations that made the drum illegal. The method changes. The refusal to be silenced does not.

Holding Black August Across the Village

In East Harlem, in Kenya, in Uganda, in Nigeria, Ubuntu Village communities don’t need to be told to remember — memory is already the practice. Black August asks something specific of that practice this month: gather, and drum, if you have a drum. Read a page of someone’s writing out loud — Jackson’s, or someone still incarcerated today. Say the names. Fast from something if that discipline serves you. None of this requires an audience or a stage. It requires the same thing the 1740 Slave Act was afraid of: people, together, in rhythm, on purpose.

If Emancipation Day asks us to remember what was won, Black August asks us to remember who is still fighting to be free.

If someone you love is still learning why August matters, this is for them. Share it.

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Sources & Research

1. LETTER: For George, The Seventh of August Movement, 1971 — Black Agenda Report
2. Black August Resources Guide — Stanford University Libraries
3. Voices from Solitary: The Legacy of Black August at San Quentin Prison — Solitary Watch
4. Study, Fast, Train, Fight: The Roots of Black August — Liberation School
5. The Revision and Origin of Black August — The Shoulders Beneath My Feet
6. George Jackson (activist) — Wikipedia
7. Drums in Communication — Wikipedia
8. Congo Square Drums and History — The Heart of Louisiana

Related Reading

• ‣ Music, Ritual, and the Science of Belonging
• ‣ African Music Therapy & Ritual Drumming Benefits
• ‣ The Drum That Remembers: Emancipation Day and the Rhythms Our Bodies Never Forgot
• ‣ The Frequency of Kenya’s Coast: Ngoma Drums and the Body’s Return to Rhythm