A Double Life

The grim news made international headlines: On August 21, 1971, prison authorities discovered a gun on famed Soledad Brother author, activist and San Quentin inmate George Jackson. A shootout ensued, killing Jackson, two other inmates and three guards, and wounding three more officers. Authorities asserted that only lawyer Stephen Bingham could have smuggled the weapon into the prison. Fearing that a conviction for abetting the guards’ deaths would lead to his own murder, the attorney fled, beginning a long, strange odyssey of pseudonymous exile. Strange indeed for the Yale-graduate scion of politically prominent New England elites. The grim news made international headlines: On August 21, 1971, prison authorities discovered a gun on famed Soledad Brother author, activist and San Quentin inmate George Jackson. A shootout ensued, killing Jackson, two other inmates and three guards, and wounding three more officers. Authorities asserted that only lawyer Stephen Bingham could have smuggled the weapon into the prison. Fearing that a conviction for abetting the guards’ deaths would lead to his own murder, the attorney fled, beginning a long, strange odyssey of pseudonymous exile. Strange indeed for the Yale-graduate scion of politically prominent New England elites.