Getting to the Core

When Convict George Jackson was shot dead in the San Quentin prison yard last month (TIME, Sept. 6), his distraught mother charged that the escape attempt was actually "set up" and amounted to murder by prison authorities. Her accusation was dismissed out of hand by most, but it prompted an emotional piece by Tom Wicker, Washington-based columnist for the New York Times. "Many others," Wicker wrote, "mostly black perhaps, but not a few of them white, will not find it hard to agree with his mother."

Wicker praised Jackson as "a talented writer, a sensitive man, a potential leader and political thinker of great persuasiveness." He lamented the "wanton destruction of humanity" by a system that had jailed Jackson for one year to life for a $70 robbery at age 19 and kept him in prison for nearly twelve years until his death. "For once," wrote Wicker, "this predominantly white society ought not passively to accept the usual assumption that authority is blameless and truthful, and those who defy it are fools or depraved, especially if black."

Senatorial Courtesy. Though Wicker did not specifically subscribe to the "set up" theory of Jackson's death, he found himself rebuked by an editorial in his own paper the next day. The Times mentioned no names, but condemned giving "currency to the vague, unsupported and unbelievable charge made by Jackson's mother." Added the editorial: "It is no contribution to the national good . . . to explain away acts of savagery as the inevitable reaction to social inequities."

Wicker has been at odds with Times editorial policy before, most notably about campus upheavals. As he puts it, "I tended to write about student grievances, and the editorial page stressed the necessity of maintaining order and academic freedom on the campuses." Never before has one of his columns triggered an opposing Times editorial, though no one called him on the carpet and the home office's only communication was to advise him in advance that the editorial would be forthcoming, a move Wicker describes as "sort of like senatorial courtesy."

Apart from the editorial. Wicker also drew strong censure from more than 100 readers. Last week he felt compelled to confront his critics. In another column, he noted that "most letters and even some editorials have accused me of charging that Jackson's death was 'set up' by the authorities. Of course, I did not."

He stuck to his guns on "how senselessly and brutally society reacted at every turn to Jackson's early transgressions; moreover, it is still doing so, every day, in other cases, and turning thousands of young offenders into hardened criminals. If that is not 'wanton destruction of humanity,' what is it?"

Surface Consequences. Many of the letters he received took Wicker to task for not showing enough concern over the death of the three white guards killed in the escape attempt. His column last week offered a reply to one letter-writer: "To grieve for the guards . . . but not to face the truth of what our society does to human beings like George Jackson is to worry about symptoms and surface consequences and not about root causes. So I must tell you that, no, I cannot be more 'even-handed,' as you would wish. I will go on, as long as I can, trying to get to the core of things the best I can."

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