By Alex Murphy
Over the past six months many people have compared the current Black Lives Matter movement to the Civil Rights movement of the sixties and seventies. It’s hard to not draw parallels, especially with the massive protests and less than savory police response. Given this reflection on movements past, it is a good opportunity to celebrate the many Black activists who championed the Civil Rights movement. Although, one Civil Rights icon has spanned both of these movements, being a leader of Civil Rights, anti-racism, feminism, lgbt+ rights, labour rights and much more for over fifty years. This is the story of Professor Angela Davis.
It’s 1972. Angela Davis is one of the most wanted people in the country by the FBI. She’s been charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. She hides out at the home of a Black Panther member, fearing she will be killed by police if she is found.This is the moment that Angela Davis came into the public spotlight, the beginning of her idolization from the left, and demonization from the right. This moment is the climax of this story, but it is not the beginning.
This story starts in 1944. Angela Davis is brought into this world with the misfortune of being born in Birmingham, Alabama, deep in the Jim Crow-ruled South. Most of her childhood was spent in a rather affluent, predominantly white neighbourhood; being one of the only Black people in the area. Growing up in Birmingham, her youth was marred by racist violence and white nationalist terrorism. During her time in Birmingham, dozens of Black family’s houses were bombed by the Klu Klux Klan, and although at the time they were officially classified as unsolved, it was no sec who was carrying out these attacks, or why. Besides the violence surrounding her and her community, Davis also attended a segregated school; this is where her first run in with the police occurred. A running theme in this story is Davis going head on against the police, and establishment in general. This is part of what made her such an effective and beloved leftist. She started practicing for these later encounters in highschool when the interracial study group that she ran was broken up by police, as that kind of fratranization was illegal at the time. Davis finally escaped the South with her mother and moved to New York. Here, she finished her highschool education and arguably found her calling. Davis was no stranger to being anti-establishment, her mother was an activist and she had dabbled in civil disobedience, but her time in New York was her first exposure to true leftist politics as a few teachers at her highschool were noted communists. She soon moved on to the even greener, or in this case bluer, pastures of Brandeis University in Massachusetts where she studied philosophy under yet another noted communist, Professor Herbert Marcuse. She graduated in 1965 and continued her education with graduate studies at the University of California. She then moved to Germany to study in Frankfurt, earning her PhD in philosophy and getting some grassroots experience with a student’s socialist organization. However, in the late 1960’s, after only a few years in Frankfurt, she returned to the USA to be more involved in Civil Rights.
This is where Angela Davis’s story often gets told incorrectly. While it is true that she was a Black revolutionary fighting for Civil Rights in the 70’s, unlike what many believe, she was not a Black Panther. Well, she was very briefly. She joined the Black Panther Party at the beginning of the decade, but as quickly as she came, she left. While she did support the Panthers, and maintained alliances and friendships with them for many decades to come, she quickly became tired of what she saw as sexism in the party. Instead, Davis spent most of the 70’s with the Che-Lumumba Club, an all Black branch of the American Communist Party. However, it was not her participation in the Black Panther Party, or her controversial and radical politics that brought her into the public eye and cemented her as a Civil Rights era icon, respected activist, and certified badass. It was her murder charge.
This brings us back to the beginning, well almost. It’s 1970 and following an innocent verdict for a prison guard at Soledad Prison who shot and killed four inmates under suspicious circumstances a prison guard is found dead. Three Black men are charged with the crime and an unjust, racist trial begins. The three men are facing death. Angela Davis is one of the many Black activists that came out in support of the Soledad Brothers, as they came to be known. She was one of their most vocal advocates, campaigning for the release of the men as well as reform in the system that got the Brothers into this horrendous situation. But she will soon be tied up in the same corrupt system. In August of 1970, the younger brother of one of the Soledad Brothers barged into a courtroom, brandishing a gun and arming the defendant, a man facing charges of attempted murder. The two men took the judge and two jurors hostages, trying to bargain for the freedom of the defendant. In the end, the gunmen were shot and killed by guards, but not before the supreme court judge was also shot. Given the familial bond between the gunman and the Soledad Brothers, it was immediately assumed, although with nothing amounting to more than circumstantial evidence, that the attack was linked to the incarceration of the three men. Angela Davis, a friend of the shooter and the alleged purchaser of the gun used, went into hiding before the police could even begin looking for her.
Now we are at the beginning. Angela Davis has been charged with murder, kiddnapping and conspiracy, for a crime that she wasn’t even pesent for. A laughably unjust trial proceeded her eventual apprehension two months after she topped the FBI’s most wanted list. However, despite an all white jury, among other attempts from the prosecution to capitalize on the rampant racism of the criminal justice system to convict Davis, she was acquitted of all charges. The most striking moment from her trial, and what is arguably the moment that Angela Davis went from fringe radical to inspirational revolutionary, was the second she walked into the courtroom. Walking in with the Black power fist held high, Davis featured in an iconic photo that would be associated with her and her cause for decades to come. She carried this momentum through the first hearing, delivering her own opening statement where she eloquently and powerfully layed out the facts of the case, the absurd charges against her, and reminded the court that she wasn’t going to take any abuse from the justice system, and that she was ready for this. She finished her nearly 9,000 word statement by flexing her experience in fringe politics, a dedication that has prepared her for the kind of racist and politically motivated attacks that the prosecution was going to level at her and that had taught her to be so much smarter than to give a gun registered in her name to a man planning an attack. She addressed the court:
...My political commitment, my political experience, including in the Communist
Party, has manifested itself in terms of what I am capable of doing-writing,
teaching, speaking and organizing around the plight of all oppressed people,
political prisoners in general, the Soledad Brothers specifically, and thereby
helping to organize an effective political movement for progressive social change.
The prosecution's own evidence will show that I was not committed to individual
acts of escape, but that I was committed to the building of a movement capable of
creating a climate of public opinion in which the death penalty could be declared
unconstitutional, and in which juries could acquit prisoners of politically-inspired
charges.
After a 97 day trial, in which time a national campaign for the freedom of Angela Davis mounted with support of the likes of Artetha Franklin and the Beatles, Davis was found innocent. As a testament to the lack of evidence against the activist, and the amazing arguments of Davis and her team of litigators, be reminded that this was a decision made by an all white jury… in 1972. She was free, and wasn’t about to let it go to waste.
While her following career in Civil Rights is full of other wild and groundbreaking victories and run-ins with the law (including being personally hated by Ronald Reagan), this marks the end of her ascent from academic activist to true American icon. This is by no means to say that she has since fallen from this glory, but this is where this story ends. After many years of teaching in philosophy at UCLA, Angela Davis now works as a guest professor at a variety of universities, continuing to preach about the dangers of racism and the powers of revolution. She is currently focusing on the not-so-small feet of abolishing the American prison industrial complex. She’s also still a certified Civil Rights icon, and will continue to be one for long to come. But all of that is a story for another day.