![]() ![]() Aretha Franklin pledged to pay her bail in cash, “not because I believe in Communism, but because she’s a black woman who wants freedom for all black people.” Davis became a symbol for free speech, for outspoken women, and for Black militancy, an embodiment of the restlessness and rebelliousness that defined the era. A “Free Angela Davis” campaign erupted worldwide. No one believed that she would get a fair hearing, so then president Richard Nixon personally invited fourteen Soviet scientists to observe it for themselves.ĭavis’s portrait spread all over the country, no longer on wanted posters but on buttons, leaflets, and T-shirts. ![]() Five days after the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in February 1972, she was allowed to post bail. Initially, Davis faced the death penalty. She was arrested in October, in a motel in New York City, and spent sixteen months in jail awaiting trial-mostly in solitary confinement, because officials feared her influence on women prisoners. ![]() Starting in August 1970, Davis was on the FBI’s most wanted list, the third woman ever to appear on it. So when news of the courthouse shooting reached Davis, she calculated that it was best to go on the run. The repression of the left, especially the Black radical left, was intensifying. The following May, National Guard troops killed unarmed college students at Kent State in Ohio, and police killed student protesters at Jackson State College in Mississippi. In December 1969 three hundred police used grenades and dynamite in a siege of the party’s LA headquarters. Further, as a member of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, she had seen the efforts of police to destroy the group. Since the Examiner article, Davis had received daily death threats. She had purchased them long before he stormed the courthouse, out of concern for her safety. The guns Jonathan Jackson used were registered to Davis. The district attorney was paralyzed for life. Jonathan Jackson, the judge, and two of the inmates were killed. He interrupted the trial of a Black inmate, gave him a gun, and the two-alongside two other Black inmates, who had been in the courtroom to serve as witnesses-attempted to kidnap the judge, an assistant district attorney, and three members of the jury. In August 1970, just a few months after Davis’s second firing, Jackson’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan, held up a courthouse in Marin County. One of the brothers was the well-known writer and Black Panther George Jackson, with whom Davis would be romantically involved. This time, they claimed her political speech was unbefitting a university professor, citing her statement, “Hell, yes, we are subversive…and we’re going to continue to be subversive until we have subverted the whole damn system of oppression.”Īs Davis’s professorial fate wended its way through the courts, she grew involved in a campaign demanding justice for three prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers, who were accused of a retaliatory murder of a white prison guard. But some months later the board, led by then governor Ronald Reagan, fired Davis again. During the appeals process, she was permitted to teach (to glowing reviews). “While I think this membership requires no justification,” she wrote the board, “I want you to know that as a black woman I feel an urgent need to find radical solutions to the problems of racial and national minorities in white capitalist United States.” The board fired her, putting her into the national spotlight over questions of academic freedom and the lingering effects of cold war anticommunism.Ī judge disagreed with the board’s decision, finding that it had no right to terminate Davis because of her political affiliations. The University of California Board of Regents confronted Davis and asked if she was a Communist. A week later, the San Francisco Examiner reported that that person was a twenty-five-year-old professor named Angela Davis. In 1969 a UCLA student who was also an undercover FBI agent revealed in the campus newspaper that the school’s philosophy department had recently hired a member of the Communist Party. ![]()
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