Angela Davis: A life and ideas
By Isabel Armstrong, Third year History Student
Angela Davis has always been a Marxist scholar, having been practically born into the movement through her mother’s employment at the Southern Negro Youth Centre. She rose to global prominence through her eighteen-month imprisonment and subsequent trial for supplying guns to a young Black activist protesting his brother’s prosecution for murder.
Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up on a street bordering the traditionally white western parts of the city. As Black residents began moving across the line to protest Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan responded by conducting bombings, burnings and drive-by shootings. Whilst the city would eventually become famous for being a hotbed of civil rights activism, Davis moved to New York through a Quaker initiative to educate Black youth in integrated northern schools.This was after the Brown v. Board Education ruling, which meant that Southern education centres would rather close down than accept Black students.
In New York, Davis joined Advance, a Marxist-Leninist youth organisation, that organised lectures and solidarity demonstrations with the Southern sit-ins of the early 1960s. She continued her socialist education, attending the Communist-aligned Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students in Finland at the age of 19. On this first trip abroad, she was introduced to global struggles against injustice, witnessing how the French police brutalised Algerian and North Africans protesting in support of the Algerian War.
For Davis, conceptualising the ties between class- and race-based activism came through trips to East Germany as a graduate student and later on a working trip to Cuba in the summer of 1969. In her autobiography, Davis writes about her attempts to bring Marxist theory to the American civil rights movement, but it was widely dismissed as “the white man’s thing.”
Davis became an activist leader in the Los Angeles region after Ronald Reagan began a concerted attempt at removing her from her post as Acting Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, invoking an old piece of legislation prohibiting Communists from teaching. Her fellow members of the Black cell of the L.A. Communist Party organised with the Black Student Union, Black Professors’ organisation and various community members to condemn Reagan’s actions. Whilst this was eventually unsuccessful, losing her job was hardly the worst thing to happen to Davis in 1970.
In the middle of February 1970, Davis discovered the Soledad Brothers’ cause through a newspaper article, and was keenly involved in protesting against their trial. Soledad prison’s O Wing permitted its inmates just one hours respite from their cell a day, and the guards were known to be sympathetic to white supremacist gangs. On January 13th 1970, guards took a mixed-race group to the prison yard in the knowledge that racial tensions would cause violence. When a fight broke out, a white guard fired at the prisoners, killing three Black inmates; he was acquitted by grand jury. The verdict led to a race riot within the prison, and one guard was thrown to his death. Three Black men were accused of his murder - George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette. Davis was a lead campaigner on the Soledad Brothers Defence Committee, centring their defence on the structural racism which led to their imprisonment in the first place, as well as the lack of evidence that they had committed the murder.
Jonathan Jackson, younger brother to George, gained control of a courtroom, attempting to free the Black men on trial with guns registered to Davis, later being murdered in a shoot-out with the police. She was charged with aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder, but chose to flee the state. Davis was a fugitive for two months, before becoming captured in New York City. She details in her autobiography her racist treatment at the hands of the prison system, highlighting how she was kept in solitary confinement as a form of mental punishment, and to prevent her from radicalising the other women prisoners.
On June 4th, 1972, Angela Davis was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. The press fervour around her trial was incredibly bigoted, highlighting both her sex appeal and the white fear of a militant Black community. Writing her autobiography helped her to reclaim her personal identity, particularly refuting the pervasive myth of her love affair with George Jackson.
Davis’ work after her trial is no less impressive. Her academic publishing is heavily intertwined with her activism: “Are prisons obsolete?” (2003) came six years after founding Critical Resistance, a grassroots organisation aimed at abolishing the prison industrial complex. She has written widely on the struggles against injustice in America and abroad. Since the 1970s, Davis has been a proponent of Palestinian liberation, refusing to condemn the imprisonment of Russian Jews attempting to flee the country for Israel.