Flights: Radicals on the Run - Tapa blanda

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Joel Whitney is the author of Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, which The New Republic called a “powerful warning.” His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Review, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor-in-chief of Guernica, for which he was awarded the 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. His essays in The Baffler, Dissent and Salon  were Notables in Best American Essays 2017, 2015 and 2013. 

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“Embodying the Enemy”: Angela Davis in California

In December of last year, the activist, intellectual, and educator Angela Davis took the podium at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Nyack, New York. The church was not the planners’ first choice but scurrilous red baiting campaigns led two venues to cancel. Waiting for the 500-strong standing ovation to quiet down, the former Communist Party member and political prisoner told her audience that “I think every day about the fact that I am associated with a people who refuse to give up, after centuries and centuries. Not only that, but who have created beauty in the process of struggling.”

As interviewer Amy Goodman noted on Democracy Now!, it was “a reprise” of what happened two years before in Davis’s hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Emphasizing words to underline her subject’s heroism, Goodman recalled an award that was canceled and reinstated after the granting organization was shamed for wavering. “You ended up doing an event outside the place you were actually invited, and so many more people turned up.” Davis admitted being stunned by the ways people misrepresent her. But more important, she told Goodman, “I’m concerned about the misrepresentation of movements against racism. Against gender inequality. For freedom.”

Indeed, misrepresentation followed Davis around throughout her public career. It was why she went on the lam in 1970, after a gun she bought to protect herself from death threats turned up in a Marin County courtroom. During an attempted prison break that turned bloody, after police opened fire on those involved, her gun was found on a young suspect. Afraid that, as a radical Black intellectual, she would not get a fair trial, Davis fled to Chicago. As police closed in on her, she proceeded to Miami and New York. She was still in disguise when apprehended, and the trial of the decade began.

Her defense became a cause célèbre, winning support from Aretha Franklin, Jean Genet, even inspiring a mediocre pop song by artists John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In her landmark Autobiography, re-released in January 2022 by Haymarket Books, she stylishly recounts the ordeal which eventually culminated in her acquittal in 1973. Edited by Toni Morrison, who interviewed the imprisoned Davis during her trial, the Autobiography recounts how the philosopher became one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Criminals.

Dynamite Hill to UCLA

Davis grew up in a part of Birmingham that was bombed so often by the Ku Klux Klan that it was renamed “Dynamite Hill.” Her mother told her, as Davis recounted to Shola Lynch in the documentary, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, that “this was not the way things were supposed to be.”[iii] She held to that as a matter of faith. From her father she learned the importance of self-defense; he kept guns that Davis saw him brandish in response to each new threat. Coming of age in this atmosphere, Davis and her sister Fania tested the boundaries of Jim Crow, easing into French accents to break the color code in retail stores. After being well tended to despite local codes, they laughed in the face of hypocritical white store owners and left without buying anything—an improvised Situationist boycott.

Members of the NAACP, her parents had been partially radicalized by friends and Birmingham neighbors, the Burnhams, a Black family who, as members of the Communist Party, came south to spur anti-racist change. Angela would remain lifelong friends with several Burnhams, including Margaret, who would become an internationally renowned civil rights lawyer. Approaching high school, Davis found herself surrounded by students who were frequently taught by teachers who cared little for Black history (in her textbook, the Civil War was renamed “the war for Southern Independence”). Having spent summers in New York with the Burnhams, Davis found a program that brought students from the segregated south to study in the north. Her timing was ironic, and she lamented missing Birmingham’s protests, regretting how she missed the radical change that came to her hometown.

In New York, Davis attended Elizabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, where she was taught by teachers whom McCarthyites had blacklisted for their leftwing views. In a Jim Crow version of foreign exchange study, she lived with a white, liberal Christian Brooklyn family whom she respected as longtime allies of the Black Liberation Movement.

Davis earned a scholarship to Brandeis University, where she studied abroad in France and fell in love with Critical Theory and French literature. One of very few Black students at Brandeis, she came under the spell of Herbert Marcuse who had written One Dimensional Man, a critique of post-war capitalism and the closest thing the 60s generation had to a philosophical manifesto. She would go on to work with Marcuse in Germany and then California.

She returned to the US smoking Gauloises and by her own account she stood out. The rampant penetration of leftwing groups by government agents served as a pretext for the emergence of an understandable distrust of the cosmopolitan and bilingual Davis. Her comrades, Davis admitted with regret, “thought I was an agent. You know, ‘Who is this Black woman who is coming from Europe and wanting to know what’s going on in the community?’”

She understood that to accomplish anything she needed a collective. But finding herself drawn to groups like the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she discovered yet more layers of the mistrust that accompanied her arrival in San Diego. The former’s nationalism and uninterrogated chauvinism sat especially uneasily with Davis.

Eventually, she fell in with Franklin and Kendra Alexander. These three were among the seed members of the Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party, embedded within the Black Panther movement. She was invited to apply for a position at UCLA, which sought a scholar trained in continental European philosophy who could teach Marxism. When offered the job, she accepted but her political affiliations meant that trouble followed Davis into the lecture hall.

“Are You A Member of the Communist Party?”

On July 1, 1969, in an article in the UCLA Daily Bruin, an undercover FBI agent leaked that the philosophy department had recently hired an assistant professor who “is well qualified for the post, and is also a member of the Communist Party.” Davis remained unnamed. But a week later, the San Francisco Examiner named Davis as the professor cited in the Bruin, labeling her a “known Maoist, according to US intelligence reports, and active in the SDS and the Black Panthers....” Two thirds of this was bunk.

“That’s when all hell broke out,” Davis recalled. The California Regents directed UCLA’s Chancellor “to determine whether Professor Davis was a member of the Communist Party, and not to sign any contracts with her pending receipt of this information.” The chancellor sent Davis a registered letter, requesting a response that same month, noting, “I am constrained by Regental policy to request that you inform me whether or not you are a member of the Communist Party.” The letter went to an old address and Davis never saw it.

As a result of the publicity, her first lecture (on the philosophy of Frederick Douglas), drew 2000 students. A white student whom journalists interviewed after the lecture suggested that Davis was “trying to overthrow our system of government, and admits it.” Whether this sentiment was shared by her colleagues and the rest of the student body mattered little. Lt. Gov Ed Reinecke cited her membership in the Party as reason to dismiss her, though an earlier case at Berkeley affirmed that political affiliations were protected under academic freedom.

The Hunt for Angela

While she fought for her job, Davis grew enmeshed in the struggle for prisoners’ rights. America was cultivating the world’s largest incarceration rate, and these were, in Davis’s opinion, political prisoners. A particular case in Soledad State Prison drew her attention.

Convicted for stealing $70 in an armed robbery, George Jackson had spent seven of his eleven-year sentence in San Quentin’s brutal solitary confinement. Soon he became radicalized by reading Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky, and Mao Zedong. In 1969, he was transferred to Soledad State, two hours’ drive south of San Francisco, where, on January 13, 1970, the guards did something shocking.

Though prisoners were typically segregated by racial identity, that day the guards placed prisoners of color together in the prison yard with members of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood. In the Autobiography, Davis accuses the guards of instigating the violence that broke out, during which Jackson’s friend and comrade was shot to death by a guard. When another guard was beaten and thrown from an upper prison tier, plunging to his death, it was seen as retaliation.

Jackson and two other prison reform activists—both Black and both convicted for minor property crimes (one for stealing a television)—were “singled out” and charged with the killing. It was a capital offense: in the days of California’s death penalty, a successful conviction could end in the state’s gas chambers.

Davis met Jackson at a hearing and was drawn to both his in-person tenderness and his cogent prison writings. In a volley of letters, they grew close and ultimately fell in love. Left out of the Autobiography, for understandable reasons (it was published quickly, in 1974), their love story is a minor through-line in the documentary Free Angela & All Political Prisoners. Lynch develops it judiciously, using the encounter to humanize both figures against the backdrop of bleak events and violence unraveling around them.

Through her advocacy for Jackson, Davis also met his younger brother, Jonathan. Growing up with a beloved brother behind bars, Jonathan’s desperation worried his family. His activism was met with a shrug at school, frustrating him. In one letter, George described him as a loyal “man-child” and asked Davis to bring him into the movement.

In August 1970, Jonathan smuggled a gun into a Marin County courtroom to free his brother and other prisoners. The incident ended in a bloodbath in the Marin County Civic Center parking lot—with Jonathan, two prisoners, and Judge Haley shot in a white van (all but the judge shot by police snipers).

Showing solidarity with the Jackson family, thousands turned out for Jonathan’s funeral, where whispers confirmed that Davis had been implicated: the guns used were those that she had purchased to protect herself. But as Davis tells Lynch, “That was not the time to make myself available to the police for arrest.” The hunt for Angela Davis was under way.