CHAPTER 32

Law and Order

RICHARD NIXON AND his team of aides had carefully studied George Wallace’s presidential campaigns. They realized that his segregationist banter made him attractive only to “the foam-at-the-mouth-segregationists.” Nixon decided to appeal to these Wallace-type segregationists while also attracting all those Americans refusing to live in “dangerous” Black neighborhoods, refusing to believe that Black schools could be equal, refusing to accept busing initiatives to integrate schools, refusing to individualize Black negativity, refusing to believe that Black welfare mothers were deserving, and refusing to champion Black Power over majority-Black counties and cities—all those racists who refused to believe they were racist in 1968. Nixon framed his campaign, as a close adviser explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by [the] racist appeal.” How would he do that? Easy. Demean Black people, and praise White people, without ever saying Black people or White people.¹

Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black (and anti-Latina/o) racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives. The strategy was right on time. In a 1968 Gallup poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed Nixon’s campaign slogan: “Law and order has broken down in the country.” A Nixon television advertisement shrieked frightening music and frightening images of violent and bloodied activists. A deep voiceover says, “I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.” The ad “hit it right on the nose. It’s all about those damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there,” Nixon reportedly said in private. In public, the tune was the same, save the racial lyrics. On September 6, 1968, before 30,000 applauding Texans, Nixon slammed the Supreme Court for having “gone too far in strengthening the criminal forces.” Thirty years before, Theodore Bilbo would have said strengthening “the nigger forces.” Campaign racism had progressed, and Nixon won the election.²

IN THE FALL of 1969, with Charlene Mitchell’s campaign behind her, Angela Davis planned to quietly nestle into her first teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles. The FBI had other plans. J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had launched an all-out, unapologetic war to destroy the Black Power movement that year. The FBI’s messenger at the San Francisco Examiner, Ed Montgomery, reported Davis’s membership in the Communist Party (and Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panther Party). In the ensuing hubbub, California governor Ronald Reagan, eager to pick up points from the anti-Red, anti-student, anti-Black law-and-order voters, deployed an old anti-Communist regulation and fired the twenty-five-year-old Angela Davis. She appealed to the California courts, setting off a confrontation between the state’s racists and antiracists, Communists and anti-Communists, academic emancipators and academic enslavers. Angela Davis had entered into the public light. Her detractors framed her as hate-filled and biased, hate mail started filling up her mailbox, she received threatening phone calls, and police officers started harassing her. On October 20, 1969, California Superior Court judge Jerry Pacht ruled that the anti-Communist regulation was unconstitutional. Davis resumed her teaching post, and Reagan began searching for another way to fire her.³

Sometime in February 1970, Davis’s Che-Lumumba Club received word of the campaign to free three Black inmates at Soledad State Prison near San Jose. With evidence only that they were Black Power activists, George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo had been indicted for the murder of a prison guard during a racially charged prison fight. In 1961, the eighteen-year-old George Jackson had been sentenced to serve one year to life for armed robbery; allegedly he had used a gun to steal $70 from a gas station. He had been transferred to Soledad in 1969, after experiencing a political transformation akin to Malcolm X’s and Cleaver’s, but his prison activism turned his $70 conviction into a life sentence. Davis became very close to George Jackson and his serious younger brother, Jonathan, who had dedicated his life to freeing his brother.⁴

Angela Davis spoke to a lively rally called “Free the Soledad Brothers” in Los Angeles within sight of the California Department of Corrections on June 19, 1970. It was the same day that Reagan’s Board of Regents once again fired Davis from UCLA, this time on the grounds that her political speeches were “unbefitting a university professor.” As evidence, Davis’s terminators had cited, among other things, her rebuke of UC Berkeley educational psychologist Arthur Jensen, who represented the revival of segregationist scholars in the late 1960s. There was “an increasing realization” in psychology that the lower Black IQ scores could not be “completely or directly attributed to discrimination or inequalities in education,” Jensen had written in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969. “It seems not unreasonable . . . to hypothesize that genetic factors may play a part in this picture.” The Regents admonished Davis for not practicing the “appropriate restraint in the exercise of academic freedom” in soundly critiquing Jensen, who had engaged, according to the Regents, in “years of study” before publishing the “lengthy article.” Academics, apparently, were only truly free to espouse racist ideas.⁵

As reporters peppered Davis for a response to her firing at the rally, she connected her academic enslavement to the judicial enslavement of political prisoners. A photographer snapped a shot of Davis carrying a sign. It read: “SAVE THE SOLEDAD BROTHERS FROM LEGAL LYNCHING.” Jonathan Jackson stood behind her, holding another sign: “END POLITICAL REPRESSION IN PRISONS.”⁶

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in California’s Marin County, holding three guns, and took the judge, the prosecutor, and three jurors hostage. Aided by three inmates, whom he freed in the courtroom, the seventeen-year-old younger brother of George Jackson led the hostages at gunpoint to a van parked outside. Police opened fire. The shootout took the lives of Jackson, the judge, and two inmates. Police traced the ownership of one of Jackson’s guns to Angela Davis. A week later, Davis was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy, and a warrant was issued for her arrest. Still grieving Jackson’s death, she saw the political repression on the wall—a death sentence if found guilty. She fled the massive womanhunt, a fugitive trying to avoid slavery or worse, like so many of her political peers and ancestors had done before her. J. Edgar Hoover, months before his death, placed the “dangerous” Davis on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list. The two pictures—one with shades, one without—on the “Wanted by the FBI” poster showcased the woman who became the iconic female activist of the Black Power movement.⁷

It showed her famous Afro, too. But the era’s most popular Afro—the woman who really transformed the hairstyle from an anti-assimilationist political statement into a fashion statement—was the biggest, boldest, baddest, and Blackest woman, the movie star of Foxy Brown (1974) and Coffy (1973)—Pam Grier. The more African Americans let their Afros grow out like Grier’s in the early 1970s, the more they faced the wrath of assimilationist parents, preachers, and employers, who called Afros ugly, “a disgrace”—like going “back to the jungle.” African Americans were assimilationists not when they permed their own hair, but when they classified natural styles as unprofessional or aesthetically inferior to permed styles.⁸

The Afro was ever present in Hollywood’s “Blaxploitation” genre of Black action-adventure films, a genre that peaked in popularity between 1969 and 1974. Facing economic ruin in the late 1960s, and mounting antiracist criticism of the Sidney Poitier–type characters prevalent in the integrationist film narratives of the 1960s, Hollywood decided to solve its economic and political woes by exploiting the popularity of Blackness. Blaxploitation’s kingpin was Melvin Van Peebles. His Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss in 1971 was the story of a bad Black stud who violently reacts to police repression, flees a massive police manhunt by using any weapon he can (including his penis), and escapes into the Mexican sunset. Along the way he is aided by Black children, preachers, gamblers, pimps, and prostitutes. The tornadoes of police repression over the past few years offscreen and the popular racist idea of the super-sexual, no-longer-emasculated Black male no doubt were factors helping the film become so enormously popular among African Americans.

But not all Blacks loved the film. In a literary explosion in Ebony, public intellectual Lerone Bennett Jr. judged it “neither revolutionary nor black” for romanticizing the poverty and misery of Black urban America. Bennett had a point. Whenever Black artists ordained financially deprived Black folk as the truest representatives of Black people, they were trekking through the back door into racist ideas. Too often, they regarded the world of poverty, hustling, prostitution, gambling, and criminality as the Black world, as if non-Blacks did not hustle, prostitute, deal drugs, gamble, and commit crimes at similar rates. And yet, whenever these artists humanized pimps, gangsters, criminals, and prostitutes, they were at their antiracist best. But those who made up the civil rights opposition to Blaxploitation films—in their unerring belief in media suasion—hardly looked for this humanist distinction. They simply saw unsavory stereotypes reinforcing Black characters offscreen. “The transformation from the stereotyped Stepin Fetchit to Super Nigger on screen is just another form of cultural genocide,” the civil rights Coalition of Blaxploitation charged in 1972.⁹

THE WOMANHUNT CAUGHT up to Angela Davis in New York on October 13, 1970. Davis was jailed at the New York Women’s House of Detention. It was there, surrounded by incarcerated Black and Brown women, that Davis began developing her “embryonic Black feminist consciousness,” as she called it. It was that year, 1970, that the women’s movement at last reached the mainstream consciousness of the United States. Norma L. McCorvey (under the alias Jane Roe) had filed suit in Texas to abort her pregnancy. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade three years later, President Nixon professed there were only two “times when an abortion is necessary”: “when you have a black and a white or a rape.”¹⁰

On August 25, 1970, Frances Beal and her sisters in the newly renamed Third World Women’s Alliance showed up with their placards (“Hands Off Angela Davis”), joining more than 20,000 feminists at the National Organization for Women (NOW) Strike for Equality in New York. Seeing the Beal poster, a NOW official rushed over and snapped, “Angela Davis has nothing to do with women’s liberation.” Beal snapped back, “It has nothing to do with the kind of liberation you’re talking about. But it has everything to do with the kind of liberation we’re talking about.” As novelist Toni Morrison explained in the New York Times Magazine months later, Black women “look at White women and see the enemy for they know that racism is not confined to white men and that there are more white women than men in the country.” Toni Morrison had just put out The Bluest Eye, an anti-assimilationist account of a Black girl’s zealous pursuit of “beautiful” blue eyes. Morrison’s debut novel was as moving fictionally as the real life account I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings (1969), Maya Angelou’s award-winning autobiographical journey from the thorny woods of racist ideas (where she wished she could wake up from her “black ugly dream”) into the clearing of antiracist dignity and resistance.¹¹

IN DECEMBER 1970, Angela Davis was extradited back to California. She spent most of her jail time awaiting trial in solitary confinement, where she read and responded to letters from her thousands of supporters, studied her case, and thought about America. She sometimes heard the chants of “Free Angela,” “Free all Political Prisoners.” Two hundred defense committees in the United States and sixty-seven defense committees abroad were shouting the same words. The defense committees formed a broad interracial coalition of supporters who believed that Nixon’s America had gone too far—too far in harassing, imprisoning, and killing hordes of antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and anti-imperialist activists and condemning them for their ideas. Those ideas, at the moment, were wrapped up in the mind and body of Angela Davis, a mind and body that Nixon’s and Reagan’s law-and-order America wanted dead.¹²

The antiracist ideas that Davis embodied were argued in a different case before the Supreme Court around the time the police brought her back to California. In the 1950s, Duke Power’s Dan River plant in North Carolina had publicly forced its Black workers into its lowest-paying jobs. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Duke Power adopted private discrimination—requiring high school diplomas and IQ tests—that produced the same outcome: Whites receiving the bulk of its high paying jobs. On March 8, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that Duke Power’s new requirements had no bearing on job performance.

The Civil Rights Act “proscribes not only overt discrimination,” opined Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, “but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” If the Griggs decision sounded too good for antiracists, then it was. It did not necessarily bar practices and policies that yielded racial disparities. Although Duke Power changed its policy on the day the Civil Rights Act took effect, the Supreme Court, astonishingly, upheld the appeals court supposition that there was no “discriminatory intent.” And Chief Justice Burger gave employers a loophole for the progression of racism. “The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.” Racist employers could then simply ensure that their discriminatory hiring and promotion practices were related to job performance, and therefore, to business necessity.¹³

The Griggs ruling hardly mattered to Black Power activists. They had no faith anyway that the US Supreme Court would outlaw the latest progression of institutional racism. Their attention was turned to their local struggles, the Davis case, and the largest Black convention in US history. Some 8,000 people attended the largest meeting of the six-year-old Black Power movement on March 10, 1972, in Gary, Indiana. The largest Black middle class in history was represented in that crowd—the New Black America. The emergence of these Black elites was the result of the activism and reforms of the civil rights and Black Power movements as well as of the strong economy of the 1960s. By 1973, the rate of Black poverty would dip to its lowest level in US history. Black income levels were rising and political-economic racial disparities closing before the recession hit in 1973.¹⁴

By the opening of the Gary convention, Blacks had taken political control over many of the majority-Black cities and counties. But some Black voters had to learn the hard way that empowering a Black person in government did not automatically empower an antiracist. And so, the main demand of independents at the Gary convention—for an independent Black political party—would not have automatically been an antiracist upgrade over the current situation, marked by assimilationists in the Democratic Party. But self-serving Black politicians squashed the plan over the next few years anyway.¹⁵

DAYS BEFORE THE mammoth Gary convention opened, Angela Davis’s trial finally began in California. “The evidence will show,” said prosecutor Albert Harris, “that her basic motive was not to free political prisoners, but to free the one prisoner that she loved.” The ownership of the gun, Davis’s flight, and her words of love in her diary and letters for George Jackson were supposed to convict her of first degree murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. All-White juries had convicted and meted out capital punishment for less. But not this jury, which acquitted Davis of all charges on June 4, 1972. She walked out of the clutches of the American penal system. But she walked out backward, looking at the women and men she left behind bars, and pledging the rest of her life to free them from slavery.¹⁶

Despite the law-and-order movement against activists, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails nationwide in 1972. This was far too many for Davis and the nation’s most well-respected criminologists, many of whom were predicting that the prison system would fade away. Sound anti-prison activism and ideas were having their effect. In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals called the prison system a “failure”—a creator of crime rather than a preventer. The commission recommended that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”¹⁷

After Davis’s acquittal, the more than 250 Free Angela defense committees received a communiqué from Davis. “Stay with us as long as racism and political repression” kept human beings “behind bars.” By May 1973, the defense committees had been organized into the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. President Nixon’s Watergate scandal heightened the contradictions on crime and prisons. All those Americans were serving prison terms, many of them for their political acts and views, while the champion of law and order, Richard Nixon, did not spend a day in prison for the Watergate scandal. When President Gerald Ford took office following Nixon’s resignation, he pardoned and immunized Nixon from prosecution.¹⁸

In the fall of 1975, Davis returned to academia. It was five years later, but she was still the center of controversy. Alumni were irate when she joined the faculty of the Claremont Colleges Black Studies Center in southern California. She found that the marketplace of ideas was the same as when she had left: segregationists were still imagining genetic differences between the races, and assimilationists were still trying to ascertain why their only hope for Black uplift—integration—had failed. Assimilationist sociologist Charles Stember argued in Sexual Racism (1976) that the White man’s sexual jealousy of the hypersexual Black man was the basis for the failure of integration. Sexual racism—the core of racism—was “largely focused” on the Black man, he maintained.¹⁹

At the same time, Stember downgraded the sexual racism faced by Black women and practically ignored the sexual racism faced by Black LGBTs. But LGBTs were hardly waiting on Stember. Since the interracial Stonewall rebellion in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1969, which had kicked off the gay liberation movement, Black LGBTs had two-stepped away from the margins of the women’s liberation, Black Power, and White gay liberation movements, starting their own new integrative dance of queer antiracism in the 1970s. New York native and lesbian writer Audre Lorde brilliantly “gave name” to these “nameless” life dances in her poetry, essays, and speeches. Non-Whites, women, and LGBTs were “expected to educate” Whites, men, and heterosexuals to appreciate “our humanity,” Lorde said in one of her most famous speeches. “The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”²⁰

Black feminist Ntozake Shange used her creative antiracist energy to produce a play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which debuted on Broadway on September 15, 1976. Seven Black women, named after colors of the rainbow, poetically and dramatically expressed their experiences of abuse, joy, heartbreak, strength, weakness, love, and longing for love. For Colored Girls emerged and reemerged as an artistic phenomenon over the next four decades on stages and screens as the “black feminist bible,” to quote University of Pennsylvania professor Salamishah Tillet. At every stop, Shange stood strong under the naïve crosswinds of the Black portrayals debates. Some were vocal about their fear that the play would strengthen racist conceptions of Black women; others feared it would strengthen racist conceptions of Black men.²¹

The argument over For Colored Girls endured for the rest of the decade. The same record started playing again, but much louder, in 1982 when Alice Walker penned her novel The Color Purple (and again in 1985 over Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film adaptation, and again in 1995 over the film Waiting to Exhale, a film about four African American women). Set in rural Georgia, Walker’s The Color Purple presents a Black woman negotiating (and finding) her way through the rugged confines of abusive Black patriarchs, abusive southern poverty, and abusive racist Whites. As the best-selling novel passed through thousands of hands, some readers (and probably more nonreaders) fumed at the portrayals of Black men. But if viewers of Shange’s play or Walker’s novel (or Spielberg’s film) walked away from the theater or closed the book and generalized Black men as abusers, then they were faulty, not the play, the novel, or the film. There has always been a razor-thin line between the racist portrayer of Black negativity and the antiracist portrayer of imperfect Black humanity. When consumers have looked upon stereotypical Black portrayals as representative of Black behavior, instead of representative of those individual characters, then the generalizing consumers have been the racist problem, not the racist or antiracist portrayer. But this complex distinction, or the fact that positive Black portrayals hardly undermine racism, could never quite put an end to the senseless media portrayals arguments, which were inflamed yet again by the explosions of Hip Hop videos in the 1980s and 1990s and Black reality television in the twenty-first century.²²

“WATCHING A PERFORMANCE of ‘For Colored Girls’ one sees a collective appetite for Black male blood,” wrote sociologist Robert Staples in 1979 in “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists.” However, the angriest Black feminist of the era was the twenty-seven-year-old Michele Wallace. Ms. magazine presented the young Wallace on its January 1979 cover, advertising her erupting Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman as “the book that will shape the 1980s.” It certainly shaped the Black gender debate. Some hated her, some loved her for posing sexism as a greater concern than racism and for exposing the racist “myth of the black man’s castration” and the racist myth of the Black woman as a “woman of inordinate strength.” Wallace testified, “Even for me, it continues to be difficult to let the myth go” of the Black superwoman.²³

But that’s where her antiracism stopped and her racist attacks on both Black women and Black men took over. After tossing out the Black superwoman portrait, Wallace painted the opposite portrait for her readers, the portrait of a Black woman who “forced herself to be submissive and passive” during the 1960s—a pronouncement poet June Jordan blasted in the New York Times as “unsubstantiated, self-demeaning,” and “ahistorical.” Angela Davis set the record straight on the meaningful and aggressive activism in the 1960s of Black women and Black men in Freedomways. Davis included men because, according to Wallace, “the black [male] revolutionary of the sixties calls to mind nothing so much as a child who is acting for the simple pleasure of the reaction he will elicit from, the pain he will cause, his father”—“the White man.” In the foreword to the new edition eleven years later, Wallace bravely admitted some mistakes, and she took back her thesis that Black machoism was the “crucial factor in the destruction of the Black Power Movement.” To Wallace’s credit, she had still brought awareness to patriarchal Black masculinity as a crucial factor in the demise of Black Power.²⁴

Only one woman elicited more debate than Michele Wallace in Black communities in 1979—and it was a White woman, the White woman that many assimilationists saw as the most beautiful woman in the world. In the movie 10, Bo Derek wore her hair in cornrows with beads, setting off a mad dash of elite White women flocking to salons to get their “Bo Braids.” African Americans were angered reading the media coverage of the mad dash. Cornrows had arrived, media outlets announced, as if Whites were the sole carriers of culture. Around the same time, American Airlines fired ticket agent Renee Rogers for wearing cornrows. Racist Americans considered Afros, braids, locs, and other “natural” styles unprofessional. When Rogers sued for discrimination, the judge evoked “Bo Braids” in rejecting her claim that the style reflected her cultural heritage.²⁵

Quite possibly the most passionate part of the furor over the Bo Braids was the widespread feeling that Bo Derek and her look-a-likes were appropriating from the storehouse of African American culture, a feeling that possibly stemmed from the dusty racist idea that European cultures could overpower African cultures. What was most amazing about the whole uproar—and similar White appropriation uproars that surrounded Eminem (rap music) and Kim Kardashian (bodily physique) decades later—was the hypocrisy of some Black people. Some of those Black people who had permed their hair—an appropriation of European culture—were now ridiculing Bo Derek and other White women for braiding their hair and appropriating African culture.

Bo Derek and her braided look-a-likes seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s, annoying Black people. But the fashion trend did not nearly have the lasting power of the latest reinvention of ruling White masculinity. If Planet of the Apes epitomized racists’ defeated sentiments in 1968, then the highest-grossing film of 1976, which won an Oscar for Best Picture, epitomized their fighting sentiment that year. Rocky portrayed a poor, kind, slow-talking, slow-punching, humble, hard-working, steel-jawed Italian journeyman boxer in Philadelphia facing off against the unkind, fast-talking, fast-punching, cocky African American World Heavy Champion. Rocky’s opponent, Apollo Creed, with his amazing avalanche of punches, symbolized the empowerment movements, the rising Black middle class, and the real-life heavyweight champion of the world in 1976, the pride of Black Power masculinity, Muhammad Ali. Rocky Balboa—as played by Sylvester Stallone—came to symbolize the pride of White supremacist masculinity’s refusal to be knocked out from the avalanche of civil rights and Black Power protests and policies.²⁶

Weeks before Americans ran out to see Rocky, though, they ran out to buy Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family. And those who did not want to slog through the 704-page tome that claimed the No. 1 spot on the New York Times Best Seller List watched the even more popular television adaptation that started airing on ABC in January 1977, becoming the most watched show in US television history. Roots: The Saga of an American Family shared the thrilling, tragic, and tumultuous story of Kunta Kinte, from his kidnapping in Gambia to his brutal crippling, which ended his incessant runaway attempts in Virginia. Claiming Kinte as his actual ancestor, Haley followed his life and the life of his descendants in US history down to himself. For African Americans in the radiance of Black Power’s broadening turn to antiracist Pan-African ideas, and starved for knowledge about their life before and during slavery, Roots was a megahit, one of the most influential works of the twentieth century. Roots unearthed legions of racist ideas of backward Africa, of civilizing American slavery, of the contented slave, of stupid and imbruted slaves, of loose enslaved women, and of African American roots in slavery. The plantation genre of happy mammies and Sambos was gone with the wind.²⁷

But the new plantation genre of lazy Black rioters who knocked down Whites’ livelihoods—the poor through welfare, the upwardly mobile through affirmative action—remained in the wind in the late 1970s. Thus, as much as antiracist Black Americans loved their roots, racist White Americans loved—on and off screen—their other Rocky, with his unrelenting fight for the law and order of racism. And then, in 1976, their Rocky ran for president.