The student radical Angela Davis sat on the floor of a small prison cell in the New York Women’s House of Detention. She had received a letter, dated November 18, 1970, from her teacher, Herbert Marcuse, who was overseeing her doctoral thesis on Kant, violence, and revolution.
For Davis, the matter was not merely theoretical; she had put Marcuse’s theories into practice. The twenty-six-year-old, whose Afro-and-sunglasses image had been endlessly replicated onto newspaper columns and FBI Most Wanted posters, had become a left-wing icon. She had been arrested on charges of kidnapping, murder, and interstate flight in relation to a botched prison break in San Rafael, California. But to her supporters, Angela Davis was a political prisoner, lashed and chained for the crime of opposing the oppressive American regime.
“Dear Angela,” Marcuse’s letter opened, “people ask me again and again to explain how you, a highly intelligent, sensitive young woman, an excellent student and teacher, how you became involved in the violent events at San Rafael. I do not know whether you were involved at all in these tragic events, but I do know that you were deeply involved in the fight for the black people, for the oppressed everywhere, and that you could not limit your work for them to the classroom and to writing.”
The professor traced Angela’s motivations to the world of her childhood—“One of cruelty, misery, and persecution”—and her study of historical oppression. “And you learned something else,” he wrote, “namely, that almost all the celebrated figures of Western civilization—the very civilization which enslaved your people—were in the last analysis concerned with one thing: human freedom. Like any good student, you took seriously what they said, and you thought seriously about it, and why all this had remained mere talk for the vast majority of men and women. So you felt that the philosophical idea, unless it was a lie, must be translated into reality: that it contained a moral imperative to leave the classroom, the campus, and to go and help the others, your own people to whom you still belong.”1
Davis, according to Marcuse, had taken the critical theories to their logical conclusion: violent resistance against the state. She had connected the insights of Western philosophy with the vitalism of the slave revolt—and, in this way, she served as the great symbol of the new proletariat, the synthetic union of the white intelligentsia and the black ghetto. She represented the “new historical Subject of change,”2 and, as such, she fought for the bound and broken masses, but also for the priests of high culture.
“You fought for us too,” Marcuse concluded in his letter. “In this sense, your cause is our cause.”3
Davis was a devoted follower of Marcuse, having followed him around the globe, from the lecture halls of Brandeis University to the dust-covered stacks of European libraries to the graduate program at the University of California, San Diego. She had absorbed his scholarship on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the theory of revolution. At the same time, she had become captivated by the black nationalist movement. She had watched the Black Panthers flex their muscles, with berets tilted over their foreheads, bandoliers draped across their chests, and long guns pointed to the sky.4
The synthesis of these two ways of being—white philosophy, black power—was explosive.
By her mid-twenties, Angela Davis had become an icon of revolt. She had articulated a vision of total revolution that would turn theory into action. “The revolutionary wants to change the nature of society in a way, to create a world where the needs and interests of the people are responded to,” she told the journalist and spiritual adviser Reverend Cecil Williams from her prison cell. “A revolutionary realizes, however, that in order to create a world where human beings can live and love and be healthy and create, you have to completely revolutionize the entire fabric of society. You have to overturn the economic structure where a few individuals are in possession of the vast majority of the wealth of this country, a wealth that’s been produced by the majority of the people; you have to destroy this political apparatus which, under the guise of revolutionary government, perpetuates the most incredible misery on the masses of people.”5
Violence, Davis insisted, was a necessary, if regrettable, step in the revolutionary process. “In the history of revolutions and not only socialist revolutions but bourgeois democratic revolutions such as the American Revolution, you have had the occurrence of violence as a means of seizing power from the oppressor, but why? Because the oppressors have failed to acknowledge that the people were right and that the people had the right to control their destiny,”6 she said in a calm but insistent voice. “And getting back to the question of what a revolutionary is, a black revolutionary realizes that we cannot begin to combat racism and we cannot begin to effectively destroy racism until we’ve destroyed the whole system.”7
Davis had a brilliant sense of the theatrical. Dressed in stylish turtlenecks, leather jackets, and patterned dresses, Davis used her jailhouse interviews and court appearances to craft the image and advance the propaganda of the revolution. She struck a slight, elegant figure and spoke with a dazzling vocabulary, drawn from her years of academic study. Newspaper photographers snapped pictures of her giving the Black Power salute to supporters in the courtroom. Television reporters hung on her every word during her public statements and press conferences.
Davis had earned, in Marcuse’s words, “success within the white Establishment”8—a scholarship to private school and Brandeis, study-abroad programs in France and Germany, a tenure-track professorship at UCLA—but she extended her life into territory that was unavailable to the white intelligentsia: authentic revolt against the white power structure.
Marcuse theorized about the black revolution. Davis embodied it. She marshalled her own identity—the authority of the black woman, the drama of the fugitive, the small acts of defiance against her enemies—in service of her revolutionary politics.
And it worked. In the months after her capture, Angela Davis transformed herself from a small-time student radical into an international cause célèbre. Left-wing activists established dozens of Committees to Free Angela Davis to agitate on her behalf. The Communist Party, which Davis had joined in 1968, held a press conference announcing “the largest, broadest, most all-encompassing people’s movement the country has ever seen to free [their] comrade, Angela Davis.”9 Five thousand people attended a fund-raiser on her birthday at the Manhattan Center in New York City. John Lennon and the Rolling Stones both penned songs of tribute to Davis, “Angela” and “Sweet Black Angel,”10 calling her a “political prisoner” and demanding her release.
The international Left also rose to her defense. The Soviet Union’s political commissars, seeing the persecution of a black female communist as a propaganda opportunity, instructed schoolchildren throughout the empire to flood the United States with letters of support. The messages combined a sense of childhood innocence with the content of state propaganda: “We Soviet students are proud of your struggle for civil rights, of your resilience, and are certain that victory will come for your people”; “We want for you to again fight for the rights of black people, so that people in your country could live the same way we do”; “It is winter here and it snows a lot. The weather is cold and we go to school.” The citizens of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan sent hundreds of thousands of additional letters and the East German government organized an illustrated-postcard-writing campaign to send “a million roses for Angela” on her twenty-seventh birthday.11
To both the Left and the Right, the revolution seemed like a viable possibility. The country was on the brink. Young people had been radicalized. Bombs were exploding at police stations. Prisoners threw themselves into a state of revolt.
Angela Davis, with the threat of the gas chamber looming over her head, believed that her revolution was imminent. The brutal murders of prison guards at Attica and San Quentin, she wrote, “evoked visions of the Paris Commune, the liberated areas of pre-revolutionary Cuba, free territories of Mozambique.”12 This was their moment. Their theories, which had languished in the classroom for all those years, were finally yielding fruit. The revolutionaries had slit the throats and shattered the skulls of their immediate oppressors.
Nixon, Reagan, and America were next.
* * *
Angela Yvonne Davis was born into a ramshackle housing project in Birmingham, Alabama, at the tail end of the Second World War. Her parents, Frank and Sallye Davis, had risen from impoverished beginnings, earned college degrees, and secured work as schoolteachers. When Angela was a child, Frank bought a gas station and the family moved into the black middle class. They purchased a sprawling two-story Queen Anne–style house on Center Street, with a wraparound porch, high gables, and a turret with small windows; Frank and Sallye rented out an upstairs bedroom to supplement their income. They were not rich, but they had secured a middle-class income and provided a strong foundation for their four children.13
The neighborhood, however, was a dividing line. Birmingham city planners maintained the city’s segregated zoning laws and designated Center Street as the red line between the races: white families lived on the west side of the street, which they called College Hills; black families moved onto the east side of the street, which they called Smithfield, and developed into a hub for black leaders in the South. Angela’s mother was involved with black Communist Party members and the Southern Negro Youth Congress.14 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, had organized the professionals, advocates, and business leaders who lived in the neighborhood. Martin Luther King Jr. huddled in their living rooms as they organized the civil rights movement.15
But the red line that ran down the middle of Center Street did not hold back the rising animosity of the enforcers of Jim Crow. Beginning in 1947, the Birmingham chapter of the Ku Klux Klan initiated a terror campaign against the new black residents, targeting the homes of clergy, lawyers, and activists. They detonated dozens of bombs with the hope of forcing the black professional class back into the ghettos on the city’s edges.16 By the time the Davis family had settled into the neighborhood, it was known as “Dynamite Hill.”
Angela, a bookish child with a conspicuous gap between her front teeth, was born into the double consciousness of midcentury black America.
On one hand, Davis’s parents provided her with the staples of a middle-class Western upbringing: she learned to read before entering school, took music and ballet lessons, and spent hours in the back room of the Birmingham Public Library, where she devoured Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.17 On the other, she developed her first memories in a world of racial hatred and violence. “At the age of four I was aware that the people across the street were different,” Davis wrote in her Autobiography. “We were the first black family to move into that area, and the white people believed that we were in the vanguard of a mass invasion.”18 The white families would glare at the black families across the road. Angela would play a game of hurling racial epithets at passing cars full of whites. Her father kept guns tucked away in the house.
Then the bombings began.
“I was in the bathroom washing my white shoelaces for Sunday School the next morning when an explosion a hundred times louder than the loudest, most frightening thunderclap I had ever heard shook our house,” Davis recalled. “Crowds of angry Black people came up the hill and stood on ‘our’ side, staring at the bombed-out ruins of the [neighbor’s] house. Far into the night they spoke of death, of white hatred, death, white people, and more death.”19
Davis’s parents met this terror with a quiet, stoic dignity. Her father never admitted to fear and her mother insisted that “the battle of white against Black was not written into the nature of things,” leaving open the possibility of reconciliation. Like many middle-class black families of their generation, Davis’s parents taught their children to work hard and appreciate what they had. Frank shared stories about walking ten miles to school, while Sallye told stories about her childhood hardships in the Alabama backwoods. At school, which was segregated by race, the teachers taught Angela and the other black students about Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, and warned them that they would have to steel themselves for “hard labor and more hard labor, sacrifices and more sacrifices,” in order to enter the professional class of doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and businessmen.
Since childhood, Angela had told her family that she wanted to become a pediatrician, but as she grew older, she began to feel doubt toward what she later condemned as the “Booker T. Washington syndrome”—the “prevailing myth” that the path to black progress was through individual initiative, rather than changing society as a whole.20
This doubt soon blossomed into an ideology. At the age of fifteen, Davis won a Quaker scholarship for black children to attend private school in New York City. Davis packed her bags, left Dynamite Hill, moved into the home of a white family in Greenwich Village, and enrolled in the Elisabeth Irwin High School, nicknamed “Little Red,” an experimental educational cooperative that employed teachers who had been blacklisted from the public schools for their radical politics. Her teachers included members of the Communist Party;21 her classmates included future radicals such as Kathy Boudin,22 who would later join the Weather Underground and earn a felony murder conviction for her role in an armored car robbery.
There, in the little brick building on Bleecker Street, Angela Davis would have her awakening. The doubts that she had harbored, the pain that she had borne—all of it would be put into perspective by the teachers in the Little Red School House, who taught the history of the communist movement and the ideology of revolution.
Davis found her first inspiration when, sitting in one of the schoolrooms, she opened the pages of Marx and Engel’s famous polemic. “The Communist Manifesto hit me like a bolt of lightning,” she recalled. “I read it avidly, finding in it answers to many of the seemingly unanswerable dilemmas which had plagued me. I read it over and over again, not completely understanding every passage or every idea, but enthralled nevertheless by the possibility of a communist revolution here.” She was intoxicated by visions of “how capitalism could be abolished” and make way for “a new society, without exploiters and exploited, a society without classes, a society where no one would be permitted to own so much that he could use his possessions to exploit other human beings.”23
During this same period, Davis supplemented her book reading by attending meetings with a Marxist-Leninist youth organization and listening to lectures at the American Institute for Marxist Studies. On the weekends, she marched against nuclear weapons and picketed a Woolworth variety store.24
By all accounts, Davis was a precocious student. She graduated from Elisabeth Irwin and earned a full scholarship to study French at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. On campus, she immersed herself in the fashionable intellectuals of the era—Camus, Sartre, and the French existentialists—and listened to speeches by James Baldwin and, crucially, Herbert Marcuse. Davis was drawn to the German philosopher and, during her sophomore year, began weekly private discussions with him on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the critical theorists. “I read all of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s works that had been translated into English or French, in addition to Marcuse’s writings. In this way I had acquainted myself with their thought, which was collectively known as Critical Theory,” she said.25
With Marcuse’s encouragement, Davis finished her studies at Brandeis and enrolled in the graduate program at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt—the birthplace and spiritual center of the critical theories. In Frankfurt, Davis studied directly under Marcuse’s colleague Theodor Adorno, attended communist youth festivals, visited East Germany, and listened to Rudi Dutschke’s public speeches.
But her studies in Europe were short-lived. She was following the news back home, watching as Los Angeles erupted in race riots and the Black Panther Party caught the attention of the press. Davis began to feel homesick, submerged in European theory while the American ghettos convulsed with revolutionary action. Her decision was finalized when she opened the international section of the newspaper and saw the iconic images of the Panthers hoisting their rifles into the air on the steps of the California State Capitol.
Davis was studying the old texts on violence and revolution; the black militants were threatening it directly with lead and steel.
Davis packed her bags and, after a short stopover with Marcuse at the Dialectics of Liberation conference in London, followed her teacher back to San Diego to finish her studies there. “I wanted to continue my academic work, but I knew I could not do it unless I was politically involved,” she said. “The struggle was a life-nerve; our only hope for survival. I made up my mind. The journey was on.”26
The following years would become a whirlwind process of radicalization. Davis began by organizing left-wing student groups on the UCSD campus, agitating for the creation of a new Marxist-Leninist college department,27 and enlisting Marcuse to help break through the doors and occupy the registrar’s office.28
Meanwhile, in a less public fashion, Davis sought entry into the black militant movements that were bubbling up in Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. She traveled up and down California’s new interstate to meet with the black nationalists, separatists, communists, and revolutionaries, hoping to find her place in the ferment. “There were the severely antiwhite factions who felt that only the most drastic measure—elimination of all white people—would give Black people the opportunity to live unhampered by racism. Others simply wanted to separate and build a distinct Black nation within the United States. And some wanted to return to Africa, the land of our ancestors,” she wrote. “There were those who felt the most urgent task of the movement was to refine the spirit of confrontation among Black people. They wanted to spark mass uprisings, such as the Watts and Detroit rebellions. Related to them were those who called upon us all to ‘pick up the gun’ as the major weapon of liberation and transformation.”29
At first, Davis joined the Black Panther Party, led by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, and participated in peace negotiations between the Panthers and another militant organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. Shortly thereafter, however, that alliance collapsed and Davis spent brief stints with other revolutionary groups, which, in turn, also fell apart due to internal purges, leadership struggles, enemy infiltration, and conflict with ostensible allies.
Eventually, frustrated with the perpetual infighting of the black militant movements, Davis made up her mind: she would throw in her lot with the Communist Party USA. “I wanted an anchor, a base, a mooring. I needed comrades with whom I could share a common ideology,” she wrote. “I knew that this fight had to be led by a group, a party with more permanence in its membership and structure and more substance in its ideology.” For Davis, the Communist Party, which ruled the Soviet Union and was establishing tributary states across the globe, offered a viable path to power.
And so, on a summer day in 1968, Davis paid her fifty-cent membership dues and joined the Communist Party’s all-black revolutionary cell, the Che-Lumumba Club.30
She immediately set to work, opening a school for young revolutionaries on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. “No sooner were programs organized than they were bulging with eager young people,” she wrote. “From three-thirty in the afternoon, when the junior high school students came in, until ten at night, the office was the scene of meetings, classes and discussions on such topics as the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States, the Movement in the Los Angeles Area, Strategy and Tactics in Community Organizing, and Marxist-Leninist Theory of Revolution.”31
At the same time, Davis also began teaching revolutionary theory in the state’s public university system. In the spring of 1969,32 the University of California, Los Angeles, philosophy department offered Davis a temporary position as an acting assistant professor while she completed her doctoral thesis, “Kant’s Theory of Force.”33
But Davis’s radical teaching was soon disrupted. A whisper campaign began that summer, culminating in newspaper reports, first in UCLA’s Daily Bruin, then in the San Francisco Examiner, that identified Davis as a member of the Communist Party. The establishment powers, represented by Governor Reagan and the Board of Regents, reacted immediately. As it had done with her mentor Herbert Marcuse, the board attempted to strip Davis of her teaching position, citing a state prohibition against employing communists in the universities.
Rather than hide her affiliations, however, Davis turned the tables on the Establishment and proudly declared, “Yes, I am a Communist,” and used the controversy to portray herself as a victim of government repression.34
To drum up support, Davis gave a series of speeches on public university campuses. She read from the pages of Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, accused the university system of “institutional racism,” and denounced the Regents for their complicity in “the calculated genocide to the ranks of the Black Panther Party.”35 At another rally, delivered in tandem with Marcuse, Davis encouraged the students to join the revolutionary movements. “We have to go to the streets,” she shouted. “We have to talk about a complete and total change in the structures of this society, because that’s the only way that a concept like academic freedom is going to be made relevant—we have to go to the streets.”36
The next year would become a period of acceleration on all fronts. Davis intensified her rhetoric against the universities, deepened her relationships with the militant movements, and launched a campaign to free the black radicals George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette from Soledad State Prison, where they were incarcerated for various street crimes and the murder of a prison guard who had been beaten and throw from a third-floor tier. Davis became a fierce advocate for the three “Soledad Brothers” and began a correspondence, then a love affair, with George Jackson, who had been radicalized at San Quentin State Prison and founded a Marxist-Leninist prison gang called the Black Guerrilla Family.
Davis sent Jackson a string of letters professing her twin ardors: for George and for blood. “George,” she wrote, “my feelings for you run very deep. My memory fails me when I search in the past for an encounter with a human being as strong, as beautiful, as you. Something in you has managed to smash through the fortress I long ago erected around my soul.”37 She spent many of her waking hours in fantasies of violence and of liberating her lover from prison: “We have to learn to rejoice when pigs’ blood is spilled”; “We must learn to plan the attack, gear it towards the total annihilation of the monster”; “I see myself tearing down this steel door, fighting my way to you, ripping down your cell door and letting you go free.”38
As the summer of 1970 reached its zenith, Davis received the final word from the University of California—the Regents had decided to let her contract expire without reappointment—and her letters took on an increasingly frenzied tone.
Davis began spending her days with George’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan Jackson, and promised that they were making “beautiful plans” for the revolution. “All my life-efforts have gone in one direction: Free George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers. Man, I have gotten into a lot of trouble, but I don’t give a damn,” she wrote to George. “I love you. I love my people. That is all that matters. Liberation by any means necessary. Those means are determined by the nature and intensity of the enemy’s response. The American oppressor has revealed to us what we must do if we are serious about our commitment. If I am serious about my love for you, about my love for Black people, I should be ready to go all the way. I am.”39
With this in mind, Davis and Jonathan Jackson began assembling an arsenal of weapons. In 1968 and 1969, Davis had purchased a .38-caliber automatic pistol and an M-1 carbine rifle, and then, accompanied by Jonathan in the spring and summer of 1970, purchased another M-1 carbine and 150 rounds of ammunition. Finally, on August 5, Davis and Jonathan visited George at San Quentin, then went to a pawnshop in San Francisco and paid cash for a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of shells.40
The word “revolution” was no longer a metaphor. They were preparing for war.
Two days later, on August 7, 1970, these guns became a part of history. Jonathan Jackson rose from his seat in the gallery of the Marin County Hall of Justice, pulled the Browning .38 pistol out of a satchel, threw it to one of the defendants, then pulled the M-1 carbine from his trench coat and yelled to the astonished crowd: “Freeze!”41
Three San Quentin inmates and political radicals—James McClain, Ruchell Magee, and William Christmas—were in court that day regarding McClain’s alleged stabbing of a prison guard.42 After Jackson told the onlookers to “freeze,” the men sprang into action. McClain held the pistol to the head of Judge Harold Haley, Magee freed Christmas from the holding pen, and they lashed together the deputy district attorney and three female jurors with piano wire, taking them as hostages. Jackson then produced the 12-gauge shotgun and the men taped it under the judge’s chin. They briefly contemplated taking an infant hostage, but relented after the mother began screaming, “No, don’t take my baby!”43
Leading the string of hostages, Jackson and his three accomplices announced their demands: they wanted the authorities to release the Soledad Brothers, including Angela’s lover George Jackson, by noon that day—or all of the hostages would be killed. They moved through the corridor, telling a photographer “we are the revolutionaries,” and climbed into a rented yellow Hertz van with the intention of traveling to San Francisco International Airport.44
But the quartet never made it past the barricades. As the van approached the perimeter, four San Quentin prison guards exchanged a barrage of bullets with the hostage takers. Simultaneously, the deputy district attorney inside the van grabbed McClain’s pistol, shot Magee in the stomach, and fired at the other men until the magazine was empty. The entire exchange lasted nineteen seconds.45
When the smoke cleared, Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, William Christmas, and Judge Haley were dead. Ruchell Magee and the deputy district attorney were seriously wounded. Miraculously, all of the jurors survived.
Investigators dragged the bodies out of the van with lassos, fearing that they might be booby-trapped with explosives, and began sorting through the materials inside. They discovered that Jonathan Jackson had concealed some of the hostage-taking supplies in two books, Violence and Social Change and The Politics of Violence: Revolution in the Modern World, both of which were signed and dated on the inside cover by Angela Davis.
In Jonathan’s satchel, they found Angela Davis’s fingerprints on two more pamphlets, a manual on operating the M-1 carbine and Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. In his wallet, investigators found a yellow slip of paper with a telephone number for a public phone booth near the American Airlines ticket counter at San Francisco International Airport. Finally, after running the serial numbers, they learned that all four of the weapons used in the siege traced back to one “Angela Y. Davis.”
Meanwhile, as the blood was drying outside the Marin County Hall of Justice, witnesses spotted Davis at the San Francisco airport, where she quickly purchased a Pacific Southwest Airlines ticket to Los Angeles—and went into hiding.46
In her Autobiography, Davis presents herself as a fugitive slave fleeing the whips and the bloodhounds of the white slave master. “Thousands of my ancestors had waited, as I had done, for nightfall to cover their steps, had leaned on one true friend to help them, had felt, as I did, the very teeth of the dogs at their heels. It was simple. I had to be worthy of them,” she wrote.47
The reality, however, was less heroic. The FBI had placed Davis on the Most Wanted list for her role in the courthouse siege, and for the next two months the young professor utilized a network of wealthy left-wing benefactors, activists, and militants to disguise her physical appearance, move through a sequence of safe houses, and evade law enforcement.48 In October, however, the Bureau tracked Davis and a mysterious heir named David Poindexter Jr. to a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in Midtown Manhattan, where federal agents burst through the door and arrested them.49
* * *
President Richard Nixon celebrated Davis’s arrest on national television, praising FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for capturing his mark50 and for sending a “warning” to other radicals.51
But Davis, despite being bound and shackled, was not powerless. After she was sent to the New York Women’s House of Detention, the other prisoners clanged on the doors and chanted Angela’s name. Crowds of left-wing supporters assembled on the streets below to offer their support. A network of committees and radical organizations launched a propaganda campaign on her behalf, reaching television screens and newspaper columns around the world.52
The most significant writing during this period, however, was Davis’s own. In 1971, after she had been transferred to Marin County Jail, Davis edited and contributed to a collection of essays, If They Come in the Morning, that featured the key figures in the black militant movement: Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Ericka Huggins, prison writers George Jackson and Ruchell Magee—both of whom faced murder charges in connection with the Davis case—and an assortment of communists, lawyers, and activists who had committed themselves to the cause.
In the book, Davis carefully constructs her public image and traces the progression of her political awakening. Like Marcuse, she believed that black Marxists, endowed with the spiritual authority of their ancestors and the intellectual power of their ideology, were destined to lead the new proletariat and subvert the ruling order. In her essays, Davis portrayed the United States as a many-tentacled monster, using the arms of the state to manage society and submerge minorities into a life of crime and desperation. She identified the justice system—laws, courts, prisons, and police—as the primary “instrument of class domination” and physical enforcer of America’s “racist ideology.” For blacks, there was no escape. For Davis, the black underclass was “compelled to resort to criminal acts, not as a result of conscious choice—implying other alternatives—but because society has objectively reduced their possibilities of subsistence and survival to this level.”53
But there was still hope. Davis saw a new consciousness bubbling up in the ghettos and in the prisons. Through a network of street gangs and Black Power organizations, which had recently captured headlines for violent eruptions from the Watts section of Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, the black underclass was beginning to organize and develop an ideology of self-empowerment. The black criminal, who had previously been taught that he was the victimizer of the innocent, was learning that he was, in fact, the victim of an oppressive society. He was not a “prisoner,” but a “political prisoner.” His crimes—theft, robbery, violence, even rape—were not transgressions, but acts of moral rebellion.
As Davis captured the public imagination with her writing and interviews, her legal team prepared to defend her in court. They pursued a two-part strategy: frame the proceedings as a political persecution and sow doubt about the evidence against her.
Prosecutors had built their case step by step, demonstrating that Davis was committed to liberating her lover George Jackson, had spent the summer with his brother Jonathan Jackson, purchased all of the guns used in the courthouse assault, and had her signature and fingerprints on the violent books and pamphlets discovered on Jonathan’s dead body. They also produced dramatic new evidence: eyewitnesses had spotted Davis with the yellow Hertz rental van the day before the siege and, prosecutors alleged, she had planned to be the getaway woman, waiting at the airport public phone booth to coordinate the group’s final escape.54
But on this final point, the prosecution fell short. The defense admitted that Angela was in love with George, that she was deeply involved with Jonathan, that she had purchased all of weapons, and that she was at the airport the day of the siege—but, because Jonathan and the prisoners never made it to the airport, prosecutors could not prove beyond all reasonable doubt that she was directly coordinating the escape. The evidence was overwhelming, but circumstantial.
Davis and her lawyers imbued the trial with a sympathetic political narrative from the outset. “I stand before this court as a target of a political frame-up which far from pointing to my culpability, implicates the State of California as an agent of political repression,” Davis told the court during her arraignment. “In order to ensure that these political questions are not obscured, I feel compelled to play an active role in my own defense as the defendant, as a Black woman and as a Communist. It is my duty to assist all those directly involved in the proceedings as well as the people of this State and the American people in general to thoroughly comprehend the substantive issues at stake in my case. These have to do with my political beliefs, affiliations and my day-to-day efforts to fight all the conditions which have economically and politically paralyzed Black America.”55
The defense enlisted a team of prestigious attorneys, psychiatrists, psychologists, and a handwriting expert to aid in jury selection, and called in a procession of left-wing activists and Communist Party members to provide alibis for Davis during key moments. These alibis were flimsy—they were from dedicated political allies, often in private spaces that were impossible to corroborate—but ultimately, along with the circumstantial nature of the prosecution’s evidence and the political valence of the proceeding, it was enough.
Davis and her attorneys had beguiled the all-white jury, persuading them that the Marin courthouse revolt was a “slave insurrection” and that Angela was a “symbol of resistance.”56 They turned the tables, identifying the state as the victimizer and Davis as the victim. During thirteen hours of jury deliberation, the facts of the case seemed to melt away and the political narrative took hold.
When the judge welcomed the jury back into the courtroom, the clerk read the verdict for each of the three charges. “We, the jury in the above-entitled cause, find the defendant, Angela Y. Davis, not guilty of kidnapping . . . not guilty of murder . . . not guilty of conspiracy.”57
The courthouse erupted in cheers. One juror flashed the Black Power salute to the audience outside the courtroom and told reporters: “I did it because I wanted to show I felt an identity with the oppressed people in the crowd. All through the trial, they thought we were just a white, middle-class jury. I wanted to express my sympathy with their struggle.”58 Later that evening, a majority of the jurors attended a rock-and-roll festival in celebration of Davis’s acquittal.
Four men were dead and one of the hostages had been paralyzed from the waist down, but revolutionary justice had been served. Angela Davis had put American society on trial—and won.