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• Communist professor at the University of California's Santa Cruz campus
• Recipient of the Lenin "Peace Prize" from the police state of East Germany.
• Provided an arsenal of weapons to Black Panthers who used them to kill a Marin Country judge in a failed attempt to free her imprisoned lover, Black Panther murderer George Jackson
• A highly paid professor at UC Santa Cruz and icon of the campus left and frequent guest speaker at anti-war rallies
• Leader of a movement to free all criminals who are minorities claiming that they are political prisoners of the racist United States
• "The only path of liberation for black people is that which leads toward complete and radical overthrow of the capitalist class."

PART 1

Angela Yvonne Davis is a tenured professor in the "History of Consciousness" program at the University of California - Santa Cruz. She has also taught at UCLA and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is a former Black Panther and was an active member of the Communist Party until 1991, when she joined the group Committees of Correspondence, which seeks to unite all radical socialist groups in the United States, and of which she remains a member to this day.

Born into a middle-class family in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Davis attended segregated schools in that city until she was selected for a special life of radical privilege, becoming a student at New York's Little Red Schoolhouse (LRS), famous for its Communist faculty and student body (future Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin attended the school during the same period as Davis). Having been exposed to the Marxist classics at LRS, Davis moved on to a full scholarship at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York, an adjunct of LRS. While attending these schools, she was a house guest of Herbert Aptheker, the Communist Party's chief theoretician, and his family.

In 1961 Davis enrolled at Brandeis University, where she majored in French. She spent her junior year studying in Paris, where she came into contact with Algerian revolutionaries. She graduated from Brandeis in 1965 and then spent two years on the faculty of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She returned to the U.S. to take another teaching position at UCLA, where she worked with radical professor Herbert Marcuse. In 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague spring," Davis joined the Communist Party, voicing her belief that "the only path of liberation for black people is that which leads toward complete and radical overthrow of the capitalist class." In September 1969 Davis was fired from UCLA when her membership in the Communist Party became known. This resulted in a celebrated First Amendment battle that made Angela Davis a national figure and forced UCLA to rehire her.

In 1970 Davis was implicated by more than 20 witnesses in a plot to free her imprisoned lover, fellow Black Panther and prison thug George Jackson, by hijacking a Marin County, California courtroom and taking the judge, the prosecuting assistant district attorney, and two jurors hostage. In an ensuing gun battle outside the court building, Judge Harold Haley's head was blown off by a sawed-off shotgun owned by Ms. Davis. To avoid arrest for her alleged complicity in the plot (she supplied the hijackers with a small arsenal, but claimed not to know the purposes for which it was used) Ms. Davis fled California, where she used aliases and changed her appearance to avoid detection. Two months later she was arrested by the FBI in New York City.

At her 1972 trial, Davis presented her version of where she had been and what she had been doing at the time of the shootout; because she was acting as her own attorney, she could not be cross-examined. She presented a number of alibi witnesses, almost all Communist friends, who testified that she had been with them in Los Angeles playing Scrabble at the time of the Marin slaughter. Witnesses who placed her in Marin were dismissed by Davis and her fellow attorneys as being unable to accurately identify blacks -- because they were white. Davis' case was further aided by the pliant nature of the jury, which acquitted her. Following the verdict, one juror faced news cameras and gave a revolutionary's clenched-fist salute. He laughed at the justice system, saying that prosecutors had been mistaken to expect that the "middle-class jury" would convict Davis. He and most of the jurors then went off to partake in a Davis victory party. 

On July 9, 1975, Russian dissident and Nobel Laureat Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made the following remarks about Angela Davis in a speech he delivered to the AFL-CIO in New York City: 

"There's a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don't know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally, for an entire year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, eight and nine years old, were asked to do this. She was set free, as you know. Although she didn't have too difficult a time in this country's jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents--but more important, a group of Czech dissidents--addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?' Angela Davis answered: `They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.' That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you." (Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, pp. 60-1 ).

Davis ran for Vice President of the United States in 1980 and 1984, alongside Gus Hall, on the Communist Party ticket. She is currently a "University Professor," one of only seven in the entire California University system, which entitles her to a six-figure salary and a research assistant. This income is supplemented by speaking fees ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 per appearance on college campuses, where she is an icon of radical faculty, administrators, and students. Her professorship is in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz - a program that gave a PhD to Black Panther rapist, crack addict, and murderer Huey P. Newton, while Davis was on the faculty. The creator of the History of Consciousness Program once told David Horowitz during a formal interview that he created the program "to demonsrate that the Ph.D. is a fraud." The Provost at UC Santa Cruz is Conn Hallinan, who joined the Communist Party in 1963 at Berkeley and was an editor of the Communist Party newspaper, People's World.

During the months preceding the 2003 war in Iraq, Davis was a frequent guest speaker at rallies against the Iraq war. She is the leader of her own movement against what she calls the "Prison-Industrial Complex," claiming that all minorities in jail are actually "political prisoners" and should be released. Says Davis, "My question is, Why are people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? . . . how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and their families." Pretty difficult, especially for the victims of such predators.   

In recent years, Davis has confirmed rumors that she is a lesbian, a subject about which she had long been reluctant to speak openly. As is her wont, she has moved beyond mere openness about her lifestyle, and into the realm of radical activism. She was a featured speaker at the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum conference in 1993. In 1999 she delivered an address at Johns Hopkins University's "Living Out Loud" program, which was a series of lectures, films and events presented by the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance, an undergraduate group on campus. "Living Out Loud" was part of the university's annual Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Awareness Days. In her speech, Davis displayed her communist colors, focusing on how issues of race and class affect the gay movement. For Davis, every facet of life is weighted with political significance. Her lesbianism, she says, is "something I'm fine with as a political statement." She states that issues like sexuality can "enter into consciousness and become the focus of struggle" against domestic violence and AIDS. In her book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Davis asserts that female blues vocalists who sang about homosexual desire, abusive men, jealousy, lust, travel, and love were creating "a working-class Black feminism" and "a politics of resistance challenging race and gender identity."

Davis has never really written a scholarly or academic text. Her books, which are little more than political tracts, include: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003); Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (2001); Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (1999); Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998); The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998); The House That Race Built (1998); Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (1996); Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1992); Women, Culture, and Politics (1989); Women, Race, and Class (1981); Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974); If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971)

PART 2

http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/ead/scm/scmdavisa/@Generic__BookTextView/135

The Angela Davis Legal Defense Collection documents the initial phase of the legal defense as well as the support activities generated by the incarceration and trial of Angela Davis on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. The case, which became a major cause célebre in the early 1970s, garnered national and international attention and thrust Davis, then in her 20s, into the leadership of the black liberation movement.

Born in Alabama in 1944 to a middle class family, Davis was the oldest of three children. She attended the segregated schools of Alabama until the age of 15, when she received a scholarship from the American Friends Service Committee to attend Elizabeth Irwin High School, a progressive private school in New York City. While at Elizabeth Irwin, Davis joined Advance, a Marxist-Leninist youth group with ties to the Communist Party. Although probably not her first exposure to communism (family friends in Alabama and New York City were members of the Party), her experience in Advance may have provided Davis with her first formal introduction to Marxist-Leninist literature and philosophy.

After graduating from high school Davis won a scholarship to Brandeis University, where she majored in French literature. She spent her junior year (1962) at the Sorbonne in Paris, witnessed firsthand the Algerian conflict being waged in the streets there, and attended the Communist Youth Festival in Helsinki which had a significant impact on her political development. In 1965 she graduated from Brandeis with honors and went to Frankfurt, Germany to study philosophy at Goethe University. At the University she continued her activism and joined a socialist student group opposed to the war in Vietnam. In her autobiography, Davis notes that she spent time in East Germany, which served to deepen her commitment to socialism.

Upon her return to the U.S. Davis joined the black liberation movement and the struggle against the Vietnam war in San Diego and Los Angeles. In 1969, while completing her doctoral studies at the University of California at La Jolla, she was offered and accepted a one year temporary appointment at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Philosophy Department. Following the publication of an anonymous letter in the student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, and articles in newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles in which it was revealed that Davis was a communist (although she had not officially joined the party), the Regents of the University of California terminated her contract. Davis sued the Regents and was reinstated. In 1970 the Philosophy Department recommended to retain Davis for another year, but the Regents declined to renew her appointment, using her speeches on behalf of the Soledad Brothers as the main reason for their decision.

According to her autobiography, Davis first became aware of the Soledad Brothers after reading a February 1970 article in the Los Angeles Times. Three black inmates, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, who had become known as the Soledad Brothers, had been accused of murdering a white prison guard in Soledad Prison. Davis believed that the three men were unjustly accused as there was no substantial evidence of their guilt, and became actively engaged in the struggle for their defense. She accepted the co-chair of the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee and lectured throughout the state on the Soledad Brothers and prison conditions.

As a result of her activities and subsequent visits to Soledad Prison, Davis befriended the families of the Soledad Brothers and corresponded with the three men. She developed a special friendship with George Jackson who had been in prison for ten years and was serving a sentence for second degree armed robbery. Jackson had educated himself politically while in prison, and like Davis had developed a Marxist political outlook. He had joined the Black Panther Party, and wrote two books, Soledad Brother (1970) and Blood In My Eye (1972). On August 21, 1971 Jackson was killed in prison while allegedly trying to escape. That same year Drumgo and Cluchette were acquitted of the murder charge against them.

On August 3, 1970, an event occurred which would profoundly alter Davis' life. Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson's seventeen year old brother who idolized him, tried to assist James McClain, on trial for an alleged attempt to stab an officer, escape from the courthouse. During the escape attempt Jonathan Jackson, with William Christmas and Ruchell Magee, two prisoners who were in the courtroom as witnesses for McClain, took five hostages: three jurors, the district attorney, and the judge. To effect their escape, Jackson and his associates taped a shotgun to the judge's neck. As they were leaving the Marin County courthouse with the hostages, Jackson and the others were reported to have shouted, "We want the Soledad Brothers freed by 12:30 today!," thus indelibly imprinting in the public mind a relationship between the kidnapping and the Soledad Brothers.

During the escape attempt the judge, Jackson and Christmas were killed in a shootout with the police; one juror and the district attorney were wounded. The guns used in the kidnapping were traced to Davis, implicating her in the escape attempt. A California warrant was issued for Davis' arrest in which she was charged as an accomplice to murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. She fled Los Angeles and evaded arrest by seeking refuge in several places including New York City. A federal fugitive warrant was subsequently issued and she was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's ten most wanted list.

Two months later Davis was captured in New York City accompanied by a friend, David Rudolph Poindexter, who was charged with harboring a fugitive. When Davis was extradited to California she was charged, along with Ruchell Magee (a survivor of the courthouse kidnapping attempt). While awaiting trial, and after a few joint court appearances, Davis separated her case from Magee's and their cases were tried separately. Magee wanted his trial held in a federal court while Davis wanted her trial held in California's state court. Davis' trial was moved from Marin County, a primarily white upper middle class community to San Jose, California which was an ethnically and racially more diverse city, in an effort to secure a fair trial with a less biased jury.

Almost immediately a groundswell of support developed in favor of Davis' and Magee's release. Davis in particular, received widespread national and international support from the black community, liberals and the progressive left. The Communist Party mounted a major political campaign and held rallies in the United States and abroad, published articles, pamphlets and posters, issued petitions, distributed postcards, and requested that the public mail cards and letters on Davis' behalf. The National Council of Black Lawyers offered Davis assistance with her trial and the Presbyterian Church gave the Davis Defense Fund $10,000. Singer Aretha Franklin had offered to pay Davis' bail but was out of the country when Davis had her bail hearing. A white farmer from Fresno County who sympathized with Davis gave her the money she needed for bail, and on February 23, 1972, five days before her trial, Davis was released on $102,000 bail after serving seventeen months in jail.

Leading the defense team were Oakland attorney Howard Moore Jr. and Davis childhood friend Margaret Burnham. The other attorneys on the team were Leo Branton, Jr., Doris Brin Walker, Sheldon Otis, Michael Tigar, Dennis Roberts and Allan Brotsky. Representatives from the National Council of Black Lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Lawyers Guild assisted with the preparation of pre-trial motions.

After a trial by jury, consisting of eleven whites and one Latino, Davis was acquitted of all charges. Following her acquittal Davis taught at San Francisco State University for several years. From 1973 until the early 1990s she served on the board of the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, an organization she helped found with Charlene Mitchell. In the Fall of 1995, she was appointed to the University of California at Santa Cruz Presidential Chair and became a consultant to the Ph.D program there. Davis has written several books on gender and class issues, and is a major figure in the orthodox Communist Party

Davis, Angela Yvonne: Angela Davis - An Autobiography. New York, Random House, 1974.

Davis, Angela Yvonne: If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. New York, Third Press, 1971.

Davis, Angela Yvonne: Women, Race and Class. New York, Random House, 1981.

Ashman, Charles R.: The People vs. Angela Davis. New York, Pinnacle Books, 1972.

Aptheker, Bettina: The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. New York, International Publishers, 1975.

Major, Reginald: Justice in the Round: The Trial of Angela Davis. New York Third Press, 1973.

Nadelson, Regina: Who is Angela Davis? The Biography of a Revolutionary. New York, P.H. Wyden, 1972.

New York Committee to Free Angela Davis. A Political Biography of Angela Davis. 1971.

Parker, J.: Angela Davis: The Making of a Revolutionary, Arlington House, 1973.

Timothy, Mary: Jury Woman: The Story of the Trial of Angela Y. Davis. Written by a member of the jury. San Francisco, Glide Publications, 1975.

http://www.akpress.org/2002/items/angeladavis

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/scholaractivists/AngDavisBioBib88.htm

http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/db/issues/96/10.21/news.davis.html

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1303 �the guide to the political life

http://music.yahoo.com/ar-297232---Angela-Davis?ovchn=OVR&ovcpn=yma_artist_a&ovcrn=angela+davis&ovtac=PPC �music on yahoo

http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/686/Angela_Davis_exemplifies_sincere_strength

http://humwww.ucsc.edu/histcon/faculty_davis.htm

http://www.speakersandartists.org/People/AngelaDavis.html

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/press/releases/davis.shtml

http://sun.menloschool.org/~nfortman/8th/decadesweb.2003/olgaf/

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter/pix/angela-davis-1974.jpg

~http://voices.cla.umn.edu/images/davisa_a.jpg

~http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter/pix/angela-davis-1974.jpg

~www.utah.edu/unews/releases/ 01/feb/davisbio.html

~http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_angela_davis.htm

~http://www.speakersandartists.org/People/AngelaDavis.html

http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/ead/scm/scmdavisa/@Generic__BookTextView/135

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR23.3/gill.html?CFID=881615&CFTOKEN=82850399

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1218425/posts

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