The Public Revolutionary: Black Power and the Case of Angela Davis
In 1970 Angela Davis—professor, activist, and communist—found herself thrust into the center of a media culture not only uncertain of how it perceived black women, but one that was still overwhelmingly afraid of communism and communists. Wanted by the FBI for murder and listed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, Davis’s flight from the law and eventual capture remained front-page news across the country’s major newspapers for nearly 3 years. In the process, Angela Davis’s iconic image and life in the public eye became visual shorthand for Black Power. By looking at Angela Davis’s presence in the mainstream press between 1969-1973, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and Reader’s Digest, I trace how her identity was slowly de-individualized and refashioned into that of the archetypal black militant revolutionary, from her first experience in the spotlight as an openly communist professor at UCLA, to her flight from the FBI, capture, trial, and eventual acquittal on murder charges for her connection to the Soledad Brothers. By comparing these news stories with Davis’s own interpretation of events in her Autobiography, I demonstrate how Davis reclaims her identity from the media, using the identity she creates in her autobiography in order to set the record straight and redefine what it truly means to be a public revolutionary. Davis’s singular experience exemplified the nation’s intense cultural desire for revolution and fascination with the image of the revolutionary, but also fear of blackness and political outsiders. As one of the most high profile political prisoners of our time, Davis’s representation in the media became a cultural litmus test for a society at the crossroads, polarizing public opinion and providing a signpost for just how far American culture had progressed since the early Civil Rights Movement, and how far we had yet to go.
Part I: Angela Davis and the Cultural Landscape of Black Power
By the time Angela Davis emerges into the public sphere, a number of specific events and studies had already primed the media audience with certain signifiers of how to “read” Davis and her place in history. In 1967, major race riots erupted in Newark and Detroit against a backdrop of over 150 other “racial disorders” across the United States, ranging from “minor disturbances to major outbursts involving sustained and widespread looting and destruction of property” (KR 32). In 1968, The Kerner Report, commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to these civil disorders, came to the conclusion that, “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” (xx). The Kerner Report specifically addressed the effect of the mass media on riots, coming to the following conclusions:
First, that despite incidents of sensationalism, inaccuracies, and distortions, newspapers, radio and television, on the whole, made a real effort to give a balanced, factual account of the 1967 disorders.
Second, despite this effort, the portrayal of violence that occurred last summer failed to reflect accurately its scale and character. The overall effect was, we believe, an exaggeration of both mood and event.
Third, and ultimately most important, we believe that the media have thus far failed to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and the underlying problems of race relations. (KR 363)
The commission recognized the tendency for the mass media to exaggerate accounts of the scale and intensity of violence that occurred during the summer of 1967, contributing to the phenomenon of “cumulative effect” (KR 365). In other words, repeated exposure to mass media coverage of the riots of 1967 and “the growing momentum of the civil rights movement” conditioned the responses of a mass viewership to racially coded cues. Furthermore, the commission found that the “what the public saw and read last summer thus produced emotional reactions and left vivid impressions not wholly attributable to the material itself” (KR 365). The commission came to the conclusion that, “Fear and apprehension of racial unrest and violence are deeply rooted in American society. They color and intensify reactions to news of racial trouble and threats of racial conflict. Those who report and disseminate news must be conscious of the background of anxieties and apprehension against which their stories are projected” (KR 365).
While the Kerner Report generally avoids placing any blame on the media for the riots of 1967, the commission acknowledges the relationship between racial unrest and how issues affecting racial minorities have been underrepresented in the media. In particular, the commission criticized the media for failing to “analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States” and “communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions” (KR 366). Likewise, the commission found (not surprisingly) that “the media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world” (KR 366) and that this “white press” repeatedly reflects “the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America” (KR 366). The commission thus points to the larger social prejudices plaguing American culture at large as the source of any biases that may taint the mass media, a distinction that both enlarges the debate surrounding the media’s role while also effectively dispersing blame across all of society. While no one institution is wholly at fault for America’s tenuous race relations, the commission blasts the media for bearing additional responsibility as a primary source of education and information within American culture. The media’s role in contributing to the status quo of race relations is “not excusable” (KR 366).
Based on the commission’s findings, it is clear that by 1967, the mainstream media still by in large mirrored the preexisting biases and prejudices more widely held throughout American culture. In some ways, this trend within the media represented a back slide from earlier trends in civil rights movement coverage. Julian Bond argues how early movement coverage from roughly between 1955-1965, “brought the legitimate but previously unheard demands of southern blacks into the homes of Americans far removed from the petty indignities and large cruelties of southern segregation” (Bond 17). Once these indignities were exposed to a mass audience, the civil rights movement was able to make major inroads into combating racial injustice on a nationwide scale. However, Bond describes media coverage of the Black Power era, or roughly between 1965-1975 as “largely negative”:
…changes in the tone of Movement coverage coincided roughly with the emergence of the black power slogan during the 1966 Meredith March through Mississippi, and were intensified by the urban rioting that exploded in many of America’s cities during the late 1960’s. This new phase was characterized by much greater press suspicion of what appeared to be ever more radical black demands for the restructuring of America’s economic, political, and social system.” (Bond 17)
The “ever more radical” calls for black power dominated news headlines across the country during this period of press coverage. Black revolutionary organizations were among the most popular newsmakers, providing ample fuel for the already tenuous racial anxieties in American culture. The Kerner Commission, while cognizant of this toxic racial environment, failed to seriously consider the political motives of black power in their assessment of the nation’s race relations. As Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford suggest, the Kerner Commission’s prescription for racial unity as a first step toward healing the nation’s racial tensions belied a deeper anxiety regarding Black nationalism, “especially its tenets that affirmatively claimed blackness, emphasized the African origins of ‘New World’ black identities, advocated Pan-African political thinking, and fearlessly sought autonomy from white America” (Collins and Crawford 6). The commission’s key stratagem of racial unification was at odds with the politics of Black Nationalism, suggesting that even as the commission’s stated goal was to prevent race riots from happening again, their unwillingness to realistically consider the political legitimacy of the black power movement rendered this key strategy unviable and instead further entrenched an institutional fear of black nationalist organizations. The institutionalizing of this fear is evident in other analyses of the urban rioting. One study of the relationship between race and the news media concluded that:
The frustration of the Negro community is stirring the ferment among young Negroes in the urban slums. The fury of newly formed militant groups sometimes becomes nihilistic and even suicidal. The Watts riots are evidence of the kind of disorder that could break out anywhere with no other objective than to kill “whitey” and to damage everything he stands for. (Fisher and Lowenstein 17).
Widespread news coverage of urban rioting or “crisis reporting” helped concretize an exaggerated sense of panic surrounding urban centers and African American revolutionaries. The same study found that “what is not a crisis is not usually reported, and what is not or cannot be made visual is often not televised. The news media respond quickly and with keen interest to the conflicts and controversies of the racial story but for the most part disregard the problems that seethe beneath the surface until they erupt in the hot steam that is a ‘live’ news story” (Fisher and Lowenstein 5).
Coverage of the Black Panther Party in particular created a template for how a mass media public would respond to certain types of racially coded stories and images. As Leigh Raiford suggests, “Black Power, and the Panthers especially, were rife with visual appeal and aesthetic allure—raised fists and crisp uniforms that signified collective solidarity and organization, big Afros and serious countenances manifested the ethos ‘Black is Beautiful’” (Raiford 224-5). The widely circulated imagery of black revolutionary organizations like the Panthers “came to exemplify black American revolution” (Raiford 228). Raiford argues how this imagery, and in particular the iconic image of Huey P. Newton used in the “Free Huey” campaign, helped increase membership within the BPP but at the same time was subject to interpretation by various constituencies, including “the media, the state, everyday people who supported or opposed the Panthers or wrestled with something in between—each infused the image of Newton with their own political meaning” (Raiford 230). Black power imagery was instrumental in rousing revolutionary sentiment, but at the same time enabled a fluidity of meaning that, coupled with the media’s overrepresentation of African Americans in stories of crime, rioting, and protest, unwittingly became part of a culture of fear that had reached fever pitch by the early 1970s. In his extensive study of the Black Power Era and its cultural impact, William Van Deburg demonstrates how historical context played a fundamental role in public opinion toward black militants and black revolutionary organizations. In particular, Van Deburg argues that:
The unprecedented scourge of civil disturbances which took place during the mid-sixties convinced many that every ghetto contained hundreds—even thousands—of irreconcilable extremists whose singular goal was to foment rebellion. Terrified whites conjured up visions of campus radicals, Muslim separatists, and black teenage gang members banded together in an unholy pact to kill whitey or force him to his knees. To many suburban refugees, the black ghetto seemed a vast, uncharted sea which only the guerrillas knew how to navigate. Fear of the unknown caused these outside observers to vivify reality and to enlarge the threat of guerilla war beyond the bounds of reason. (Van Deburg 167)
In the press, there was no shortage of crisis reporting to fuel widespread public panic regarding advocates of black power, or anyone who fit the image of the black revolutionary.
Against the backdrop of this culture of fear, Davis’s presence in the public sphere additionally challenged pre-existing notions of black womanhood, stereotypes that had been proliferated through American popular culture via blaxploitation films, television, and the highly influential Moynihan Report. The Moynihan Report, a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1965, aimed to understand the root of social inequality between whites and African Americans using demographic data as its research base. The report held as its central claim that:
The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself. (Moynihan Report 73)
The Moynihan Report is most notorious for making the controversial claim that at the root of African Americans’ inability to bridge the income and education gap was a deteriorating family structure. The report argues that while, “The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability,” African American families are “highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown” (Moynihan Report 77). Finally, the report issued this condemning conclusion regarding African Americans’ status in American culture:
There is no one Negro problem. There is no one solution. Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. (Moynihan Report 77).
The report blamed the “weakness of the family structure” on what it perceived as an inversed family structure, or matriarchy:
In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well. (Moynihan Report 77).
This claim in particular threatened to institutionalize the stigmatization of black men while solidifying the stereotype of black women as hyper-strong and hyper-sexualized. The Moynihan Report promoted a version of the black family as “pathology,” prompting plenty of negative response from black power advocates who rejected this conclusion as resting on victimhood as its underlying cause. The report’s claims about black women in particular reverberated throughout American culture after the report was leaked to the media.
While the Moynihan Report provided an “official” prognosis of stereotyped gender roles in African American culture, it was popular culture that helped bring these stereotypes into American homes. Blaxploitation films in particular served as one way of watering down the political legitimacy of public figures in the Black Power movement. The character of Foxy Brown, for example, “reduced black feminist activist-intellectuals like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver to the hypersexual, constantly dressed and undressed, body of Pam Grier” (Raiford 238). As an amalgam of black female stereotypes, films like Foxy Brown undermined the political goals of black liberation movements by reducing “liberation into vengeance, the pursuit of social justice which embraced race, class, and gender into Black racism, and the politics of armed struggle into systematic assassination” (Robinson 5).
Likewise, stereotypical representations of black women had long persisted in American letters, from the servile “Mammy” figures and the recalcitrant “Topsys” to the tragic mulatta. Barbara Christian notes that these stereotypes in some ways gained ground during the Black Power era, especially in black nationalist poetry:
A different stereotype begins to emerge: the idealized black woman poised on a pedestal somewhat in reaction to the previously projected stereotypes. Black women become symbolic holders of the moral condition of blacks in much of the nationalist poetry. In some ways, though, this kind of stereotype assumes the existence of Sapphire, Aunt Jemima, the black mammy, the sex kitten, and the evil woman—images germinated in the white southern mythology and enhanced and enriched by film, television, and social programs even up to the present” (Christian 16).
In other words, the categorical limitations black women’s identities were bounded by was not limited to the white establishment. Though such criticism of Black power movement organizations has since been importantly deconstructed, offering a far more nuanced understanding of positions on women in the movement, such criticism did speak to the early and open gender chauvinism of the movement. Contemporary analyses of Davis’s experience in the media spotlight tended to obliterate her role in contributing to the burgeoning black feminist movement within the black power movement in favor of overdetermining her identity as an exemplary, singular, or exceptional character. For example, before Davis’s own autobiography went to print, several individuals of varying ideological standpoints wrote biographies of Davis, each attempting to capture the “real” Angela Davis. Marc Olden’s 1973 biography, titled Angela Davis: An Objective Assessment, formulated her life story as a dichotomous battle between black and white:
In reading about militant blacks who taught in universities, bought guns and who publicly admitted they were communists, white America reacted predictably. A black, gun-toting red was Lucifer come up from below and turned loose to lay waste everything Christian and decent. That was one view.
The black view was different. All those opposing her were white. It was the white world that tried to stop her from teaching, that had threatened her life for almost a year and that was now charging her with murder and kidnapping. Angela Davis was a black woman fighting back. Angela was a sister in trouble.
So, the many newspaper stories intensified existing prejudices or beliefs. There was a lot to read about Angela Davis. The pretty professor turned fugitive formed a success story unique to the turbulence of the 1970’s. (Olden, Intro)
Olden’s “objective assessment” is anything but, and his introductory comments suggesting that “All those opposing her were white” is completely unsubstantiated. Olden warns at the end of his introduction that, “Whatever definition emerges [of Davis’s life story], no matter how temporary, the press stands ready to exploit it.” Though he may not have meant to implicate himself, his ensuing biography is shamefully exploitative, relying almost completely on newspaper and media accounts to piece together Davis’s life with some of his own colorful commentary loosely interspersed among these second hand accounts. For example, in Olden’s chapter covering Davis’s experience teaching at UCLA, he describes her as:
…an attractive figure on the podium: tall and slim, an imposing Afro hairdo framing her pretty face with its light brown skin and wide mouth. Sometimes she wore tinted glasses, along with colorful contemporary clothes. As causes go, and she was to be a cause for the next three years, she was the best looking one in a long time. (Olden 34)
His depiction is certainly no improvement on the mass media’s strange obsession with her appearance, and in fact seems to border on creepy as he waxes on about Davis’s physical fitness as a “cause.”
While Olden’s biography is meant to be nothing more than a pseudo-journalistic quick read, J.A. Parker’s 1973 biography Angela Davis: The Making of a Revolutionary presents itself as a more researched, historically situated rendition of Davis’s life. However, Parker makes it abundantly clear that he disapproves of black revolutionaries beginning with his book’s dedication:
Dedicated to my wife Dorothy who is not a revolutionary and our daughter Wanda who shows no signs of becoming a revolutionary.
His biography of Davis devolves into little more than anti-Communist propaganda. Parker is especially critical of Herbert Marcuse, whom he describes as having an unparalleled influence on “the young and impressionable Angela Davis” through his “complex and often confusing philosophy, as well as his method of presenting it to his students” (Parker 86). Parker’s biography of Davis includes a rather involved critique of Marcuse’s philosophy and teaching methods, arguing that “One thing quite clear about Professor Marcuse is that if he were in charge of our universities, or of society as a whole, free speech would surely be eliminated” (Parker 87). Parker’s nearly 300-page tome on Davis proves to be more of a platform for Parker to air his anti-leftist views and distaste for radicalism.
Regina Nadelson’s 1972 biography Who is Angela Davis? The Biography of a Revolutionary represents the most sympathetic stance of these biographies, though her sympathy is somewhat misplaced. Nadelson claims that her goal is to “dig beneath the distorting columns of newsprint and discover who Angela Davis, in all her personal and political complexity, really is” (xiii). However, her biography of Davis seems more a journey into exploring what Davis’s experience came to represent for Nadelson personally. In a rather scathing review for the New York Times, Toni Morrison blasts Nadelson for writing what is essentially a fluff piece on Davis’s life that fails to explore the more serious politics of what was at stake in Davis’s experience:
…in the chapter “Conversations in Jail” Miss Regina quotes exactly 23 words Angela actually spoke and they were directed to Margaret Burnham, the rest of them being culled from writings and speeches, so the consequence of this singularly parochial research is that Angela Davis is revealed to be pretty much like Regina Nadelson, an American. “People see her as a black leader and as a liberated woman. There is something else that matters to me: she is an American.” And as for her personal regard for her subject, Miss Regina likes her; “She is kind and funny.” Yessum, Miss Regina. We all are. (Toni Morrison, New York Times Oct 29, 1972)
Interestingly enough, in spite of Nadelson’s desire to avoid the mistakes she saw the media making in its representations of Davis, she falls just as easily into them:
Angela is young and she is articulate, she is highly intelligent. She is a black woman and she is a Communist. Good–looking, strong-minded, and totally committed, she had qualities to make the mouths of the media water with anticipation. What disturbed the press, however, was that despite a neat set of labels (black, brilliant, beautiful, red, etc, etc.), it wasn’t actually all that easy to shove her into categories (Nadelson 4).
Nadelson’s biography of Davis is uncomplicated and utterly invested in the desire to find out who the “real” Angela Davis, wanting only “to discover Angela beneath, apart from, in spite of, events that have happened” (Who is Angela Davis xv), as though Davis could (and should) exist apart from her politics and the events that secured her a place in the public eye. Nadelson’s fruitless endeavor unwittingly contributed to the media machine that was itself devoted to finding the “real” Angela Davis.
As though in direct rebuttal to Nadelson’s introductory comments about her reasons for writing a biography of Davis, Davis’s own preface to her autobiography responds to this sanctimonious attempt to recreate her in the image of the safe, pretty, and exceptional black woman who accidentally fell into revolution. Davis writes:
…the forces that have made my life what it is are the very same forces that have shaped and misshaped the lives of millions of my people. Furthermore I am convinced that my response to these forces has been unexceptional as well, that my political involvement, ultimately as a member of the Communist Party, has been a natural logical way to defend our embattled humanity. (Davis xv)
Davis further refutes attempts to represent her experiences as an exceptional case:
The one extraordinary event of my life had nothing to do with me as an individual—with a little twist of history, another sister or brother could have easily become the political prisoner whom millions of people from throughout the world rescued from persecution and death. (Davis xvi)
Finally, Davis dismisses the separation of personal experience from politics as not only impossible, but irresponsible:
I was unwilling to render my life as a personal “adventure”—as though there were a “real” person separate and apart from the political person. My life would not lend itself to this anyway, but even if it did, such a book would be counterfeit, for it could not convey my overwhelming sense of belonging to a community of humans—a community of struggle against poverty and racism. (Davis xvi)
Davis’s introductory remarks remind us that the goals of autobiography are as much shaped by experience as they are the political environment within which experience takes shape. When this political landscape is as volatile as America during the late 60s and early 70s, Davis’s preface speaks all the more pointedly to the tendency for media representation to be divisive and represent (both intentionally and unintentionally) the hopes and ideals of the ruling class. In so doing, we can read Davis’s autobiography as not only a political autobiography (as Davis herself intended it to be), but also a response to the encroaching limits placed upon her by media culture and outside representations of her selfhood. By looking at Davis’s autobiography as part of a dialogue between media culture and her experiences within that culture, we can more closely understand the extent to which the modern African American freedom struggle is indebted to the political stances taken by activists like Davis who against all odds refused to allow her identity to be co-opted.
Part II: Angela Davis’s Autobiography and The Mainstream Press
Davis’s autobiography is, I would argue, a direct response to the mass media’s splintering of her identity into discreet, often stereotypical categories. During her tenure at UCLA as an assistant professor and her experience as an accused murderer in connection with the Soledad Brothers case, Davis was able to read about her experiences as they were happening in the news, almost as simultaneously as events would transpire. In a sense, Davis’s presence in the news media adds a post-modern dimension to a Du Bois-ian notion of double-consciousness. In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois theorized that African Americans are born “with a veil and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the eyes of others” (DuBois 10-11). The growing pervasiveness of the mass media forms like news magazines, newspapers, and television during the mid to late 20th century creates another staging ground for African American identity, where the “eyes of others” transforms into an increasingly singular “eye.” As Edward Morgan suggests, “Mass media’s construction of the past is governed first and foremost by the imperative of maximizing audiences and readers. Their selective memory, then, invariably reflects fundamental economic, organizational, and ideological forces at work within a capitalist economy. As such, the mass media plays a crucial role in creating the foundations of common, or near universal public discourse and public memory within a culture” (Romano and Raiford 138). Collectively, news coverage of Davis merged to create a fixed image that was nearly beyond her control and that threatened to become the image that would be etched into public memory permanently. In the same way that a traditionally sanitized public discourse surrounding the Civil Rights movement has only recently been cracked open by first-hand accounts in the form of memoirs and autobiographies, Davis’s autobiography becomes, almost out of necessity, a place to reclaim her identity from a public discourse heavily influenced by the universalizing tendencies of the mass media.
The nature of Davis’s presence in the media during this period is evidence of not only how the issues of black power, black revolution, and radicalism in general were on the minds of the general public, but also how these issues were in every way being contested by and through the media. Davis, as a Black Feminist Communist, made for an incredibly provocative test case. The mainstream press more often than not emphasized aspects of Davis’s character that would heighten a sense of drama surrounding her character, adding more pulp to their headlines while also contributing to a more widespread sense that radicalism was America’s #1 enemy. The mainstream press tended to downplay Davis’s connection to a larger struggle, while playing up her personal and physical characteristics. For example, the majority of stories about Davis within the major national news magazines Newsweek and Time open with a gesture toward Davis’s physical beauty:
“Angela Davis is black, proud, beautiful and a Phi Beta Kappa.” -Newsweek, Oct. 6, 1969
“Angela Davis is not only black and beautiful but Red and militant.” -Newsweek, June 22, 1970
“Beautiful, Afro-coifed Angela Davis has been a center of controversy ever since her appointment last year as the University of California’s first black philosophy instructor.” -Newsweek, Aug. 24, 1970
“Angela Davis, 26, is black and, slogans aside, beautiful. She is an outstanding scholar and teacher as well.” -Time, Aug 31, 1970
“When FBI agents captured Angela Davis in a Manhattan Motel last week, it seemed that the denouement of the mystery surrounding the striking, cerebral young radical might be near.” -Time, October 26, 1970
By emphasizing first Davis’s appearance (“beautiful”,“black”, and “striking”), followed by descriptions of her intellect and/or militancy, the language of these news stories begin to perform a process of de-invidualization, effectively collapsing categories of identity through their collective rhetorical strategies. These stories suggest through their characterizations of Davis that she is exceptional not because she is a radical, or a black college professor, or even a communist, but because she occupies these positions while also being attractive. Davis, in effect, is assigned a gendered tagline. Her identity, over the course of being on public trial in the media, is reduced to that of the prototypical black female “revolutionary”, “radical”, “red”, or “militant.” As far as the mainstream press is concerned, these groups/categories/political leanings are treated as interchangeable. While the cultural biases revealed in these stories, and in particular the gendered biases, are certainly a product of the times and not necessarily unique to the mainstream press, these biases nonetheless help to create a cultural type—the black, female revolutionary—who serves as the focal point for so many of culture’s anxieties about black identity, revolution, and women’s liberation at the time.
In the introduction to the new edition of her autobiography, Davis sees her autobiography as an opportunity to revise the type of identity streamlining that the media inevitably traffics in:
The real strength of my approach at that time resides, I think, in its honest emphasis on grassroots contributions and achievements, so as to demystify the usual notion that history is the product of unique individuals possessing inherent qualities of greatness. Many people unfortunately assumed that because my name and my case were so extensively publicized, the contest that unfolded during my incarceration and trial from 1970 to 1972 was one in which a single Black woman successfully fended off the repressive might of the state. (Davis viii-ix)
Davis is concerned with not only how she is portrayed as exceptional in the press, but also the nature of that exceptionalism, and how it detracts from the larger cause of black liberation. For while the Kerner Commission and other sociological studies on the role of the mass media in race relations all pointed to a central problem—that the underlying causes of racism and racial tension were not being addressed in the mainstream media—Davis experienced the effects of this absence through her representation within the news media.
Davis’s autobiography opens with a description of the months she spent underground and on the run from the FBI before she was finally arrested. In this relatively brief description (compared to the bulk of her autobiography, which does not focus on her experience of going underground or her capture), Davis recalls a moment when she turned on the news while at a motel outside of Detroit only to see an erroneous story about herself on the screen:
Today, Angela Davis, wanted on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in connection with the Marin County Courthouse shootout, was seen leaving the home of her parents in Birmingham, Alabama. She is known to have attended a meeting of the local branch of the Black Panther Party. When Birmingham authorities finally caught up with her, she managed to outrun them, driving her 1959 blue Rambler. (Davis 11)
This represents the first of many scenes in Davis’s autobiography where she refers to the experience of either seeing herself on television or reading about her experiences in the news. This initial reference to media representation lays out one of the major paradoxes of Davis’s representation within the mainstream press. On the one hand, the news media reflects the pervasiveness of racism, where all individuals of a certain race are forced to check-in their individuality at the door in subordination to an overarching racial identity. In this case, the news media has clearly confused another black woman for Davis. Davis reacts to this particular news story with apprehension, knowing very well that all of the “facts” of the story are speculation:
Was it my sister they were talking about? But she was supposed to be in Cuba. And the last time I had seen my car it was parked outside of Kendra and Franklin’s on 50th Street in L.A. (Davis 11)
The news story generalizes Davis’s identity, literally creating a typology of selves where her identity seems interchangeable with these various other “sightings” of herself. Just as she is captured by the FBI in New York City, Davis describes how the agents keep repeating the question “Are you Angela Davis?” and how “Obviously they had gone through similar scenes many times before. They had rehearsed this moment with the false arrests of scores, perhaps hundreds of tall, light-skinned Black women with large naturals” (Davis 15). But even as law enforcement agencies and the news media generalize and constrain Davis’s identity as a Communist, a black woman, and a revolutionary, they equally deemphasize Davis’s connection to a larger social struggle for black liberation, opting instead to mostly portray her as an anomalous character among black revolutionaries. Davis witnesses as she becomes the “star” of story that is never entirely her own. Moments before the FBI capture Davis in New York City, she describes the thoughts flashing through her mind, likening her experience to a television show where there exist no moral ambiguities:
I remembered the television program I had watched in the Miami apartment: The FBI—a typical, inane TV melodrama of agents pursuing fugitives, complete with the final violent encounter which left the pursued with bullets in their skulls and the FBI agents shows as heroes. Just as I moved to turn off the set, a photograph of me flashed on the screen as if it were a part of the fictionalized FBI pursuit. “Angela Davis,” a deep voice said, “is one of the FBI’s ten most wanted criminals. She is wanted for the crimes of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. She is very likely armed, so if you see her, do not try to do anything. Contact your local FBI immediately.” (Davis 15)
There is a dark irony attached to Davis’s situation, where everything she experiences is constantly being doubled by the media and/or popular culture, but where none of the particulars of her situation are able to cut through the white noise. This cultural interference becomes a primary target for Davis as she meticulously details the circumstances of her imprisonment, trial, and eventual acquittal in the remainder of her autobiography. Even as she recounts the moment of her arrest, she realizes that what she is up against is more than just the FBI, but rather the criminalized persona imposed upon her by law enforcement and the media:
As I stood there, determined to preserve my dignity, elaborate preparations were being made to get me out. I could hear them alerting other agents who must have been stationed at various points in and outside of the motel. All these “precautions,” all these dozens of agents fit in perfectly with the image they had constructed of me as one of the country’s ten most wanted criminals: the big bad Black Communist enemy. (Davis 16)
The moment of Davis’s arrest becomes almost inconsequential when set against unchecked cultural anxiety surrounding Communism and black revolutionaries. Davis describes the scene of her arrest as exactly that: a scene, or a page from a story whose conclusion is so played out that it becomes cliché. Unfortunately, the news media does not make room to ask why Davis identifies as Communist, focusing only on the more sensational outcomes of that decision and ultimately reinforcing the “big bad Black Communist” as the villain in a story that has become all too familiar. In fact, aside from these early recollections of her months on the run, Davis devotes a significant portion of her autobiography to confounding the limited version of Communism promoted by popular culture and lingering Cold War era politics. Beyond even the truncation of her public identity into a radical and a criminal, Davis’s autobiography seems most compelled to set the record straight on her political beliefs.
Davis’s first experience with in the media spotlight and inadvertent transformation into a public revolutionary began with her political “outing” as a communist by an FBI informant while working as an adjunct professor at UCLA. Her position as an openly Communist educator became a public opinion testing ground for the role of politics in education, forcing her in front of the public through extensive news coverage. While traveling abroad in Cuba, Davis’s affiliation with the Communist Party made headlines first in the UCLA campus paper and later in the San Francisco Examiner. Unbeknownst to Davis, she had already become a person of interest with the FBI because of her past involvement with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party. Davis, rather than quietly avoid confrontation and deny the allegations that she was a Communist, chose to affirm her membership in the Communist Party. She recounts the angry and often violent backlash that resulted from her political identity:
The racists and anti-Communists throughout the state responded with furor. Threatening calls and letters poured into the Philosophy Department and into the offices of the Communist Party. A man broke into the Philosophy Department offices and physically attacked Don Kalish. A special telephone line had to be installed in my office, so that all calls could be screened before they reached me. The campus police had to be placed on alert at all times. Several times they had to check out my car because of bomb threats I had received. (Davis 219)
The mere fact of Davis’s membership in the Communist Party fueled a public debate, polarizing those who sided unwaveringly on the integrity of intellectual freedom and those who felt that intellectual freedom could not exist within the politics of Communism. For example, UCLA Professor Richard Barton wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Times:
The contention of Profs. Searle and Kalish that the firing of a Communist by the Regents is a violation of academic freedom, a political test, neo-McCarthyism, or part of the conspiracy theory is fatuous. Such a decision by the university board is an inevitable conclusion, if one truly believes in intellectual freedom. No member of the Communist Party should be hired by the University of California because, by joining the Communist Party and submitting to its disciplines, one automatically forfeits his “intellectual license.” Such committed people are no longer open and free investigators, having dedicated themselves to dogma and authoritarian party-line. They are “special pleaders” or “true believers.” (Los Angeles Times Sep 27, 1969)
Another editorial in the Los Angeles Times demonstrates the pathology of fear and paranoia that surrounded public perception of the Communist Party:
What smells unmistakably like a carefully contrived plot aimed at provoking new tensions between the university and the public is now unfolding at UCLA in the case of Angela Davis, the admitted Communist Party member and philosophy teacher. How successful this shrewd but transparent effort at confrontation politics will be depends to a great extent on the political sophistication and calm good sense of the UCLA community, the University of California Regents, and the general public. If reason and perception the part of all these concerned groups prevail, then the revolutionaries who are stage-managing the Davis case will be defeated. But if emotions are permitted to become dominant and dictate responses, then the purposes of the Communists and their allies will be served. (Los Angeles Times, Sep 25 1969)
The same author contends that Davis “apparently has proper academic qualifications” to teach at UCLA and condemns the whole situation as “a set-up from beginning to end, engineered by Communists and their sympathizers, and involving a predictable effort to polarize opinion and incite disruption by confusing the real issue with phony charges.” This story insists that Davis is a mere pawn in a Communist conspiracy, a victim of some greater authority.
Yet another editorial by Ernest Conine suggests that the real problem is not Communism, but how New Left and radical groups like The Black Panthers, the Progressive Labor Party, and the Students for a Democratic Society “all have apparently played a larger role in campus violence than have card-carrying members of the Moscow dominated Communist Party. It has been suggested that the regents might respond to this reality, not by abandoning the policy against hiring Communists, but by broadening it to include these other, more radical groups” (Los Angeles Times Sep 28, 1969). Conine goes on to ask whether those in defense of Davis would hire a professor who was a member of the Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan. Again, this opinion de-emphasizes Davis as an active agent in her own politicized situation, instead seeking external radical organizations to place blame upon.
While these letters and editorials belie a deep-seated fear of Communism, others responded with outright racism. In describing Davis’s first lecture at UCLA, Art Siedenbaum’s report sarcastically claims that the California Regents have played perfectly into the Communist Party’s hands, helping make Davis’s first lecture “the most popular philosophy course in the history of the University of California.” Siedenbaum concludes that Davis’s lecture produces “Another mob scene. The regents put that uppity professor in her most public place” (Los Angeles Times Oct 8, 1969).
As is the tendency in mainstream media, journalistic objectivity was manifest by creating two sides for every story, and Davis was no exception. A fellow UCLA philosophy professor Arnold Kaufman defended Davis’s qualifications and politics against those skeptics who felt no Communist could possibly be fit to teach:
A favorite argument of Miss Davis’ adversaries is that, as a Communist, she does not believe in academic freedom. Did she not say that certain right-wing types ought to be barred from teaching? I have discussed this with Miss Davis. She would not in fact oppose hiring a fascist, provided he identified himself as such, and permitted free discussion in his classroom…The relevant questions are: Does she conceal her belief? No. Does she defend it through reasoned argument? Yes. Does she permit her students to counter her views? Yes. (The New Republic Jan 3, 1970)
But in spite of efforts like Professor Kaufman’s, the burden of presenting Communism as something other than the political preference of the weak-minded and brainwashed rested ultimately on Davis’s shoulders.
Davis takes up this challenge in full, using her autobiography as a bildungsroman of her political identity and creating a story within her life story as a means of complicating the simplified public tale of how she came to adopt Communism as her politics of choice. The incidents that led Davis to her political awakening were addressed in biographical sketches of Davis in the press, though often in ways that gave the impression that Davis simply went to Europe a bright college girl and returned to America a violent, revolutionary black woman. The Reader’s Digest’s front page spread on Davis, provocatively titled, “Angela Davis: The Making of a Martyr” (March 1971) describes her as “ideally cast for the role” of a black revolutionary martyr, someone who can unite the New Left. Author Ralph Kinney Bennett details how Davis, “spent some time in France, and there, she says, the violent tactics of the Algerian revolutionaries ‘gave me a concrete idea of the general direction in which our own movement would be heading.’” (Reader’s Digest March 1971)
The quote from Davis is ambiguous, though Bennett’s phrasing regarding the “violent tactics of the Algerian revolutionaries” clearly emphasizes the violent side of revolutionary politics and within this context, seems to suggest that Davis is actually planning out some sort of violent revolutionary action. Within her autobiography Davis deconstructs this fantasy of violence, demonstrating not how the Algerians have given her ideas about “violent tactics,” but how much racism is a social disease that persists globally:
To be an Algerian living in Paris in 1962 was to be a hunted human being. While the Algerians were fighting the French army in their mountains and in the Europeanized cities of Algiers and Oran, paramilitary terrorist groups were falling indiscriminately upon men and women in the colonialist capital because they were, or looked like, Algerians. (Davis 122)
The connections between the plight of Algerians in France and black Americans in the United States was not a simple case of compare and contrast for Davis, but a realization that the kind of racial hatred that fueled violence in the States plagued other countries as well, helping Davis develop a sense of just how universal the struggle for civil rights truly was. She realizes that the French police are “as vicious as the redneck cops in Birmingham who met the Freedom Riders with their dogs and hoses” (Davis 122) and through this parallel, experiences a sobering political awakening: “the new experiences I had expected to discover through travel turned out to be the same old places, the same old experiences with a common message of struggle (Davis 122).
But within Bennett’s biographical sketch, Davis’s trip to France and first-hand witnessing of the oppression and violence against Algerians is reduced to a lesson in violent revolutionary tactics. Bennett goes on to describe Davis’s political journey to Communism:
Angela’s rapidly developing commitment to the radical left now became more overt. She joined the Communist Party, which was then accelerating efforts to recruit blacks. She told a group of San Diego students: “As I see it, capitalism does not contain the solution to our problems. We have to talk about radical solutions. She joined the Che-Lumumba Club, a handful of black Marxists constantly in trouble with the party for being “undisciplined.” In January 1968, according to California gun-registration records, Angela purchased a Browning automatic pistol at a Los Angeles pawnshop. On April 7, 1969, she purchased a second gun—a Plainfield carbine, semi-automatic” (Reader’s Digest March 1971).
The logic of Bennett’s description suggests that Davis became Communist as a result of the party’s stepped-up recruitment efforts of blacks. The quote he includes from Davis references “radical solutions,” a phrase that alone might not sway opinion of Davis one way or another, but followed by the unattributed quote about how members of the Che-Lumumba Club were undisciplined begins to build upon an image of Davis as at best, a person capable of advocating violent action, and at worst, someone who would purposefully initiate violence in the name of Communism and revolution. The paragraph is loaded, and the almost non-sequitur follow-up with the details of Davis having purchased guns rhetorically seals the deal. Bennett’s piece displays not overt bias, but rather a series of events that just happen to emphasize one particular characteristic: violence.
Bennett goes on to quote from one of Davis’s UCLA lectures, where she argued that, “The first condition of freedom is an open act of resistance—violent resistance” (Reader’s Digest March 1971). This is followed by another quote from one of Davis’s off-campus speeches, where she said, “When people start saying that we are subversive, we should say, ‘Hell, yes, we are subversive; hell, yes, and we are going to continue to be subversive until we have subverted this whole damn system of oppression” (Reader’s Digest March 1971). Bennett’s selective use of Davis’s words continues to uncritically present so-called proof that Davis is inherently violent, ignoring the contexts within which Davis made these statements—the public university lecture and the political speech. In both instances, a specific audience and rhetorical agenda attend the type of language Davis opts to use. Likewise, Bennett’s culling of just one line from an entire course lecture is transparently misleading.
Davis’s participation in a mass protest against police brutality and the unjust killing of Gregory Clark, culminating in a mock trial aimed at demonstrating the injustice of the legal system becomes further fodder for Bennett’s chain of evidence regarding Davis’s violent nature. He briefly mentions how the mock court finds “the entire national, state and local government apparatus, including the judiciary, ‘guilty’ of crimes against ‘the people.’ All were sentenced to be ‘revolutioned to death.’ (Reader’s Digest March 1971). While we could generously describe Bennett’s summary of the events of the mock trial as just the facts, he once again immediately follows up this description with “On July 25, the Marin County grand-jury indictment alleges, Angela, ‘in the company of Jonathan P. Jackson,” bought a second Plainfield carbine” (Reader’s Digest March 1971). The implied missing link between to the two sentences clearly condemns Davis.
But in Davis’s own version of her involvement with the People’s Tribunal Committee, she explains with great detail the intense community organizing efforts that rose up around the so-called “justifiable homicide” of Gregory Clark by the LAPD, where “the fruits of our labors were a tremendous awareness in the community of the case of Gregory Clark and a very large turnout at the people’s trial” (Davis 173). Whereas Bennett focuses primarily on the verdict pronounced at the trial, Davis looks at the historical circumstances preceding the trial. In contrast to Bennett’s misdirection and implications of guilt disguised as objectivity, Davis describes the necessarily biased, passionate appeal to justice embodied in the mock trial:
If someone accused us of being one-sided, we made no claims to partiality. We were not trying to duplicate the bourgeois judicial system which tries to conceal its class and race bias behind meaningless procedures and empty platitudes about democracy. We were demanding justice—about which Black people needed to be defiant and passionate. After hundreds of years of suffering the most persistently one-sided bestiality of violence, how could we seriously assume a posture of unbiased observers? (Davis 173-174)
Davis rejects Bennett’s veiled allusions to her guilt due to her participation in protests that use impassioned language and calls for revolt by specifically addressing the place of anger and rage in civil rights organizing:
“Death to the pig,” brothers continued to shout. Appoint a commission to execute the sentence, they said. Rage had transported these brothers into a desperate fantasy world. I understood how they felt. When I saw Gregory Clark’s blood on the sidewalk, rage had pulled my instincts in the very same direction. But understanding the real value of mass action, I therefore had something else to lean on, something which could absorb my anger and set it on the right track. (Davis 175)
The image of the angry, pig-hating, black revolutionary that Bennett plays upon in his Reader’s Digest piece is just that—an image. Beyond that image is genuine frustration, but more importantly the sense of belonging to a larger struggle, and it is that sense of connection to community that Davis uses to counter the forced individualization of her experience and vetting of her supposed violent nature.
Unfortunately, the power of the image continues to plague Davis in other media stories, especially following her arrest by the FBI in NYC. In its Oct. 26th 1970 cover story, Newsweek represents Davis both visually and textually as an embodiment of opposing forces. The iconic front page image juxtaposes an image of Davis with her eyes askance, sporting an afro hairdo, and appearing every bit the “typical” black revolutionary against the image of Davis in handcuffs, her hair straightened and pulled back, and wearing glasses. The difference in physical appearance between the two images is intentionally stark, and the accompanying article argues that Davis’s life was a life with only two possible outcomes:
For she had made her spiritual home at the crossroads of two cultures, and somehow she managed to inhabit them both, declining the rewards that either would have bestowed on her if she had been willing to live within its rules alone. She could have opted for the life of scholarship—a precocious childhood, attendance at the best of schools, junior year at the Sorbonne and Graduate study in Germany, European literature, Kantian philosophy, professorships, tenure and learned publications. Or she could have chosen the world of the streets—of swelling black consciousness in the nation’s ghettos, mass rallies, Afro hair-do’s, angry slogans, guns and violent death. But she chose both worlds at once—and the tension lent special power and poignance to her story. (Newsweek Oct 26, 1970)
The “power and poignance” of Davis’s life is in reality the contrivance of journalistic writing, emphasizing an imagined split in African American culture, where the middle-class “life of scholarship” and ghettoized “world of the streets” are not only incommensurable with one another, but the only possibilities available.
Davis’s autobiographical narrative disrupts this dichotomy by drawing a direct relationship between her education and experiences abroad and her eventual decision to return home to take active participation in the black liberation movement, underscoring the idea that there was never any “choice” involved. For example, while news stories would often cite the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing as an important stepping stone on Davis’s road to radicalism, these stories never explored what implications the tragedy had for Davis both politically and personally. This event is one of many that contribute to Davis’s eventual decision to become a Communist, forcing Davis to confront society-wide racism beyond the level of the personal. Biographical pieces from publications like Reader’s Digest or Newsweek would gloss over the bombing and its effect on Davis’s life in a line or two:
She knew some of the four black girls killed in the blast that devastated a church and Sunday school in September 1963 (Newsweek Oct 26, 1970)
And,
In the fall of 1963, while Angela was a student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, a dynamite blast killed four black girls attending Sunday school in the basement of a Birmingham church. One victim was a neighbor of the Davises. That bombing, Angela noted later, “affected me definitely in a political sense.” (Reader’s Digest March 1971)
The Reader’s Digest description in particular paints Davis’s reaction to the bombing as particularly cold and clinically removed. Both stories emphasize that she knew “some” of the victims, but simply mention the incident as one in a list of many exceptional circumstances that led Davis to her extraordinary situation. It is this idea that the bombing was somehow exceptional that Davis uses her own account to counteract. She overturns the idea that the murder of four little black girls is in any way unusual, given the racially charged climate of the social world they lived in:
When the lives of these four girls were so ruthlessly wiped out, my pain was deeply personal. But when the initial hurt and rage had subsided enough for me to think a little more clearly, I was struck by the objective significance of these murders. This was not an aberration. It was not something sparked by a few extremists gone mad. On the contrary, it was logical, inevitable. The people who planted the bomb in the girls’ restroom in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church were not pathological, but rather the normal products of their surroundings. And it was this spectacular, violent event, the savage dismembering of four little girls, which had burst out of the daily, sometimes even dull, routine of racist oppression. (Davis 130-131)
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing does in fact affect Davis “in a political sense,” but it strikes her equally in a personal sense. Davis’s rendering of the event proves not how this brutal act is merely another step in her political development, but how much personal experience is the source of political conviction. After learning about the bombing, and later on about organizations like SNCC, CORE, and countless others that grew out of the growing racial upheavals in not only the South but across the United States, Davis found herself more and more unable to remain abroad. In her own words, “…each day it was becoming clearer to me that my ability to accomplish anything was directly dependent on my ability to contribute something concrete to the struggle” (Davis 145). There never was any personal decision to give up her “life of scholarship” to join the black liberation movement. The dichotomy between a safe middle-class existence and streetwise radicalism is patently false: Davis shows that when racial hatred permeates a culture, the personal becomes the political.
The Newsweek article continues to push the idea that Davis seems “less American than a product of European intellectual culture,” and that it is her “severe rationalism” that attracts her to the Communist Party rather than her “ghetto soul.” The narrative thread of Davis’s life in the hands of the media suggests that she is a black woman who was somehow led astray from what could have been a “good” life by her overabundant intelligence. Likewise, this narrative suggests that because of her unwieldy intelligence Davis somehow lacks a “ghetto soul.” The total effect of these descriptions separate Davis from the rest of the black community, isolating her experiences from any larger underlying social problem. Instead, these stories paint Davis’s decision to join the Communist Party as an aberration resulting from her intelligence and a deviation from being American.
Such was the cultural climate of 1970. As the popular press demonstrates, Communism was still widely perceived as the desperate politics of radicals who held no love for America. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the letters to the editor following Newsweek’s front page story on Davis. Reactions were overwhelmingly negative, and proved that Davis’s politics were enough to condemn her. The following are examples of the extreme responses elicited by the Davis Case:
In the article about Angela Davis she is portrayed almost as an angel of virtue. It is disgusting, to say the least, that a criminal and a Communist be given such favorable publicity. — R.C. Matthews, San Antonio, TX
Anyone who attempts to make a glamorous heroine of a conspiring, murderous, Communist agitator such as Angela Davis is either and idiot or one of them! — J. Smith, Trenton, NJ
I realize that the last thing Newsweek considers itself is a Communist mouthpiece, but with such glorification of a simple case of egotistic disregard for everything logical or constructive, that is what you turn out to be. Miss Davis is not a credit to the Communists—unless the press made her so. She is a good example of the fact that education, even extensive formal education, is not a guarantee of reasoning ability or psychological health. -David Paine, Schenectady, NY
These commentators, interestingly enough, lash out at the media for covering the Davis story and in doing so, becoming a platform for Communism. Other reactions strike on a more personal level, projecting a level of sympathy for Davis, whom they perceive to have been essentially “brainwashed” into falling for the politics of Communism:
Those who would destroy our society and free people once again scored a major victory in the case of Angela Davis. By twisting her searching mind, they not only destroyed a beautiful American but also insured that more of her people, less knowledgeable and thoughtful than she, would follow in her footsteps out of sheer loyalty to one of their own. Dr. Marcuse and his like deserve medals from the enemies of the American people and absolute scorn and abhorrence from the citizens of this society. G.L. Pugh, Norwalk, CA
I want to express my appreciation for your fine, sensitive cover pictures of Angela Davis. Our current fashionable concern for ecology must include an awareness of what is happening to some of the better human beings in this country. When a person as intelligent, beautiful, and gifted as Miss Davis turns against our country, notice should be taken. One is forced to remember Paul Robeson in this context, another extraordinary individual whose immense potential was early lost. And from there the list seems virtually endless. Thomas Owen, Seatauket, NY
In both of these instances, Davis is the victim of radical/Communist indoctrination, a once “beautiful American” who has fallen under the thrall of leftists like Herbert Marcuse. Davis is consequently not to blame for her descent into Communism, but instead deserving of pity. Their reactions effectively remove Davis’s own agency from the equation, a patronizing move that operates under the guise of patriotism. Even more so, such comments highlight the extent to which Davis’s politics affect the public on a personal level. Her membership with the Communist Party and her unwillingness to denounce her political beliefs as transmitted via the media transform into personal attacks against those who view themselves as representative of true Americans.
The loss of control over Davis’s own life narrative, so to speak, becomes part of a more widespread glossing over of important nuances, conflicts, and tensions within the black liberation movement, as well as the unexpected ideologies and individuals, especially women, exerting influence from within the movement. Davis’s extensive recounting of her experience with various black power movement organizations and her eventual decision to fight racism as a member of the Communist Party draws attention to the multiple fronts at work in the movement, and how these fronts were not always unified. This critical history of Davis’s political engagement forces her audience to confront the validity of the claim that Communism was an error in judgment; a wayward path away from right thinking and a twisted intellectual rationalization.
One of the first mass rallies Davis attends is the 1967 Black Youth Conference in Watts. In a pointedly visual description of the crowd, where women wore “long dresses of red, purple, orange and yellow” and “the men wore bubas that rivaled in every way the fiery beauty of the women’s clothes” (Davis 158), Davis attempts to recreate the almost sublime effect of this “massive display of strength” (Davis 158). Davis finds herself overwhelmed by the experience: “I was a stranger to this kind of gathering and found literally staggering the energy and resolve of the people…I walked around calling everyone sister and brother; smiling, elated, high on love” (Davis 158). Contrasting the almost euphoric effect of being immersed in a mass of individuals united by the common desire for black liberation is Davis’s realization that this unity is every bit as tenuous as the emotions that fuel the energy of the crowd:
A gun battle broke out during the first hours between two organizations—The United Front and Ron Karenga’s US Organization. Beneath the façade of unity, under the wonderful colors of the bubas, lay strong ideological differences and explosive political conflicts, and perhaps even agent provocateurs…In the midst of the chaos which followed the shooting, I read the literature, sat in on some of the workshops, and discovered that about the only thing we really had in common was skin color. No wonder unity was fragile. (Davis 159)
During this conference Davis is exposed to a number of organizations, each subscribing to a different political ideology, from the idea that black people need to create their own culture, their own society, and in some cases, separate from white America completely, to those who advocated taking up arms and reproducing the mass uprisings of Detroit and Watts. Out of the chaos of the conference Davis describes the strategies and ideals of SNCC and the Communist Party as “rays of lucidity” (Davis 160). Both organizations emphasized not only the problem of race, but also its interconnectedness with the problem of class in capitalist America. The oppression of black people, Davis argues, is the result of “racism as a tool of the economically ascendant class—the capitalists” (Davis 160). The Communist Party satisfied Davis’s desire to go beyond merely attacking the symptoms of oppression by addressing its root causes.
But beyond her ideological differences with many of the black nationalist groups, Davis experienced first hand the subordinate role that women were often made to play within these organizations. While helping organize a rally with a coalition of revolutionary groups, Davis recalls the difficulties she encountered as a woman trying to work with these organizations:
I was criticized very heavily, especially by male members of Karenga’s organization, for doing a ‘man’s job.’ Women should not play leadership roles, they insisted. A woman was supposed to ‘inspire’ her man and educate his children. (Davis 161)
Davis’s experience with “some black male activists” (Davis 161)—she is careful not to indict all black men—leads her to the sense that many would “confuse their political activity with an assertion of maleness. They saw—and some continue to see—Black manhood as something separate from Black womanhood. These men view Black women as a threat to their attainment of manhood—especially those Black women who take initiative and work to become leaders in their own right” (Davis 161). Later, while working for SNCC, Davis recalls:
…whenever we women were involved in something important, they [male members of SNCC] began to talk about “women taking over the organization”—calling it a matriarchal coup d’état. All the myths about Black women surfaced. Bobbie, Rene, and I were too domineering; we were trying to control everything, including the men—which meant by extension that were trying to rob them of their manhood. By playing such a leading role in organization, some of them insisted, we were aiding and abetting the enemy, who wanted to see Black men weak and unable to hold their own. (Davis 182)
While the internal politics of organizations like US and SNCC were rife with tense gender relations, these tensions were, as Davis suggests, symptomatic of a more widespread vilification of black women:
After all, it had been the voice of the Johnson administration, Daniel Moynihan, who in 1966 had rekindled the theory of the slavery-induced Black matriarchate, maintaining that the dominant role of Black women within the family and, by extension, within the community was one of the central causes of the depressed state of the Black community. (Davis 182)
Within the umbrella of black liberation organizations, Davis’s assertion of her gender identity is in and of itself revolutionary. By eventually adopting a Communist position, Davis would further alienate herself from groups like SNCC, who in the face of media pressure would eventually begin expelling Communists. For Davis, intolerance of women in leadership roles was part of the same problem that fueled fear of Communism. In a sense, Davis’s assertion of her revolutionary identity is inextricably linked with the assertion of her identity as an independent woman.
But even as Davis struggled privately to deal with these tensions within the black liberation movement, her highly publicized courtroom battle forced these issues into the public realm. The prosecution’s projection of Davis as an embattled woman, torn between the cold, rationale of revolutionary action and uncontrolled passion eerily reproduced the mainstream media’s depiction of Davis as torn between the world of academia/rationalism and the “real” world of the streets. The fact that both Davis’s image in the media and the prosecution’s image of Davis in her murder trial relied upon the same strategy is impossible to ignore. Davis herself argues that the media played a hand in dividing her physically and ideologically from co-defendant Ruchell Magee, in an attempt to emphasize the exceptional nature of her case and “burn away all semblance of solidarity between us—to turn those who supported me against Ruchell and to turn those who supported Ruchell against me. They wanted disunity and division; for divided, we would both be most vulnerable” (Davis 293). Whether or not the media purposefully set out to create a division between Davis and Ruchell is up for debate, but what we can say with certainty is that the apparent oppositions existing within Davis’s life, and exacerbated by her association with and participation in black revolutionary organizations proved too tantalizing for the media to ignore. As a consequence, these supposed divisions between middle class black life and an impoverished life on the streets, between rational thought and violent action, between Davis and Ruchell were each made out to be more than just part of the larger story of African Americans and instead magnified into the opposing poles of a divided black culture.
Perhaps the most sensational argument made by the prosecution against Davis was their characterization of her involvement in the shootout as a “crime of passion.” With no hard evidence against Davis proving motive, the prosecution’s key strategy was to piece together bits Davis’s letters to George Jackson alongside her personal diary in order to create the seamless tale of a woman driven to violent action by her uncontrolled emotional attachment to George Jackson. While the mainstream press would not be so bold as to uphold any of these highly circumstantial claims, various stories projected her as playing a “role” as she spoke in her own defense while alternately functioning as a pawn for the Communist propaganda machine. For example, as her trial proceedings began, Newsweek reported that, “the former UCLA philosophy instructor and avowed Communist accused of helping plot the shootout murder of a judge in San Rafael, Calif., last August, rose to speak in the very courthouse where the deadly drama had occurred. Her words were entirely in character” (Newsweek Jan. 18, 1971, emphasis mine). The same story concludes that, “the moments of drama sustained Miss Davis’s standing as a wall-postered cause célèbre for the American Left and the Communist world.” As Davis’s trial commenced, The Chicago Tribune ran a story headlined “Reds Hoping to Make Martyr of Angela to Raise Funds,” describing her as the “latest heroine of the black revolution” and characterizing her trial as “the biggest fund-raising project of the American Communist Party in more than a generation” (Chicago Tribune Jan. 7, 1971). In support of this claim, the Tribune argues:
…a favorite ploy the organization was to make a martyr of a person accused of a capital offense and organize defense committees. Only a portion of the money raised by these committees was ever actually used for defense with the bulk finding its way into party coffers. Miss Davis’ case is tailor-made for this tactic. She, like many other “beneficiaries” of the Red largesse, is from a minority group. She has been an active radical and above all she is charged with a largely circumstantial crime. (Chicago Tribune Jan. 7, 1971)
In each of these reports, Davis takes an increasingly passive role in her trial, to the point where it would seem Davis is no more than one in a long line of “favorite” ploys for the Communist fundraising machine.
The characterization of Davis as a preprogrammed sacrifice to the alter of Communism becomes even more troubling when her letters to George Jackson are entered as evidence against her, excerpts of which are then published within major newspapers and newsweeklies. The most provocative lines are sampled as headlines, including “One Says Black Women Must ‘Learn to Rejoice When Pig Blood Is Spilled;’ Judge Bans Lengthy Missive” (Los Angeles Times April 25, 1972) and “I Should Be Ready To Go All The Way” (Newsweek May 8, 1972). Both stories reproduce lengthy sections from the letters, inserting into the public realm Davis’s private thoughts. These excerpts emphasize the so-called uncontrolled passion of Davis. For example, the Los Angeles Times quotes from Davis’ diary the following lines:
…as I re-experience this now, my pulse beats faster, I begin to breathe harder and I see myself tearing down the steel door, fighting my way to you, ripping down your cell door and letting you go free. I feel as you do, so terrible is this love. (Los Angeles Times May 2, 1972).
Newsweek reproduces equally dramatic lines, citing them as “revealing glimpses into Miss Davis’s feelings toward Jackson and her thoughts on the revolutionary role of black women,” including:
The night after I saw you in court, for the first time in months, I dreamt…We were together, fighting pigs, winning. We were learning to know each other. I love you.
And,
My life, 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. I love you. I love my people—that’s all that matters: liberation by any means necessary…The Amerikan 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 Black people. I should be ready to go all the way. I am… (Newsweek May 8, 1972).
Out of context, these excerpts from Davis’s letters in the news media perform the role of condemning Davis’s character almost more effectively than in the trial itself. In her own retelling of the trial, Davis reproduces these same sections from her letters and more, demonstrating how her letters stand as not only proof of her innocence, but also as part of a larger conversation regarding the role of black women in revolution. The additional excerpts Davis includes that the news media does not print focuses intensely on these ruminations, especially the relationship between the black male and the female revolutionary:
But all this presupposes that the Black male will have purged himself of the myth that his mother, his woman, must be subdued before he can wage war on the enemy. Liberation is a dialectical movement—the Black man cannot free himself as a Black man unless the Black woman can liberate herself from all this much—and it works the other way around. (Davis 374)
And,
Women’s liberation in the revolution is inseparable from the liberation of the male. (Davis 374)
Davis must confront the unreal situation of having her own words used against her in a court of law and reproduced for the world to see in newspapers and magazines. Her autobiography reproduces these words yet again, but this time to serve as a final word. As Davis writes in reaction to hearing her letters read aloud in court:
I had the impulse to proclaim once more the utter bankruptcy of the state’s case—it was with this kind of evidence that they had kept me in jail those sixteenth months. But on the other hand, I felt depressed at having to see my most intimate feelings hurled out into the public like that through the calculating and cold presentation of the prosecutor. And the unmitigated grief was revived, the grief at Jon’s death, the grief at George’s death, and the burning anger at their murderers. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t scream. (Davis 376)
In these lines it becomes clear the extent to which Davis’s identity became a public commodity, volleyed back and forth between sympathizers and opponents, the newsroom and the courtroom. Davis’s realization that “this kind of evidence” lies at the root of her criminalization, misrepresentation, and de-politicization is an awakening that she radically transforms within her autobiography, reframing and re-contextualizing the circumstantial evidence brought against her in order to defend her innocence, but more importantly, to reclaim her political agency within an infuriatingly one-sided public discourse on her identity.
The “not guilty” verdict is not how Davis chooses to end her story, though the slow disappearance of her name from the headlines would suggest otherwise. Although the media has played such an invasive role in her experience, Davis acknowledges its power as well. After the verdict is pronounced, she knows that only through the press can she “speak to and thank all the people” (Davis 395). With her autobiography, she finds another voice to speak to the people, reminding readers of the dangers of disunity and losing sight of the larger struggle for freedom. In doing so, she makes a claim for her own identity, recovering it from the morass of public representation and asserting herself as a black feminist communist without apology.
