Angela Davis: The Iconic "Sweet Black Angel" at l'Humanité

[marmar]

Angela Davis: The Iconic "Sweet Black Angel" at l'Humanité

Wednesday, 01 May 2013 09:08
By Rosa Moussaoui, L'Humanite in English | Op-Ed


Here’s a look back at the work of this remarkable activist who is still engaged in the struggle for human emancipation.




Her slender silhouette, her afro, her angelic face - they symbolise not just an era, but a struggle. The poet and playwright Jean Genet saw her as a woman with "tenaciousness so emotive it’s mystical." Forty-one years after her release, Angela Davis is a revolutionary icon, a major figure in the struggle for emancipation, in feminism, a symbol of the black American struggle for equality.

The part of the world in which we grow up shapes us. In terms of racial segregation, Angela Davis was born in the first circle of hell. Birmingham, Alabama - the heart of the racist and secessionist south, where in 1955 Rosa Parks had the courage to carry out a fundamental act of rebellion. Davis’s earliest childhood memories were the blasting of bombs planted by the fascist Ku Klux Klan, so many that her neighbourhood became known as "Dynamite Hill". She heard tales of a grandmother who remembered the days of slavery and "whites only" signs. Her parents were communists, actively campaigning against the Jim Crow laws establishing apartheid in the U.S. At fourteen, she left Alabama for New York thanks to a scholarship. In high school, she discovered the Communist Manifesto and made her first activist steps in a Marxist organization, Advance.

Angela Davis was a bright student. In 1962, she entered Brandeis University. In the first year, there were only three black students. She discovered Sartre, Camus, and was introduced to the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse, whose classes she took. She left in 1964, first for Frankfurt, then the crucible of heterodox Marxism. She studied Marx, Kant, and Hegel and followed the lectures of Theodor W. Adorno. In the US, a new wave of protests began against racist oppression and the Vietnam War. Upon her return in 1968, the young philosopher joined the Black Panthers and signed up to the Che Lumumba Club, a group affiliated to the Communist Party. A year later, in possession of a PhD supervised by Marcuse, she was appointed professor at the University of California Los Angeles to teach Marxist philosophy.

The profile of a twenty-five year old woman, her skin colour, beliefs, and convictions focused the hatred of an ultra-reactionary white American mind-set that then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, sought to harness. At the request of the latter, Angela Davis was fired from the university. This was the first act of a politico-judicial plot against the communist militant. Already active against the prison industry that crushed black youth, Davis took up the cause of three inmates at Soledad prison. With one of them, George Jackson, she had an epistolary love affair. The desperate attempt by Jackson’s younger brother to break him out of prison went awry. Jonathan Jackson, two other prisoners and a judge were killed in the shoot-out. Angela Davis was accused of supplying weapons to the attackers. Designated as public enemy number one, she was one of the ten most wanted people in the United States. For fear of being killed, she fled. A wanted poster describing her as "armed and dangerous" was plastered all over the country. Bearing a vague resemblance to Angela Davis - or just having an afro - was enough for hundreds of women to be arrested. The FBI deployed as part of its counter-intelligence program targeting communists and Black Panthers, disproportionate measures to hunt down what the white reactionary establishment called "the red panther " or "the black terrorist". But there was solidarity as "We would welcome Angela Davis" placards began to pop up on the doorsteps of friendly houses. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16105-angela-davis-the-iconic-sweet-black-angel-at-lhumanite

[LWolf]

1. I was privileged to hear Angela Davis speak

in 1972, when I was 12 years old, sometime after her release. My mom took me with her. It was a formative experience for my young self.