Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Davis becomes involved with anti-war protests, which leads to an arrest in San Diego. The police threaten to charge Davis and her friend with vagrancy since they are not employed, or even with robbery since they have money but no jobs.

She also becomes active in the establishment of a Black Student Union: “It struck me, about this time, that I was being looked upon as somewhat of a leader of the Black Liberation Movement at the university” (136). Davis likewise becomes involved with a newly formed and independent West Coast branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) based in Los Angeles. The group organizes a mock trial and demonstration to protest racist police brutality after a Los Angeles police officer is acquitted of murdering a Black man named Gregory Clark. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. Davis is consumed with sadness at his death and feels guilty because SNCC was critical of some of King’s views. However, she finds an outlet for her feelings in continuing her work with SNCC.

Police raid the SNCC office amid planning for a demonstration, damaging much of the organization’s equipment and resources, including the mimeograph machines they use to print and distribute movement literature. The police even put nails in the pot of spaghetti SNCC members prepared earlier in the day.

SNCC serves as one of the leading organizations for Black liberation in the area. Nevertheless, internal difficulties arise along gendered lines: “Three women on the staff—Bobbie, Rene, and myself—always had a disproportionate share of the duties of keeping the office and the organization running” (157). The men who occasionally attend the staff meetings criticize the women for assuming too much control: “By playing such a leading role in the 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” (157). When a leader from SNCC’s New York headquarters arrives, he criticizes the consciousness-raising curriculum Davis has created for not providing skills to Black community members, and he criticizes her Marxism. His opposition to communism eventually leads to Franklin Alexander’s removal from the group for being a Communist. Alexander is one of the few men who has offered support to Davis and her women colleagues in SNCC. Only Davis and Alexander’s brother protest: “The first concession, the first endorsement of an irrational, anti-communist policy […] was the beginning of the end of our organization” (161).

SNCC’s disintegration leads Davis to join the Che-Lumumba Club, a Black cell of the Communist Party in the United States based in Los Angeles. She also becomes intensely involved in activism on the UC San Diego campus. Davis and others press the university’s administration to create a new college dedicated to supporting students from marginalized groups, including Black, Chicano, and working-class white students. Davis and fellow students succeed through a series of demonstrations and protests.

Davis departs for communist Cuba during the summer after her first year at UCSD. She notes that the University of Havana now serves students of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds, whereas before the revolution, all its students were elites. She spends time working in coffee fields before moving on to assist in the sugarcane harvest: “The job of cutting cane had become qualitatively different since the revolution. No one was a cane-cutter by trade any longer; during the cane season everyone pitched in” (181). Further, the proceeds from exportation of sugar are used to improve living conditions for the islanders.

Davis admires the way the Cubans live, especially the way the Communist regime deals with racism:

The first executive decrees of the new government had been to abolish segregation in the cities, brought to Cuba by corrupt capitalists from the United States. Now it was simply a crime to discriminate against Black people in any way, including the use of racist language (183).

Davis’s group leaves Cuba for the United States by way of the French Antilles in August. The freighter carrying her party is circled by a US aircraft carrier, and French authorities force the Puerto Rican travelers to hand over the literature they are transporting.

Davis returns to California to teach philosophy at UCLA, where she encounters media scrutiny for her Communist affiliation. Moreover, one media report falsely accuses her of running guns for the Black Panthers. The governor’s office and the Board of Regents direct the university’s chancellor to “formally ask” Davis if she belongs to the Communist Party due to a regulation from 1949 banning the university from employing Communists. Davis finds support in her departmental colleagues and fellow members of the Che-Lumumba Club, who mobilize public protest, but the Board of Regents fires her anyway. Davis’s sister, Fania, and her husband, Sam, are surveilled in San Diego, leading the police to storm their residence, shoot Sam, and later arrest Fania for attempted murder because she tried to protect her spouse. Officers at the jail taunt Fania. Davis accuses the police in San Diego of collaborating with the governor’s “racist, anti-communist policies to the extremes of premeditated murder” (196). The court eventually drops charges against Sam and Fania.

Meanwhile, the judiciary declares the university’s firing of Davis unconstitutional, but the regents continue to plot ways to get rid of her: “Repression was on the rise throughout the country” (197). The police besiege and raid the headquarters of the Black Panthers in Los Angeles, an act that Davis witnesses firsthand. A shoot-out ensues as members of the community watch in horror, assuming many of the Panthers inside have been killed. The Che-Lumumba Club, Panthers, and Black students organize a march, protest, and later a vigil, where the police attack and beat the crowd. At a subsequent demonstration calling for the release of the now-jailed Panthers, Davis publicly accuses the state of conspiracy against the Panthers, a fact revealed as true months later:

In the aftermath of the rally, its immediate effects could already be seen. For a while, at least, there was a noticeable let-up of police violence in the community. If you were stopped, you could see that the L.A. police were not as self-confident and certainly not as arrogant as they had been before (209). 

Later, Davis is summoned to appear as a witness in the trial of a young Black man named Hekima whose murder conviction had been recently overturned. Hekima wants to make a case about the systemic effects of racism and poverty on individual behavior. Davis testifies to this in his defense as “an expert on the socioeconomic function of racism” (216). Though he is convicted a second time, Hekima does not give up the struggle for freedom, and Davis continues to assist him. Her experience with Hekima also shows Davis that Black prisoners have begun to develop an understanding of the forces that have led to their circumstances, which heartens her.

Soon Davis becomes involved in the struggle to free the Soledad Brothers, three men held in Soledad Prison and accused of killing a guard: George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo. The prison is staffed by racist guards who foment division and thus created the volatile circumstances that led to the guard’s death. Moreover, no evidence proves the men are responsible for the guard’s murder: “But there was evidence that George, John, and Fleeta were ‘militants’; they had been talking with their fellow captives about the theory and practice of liberation” (221). Davis becomes involved in the mass movement to defend and free the men, and within a few weeks of mobilization, awareness of the Soledad Brothers’ plight and the resistance is widespread. Davis also becomes close with George Jackson’s family, especially his teenage brother Jonathan, whom she mentors. She begins to frequently correspond with George and develops deep feelings for him. The movement achieves a victory when the judge agrees to move the Soledad Brothers’ trial to San Francisco, where it will be “more public” and conducive to protests. Meanwhile, UCLA’s Board of Regents decides not to renew Davis’s contract for the following academic year. She must also complete her doctoral dissertation, which forces her to slow down her activism, though she remains committed to her work to free the Soledad Brothers.

On August 7, 1970, a prisoner from San Quentin named James McClain is on trial at the Marin County Courthouse. Jonathan Jackson enters the courtroom as an observer and subsequently orders everyone to stay still at gunpoint. McClain and two other men, Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, join Jackson. They lead the judge, prosecutor, and several jurors into a van outside. Everyone inside is either killed or wounded, including the judge, in a barrage of bullets rained down by the authorities. Jonathan is among those killed, leaving Davis enraged and brokenhearted: “I knew there was only one way to avenge Jon’s death—through struggle, political struggle, through people in motion, fighting for all those behind the walls” (243).