Historical Perspective

Davis gives extensive attention to the circumstances of American history that have affected African Americans—although it should always be remembered that while her focus is African Americans, much of what she says applies to other minorities and even to much of the white working-class community. Central to this discussion is slavery and its perpetuation through such laws as the fugitive slave laws. These unjust “reflections of existing social inequalities” have required the oppressed to forge “effective channels of resistance,” in effect forcing them to violate laws—though even when they do not violate laws, their very resistance is branded as criminal. She cites as an example of this “extra-legal anti-slavery activity” the Underground Railroad, the informal system of guides, routes, and safe houses that allowed slaves to escape to the North and, in many instances, to Canada. She refers to the case of Anthony Burns, a Virginia slave whose supporters, among them the prominent abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took up arms to free him. She also alludes to John Brown, a white abolitionist who led an abortive raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Brown was executed that year, but he was regarded as a heroic figure in many quarters.

Davis goes on to note that throughout the abolitionist era and beyond, blacks and progressive whites had to violate the law. She refers to the post–Civil War Black Codes—laws passed in the southern states to deny blacks their civil rights and keep them in subservient positions, usually by inhibiting their freedom of movement and freedom to contract for their labor. Typical of these codes was the code in Mississippi, which read, in part:

Davis points out that blacks took up arms to defend themselves from “codified racism and terror” during this era. In the twentieth century, figures such as Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, called on people to flout discriminatory laws to protect themselves from “legalized terror” and from such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, sit-ins (where, for example, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters) were conducted in violation of the law.

The Political Prisoner

These and other instances led Davis to conclude that the “common denominator” linking those who violated the law and were then imprisoned was that they were political prisoners. She notes that there is a difference between someone who commits a crime for his or her own self-interest and one who violates a law because the law oppresses a class of people. The former are criminals; the latter are revolutionaries, and when they are captured, they are political prisoners. The political prisoner is one whose words or deeds have “brought him into acute conflict with the state.” In this context, the alleged crime is of little importance. The accused may stand trial for a crime, but the crime does not exist or has only “nominal existence.” She cites as an example the case of Joe Hill, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”), a radical labor organization that espoused ideals that many regarded as Communist. Davis asserts that the murder charge against him was a “blatant fabrication” and that he was arrested solely because the authorities wanted to silence “a militant crusader against oppression.”

Davis acknowledges that the authorities often feel a sense of ambivalence about political prisoners. As an example she cites the judge in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, a notorious episode in which two Italian immigrants, Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were accused of murdering two men during an armed robbery in Massachusetts and, after a series of appeals, were executed in 1927. It was widely believed at the time, and still today, that the two may have been innocent of the crime, but their anarchist associations doomed them at a time when the nation was beset by fear of Communism. She cites the example of a Nazi jurist who advanced the theory that a person might be a thief, and thus liable to the penalties of the law, without having committed an overt act of theft. According to Davis, President Richard Nixon and his FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, subscribed to a similarly Fascist doctrine. As a further example she cites the instances when Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested for “nominal crimes” when his real “crime” was opposition to racism. Yet another example was Robert Williams, a North Carolina civil rights activist and the author of Negroes with Guns. In 1971 Williams was accused of kidnapping after offering refuge to a white couple who were passing through town during a time of racial disturbance. His real “crime,” in Davis’s estimation, was “advocacy of black people’s incontestable right to bear arms in their own defense.” After living in exile in Cuba and China, Williams returned voluntarily to the United States in 1969 and was eventually extradited to North Carolina, where, after the legal proceedings dragged on, charges were dropped in 1976.

The FBI’s 1970 wanted poster for Angela Davis

AP/Wide World Photos

Davis goes into more detail about the definition of a political prisoner, describing such a prisoner as one who boldly challenges “fundamental social wrongs fostered and reinforced by the state.” She gives further historical examples, including that of Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831 in Virginia and was caught, tried, and executed, in much the same way that John Brown was. Davis believes that the execution of these men was intended to “terrorize the anti-slavery movement in general” and to discourage abolitionist activity. In defending Turner against the charge of murder, she argues that his acts were little different from killings that resulted when colonial Americans took up arms against the British.

Modern Civil Disobedience

Davis calls attention to modern civil disobedience, again stressing that the authorities work to subvert liberation movements. She discusses a 1970 incident in Los Angeles in which the Black Panthers took up arms to defend themselves from the police. A key point for her is that such people are demonized as pathological criminals, with little attention paid to their positive accomplishments. She states that self-defense is “twisted and distorted” by the authorities and “rendered synonymous with criminal aggression.” The police, though, are exonerated as having committed “justifiable” acts of homicide. She calls these distortions “ideological acrobatics”; the purpose of criminalizing these acts is to discredit radical and revolutionary movements. The irony for her is that while the authorities do not acknowledge the political nature of their own actions, they nonetheless introduced Black Panther literature as evidence of criminal intent in a noted New York trial. Davis lays these distortions at the feet of President Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew, and California governor Ronald Reagan. In sum, Davis argues that the judicial and penal system is a tool used “in the state’s fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism, poverty and war.”

Next, Davis alludes to an indictment that had been handed down in 1951 of W. E. B. Du Bois, a prominent black intellectual in the early part of the century. From 1949 to 1955, Du Bois was vice chairman of the Council on African Affairs, cited by the U.S. attorney general as a “subversive” organization. In 1950 he became the chairman of the Peace Information Center in New York City. During this period, fears of espionage and Communist influence abounded. The infamous hearings led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy were held to root out suspected Communists in the government and elsewhere. Du Bois’s association with leftist groups made him suspect. In 1951 he was tried on the charge of failing to register as a foreign agent. Although he was acquitted, Du Bois remained in the eye of government agencies, and the State Department revoked his passport. Later, Du Bois officially joined the Communist Party and became a citizen of Ghana, where he died. The quotation is from his 1952 book, In Battle for Peace.

Davis sees Du Bois’s realization as the beginning of a movement that has focused on political prisoners, particularly people of color. She sees a mass movement developing around political prisoners, who have become a “catalyst” for political action because they are able to expose the “oppressive structures of the penal system” and its ability to suppress social movements.

The Prison System

Davis argues that the prison system is an “instrument of class domination” that focuses less on the alleged criminal act and more on the person who commits it. She argues that crime is a function of the unequal distribution of property and reflects social needs borne of poverty—that is, that crime is a challenge to capitalism. In building her argument, she naturally refers to the nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx and to Marxism, the strand of historical-philosophical thought that provided the ideological underpinnings of Communism. Lumpenproletariat (literally “rag proletariat”) is the German word Marx used for those working-class people who would never achieve class consciousness (awareness of their own predicament) and who were therefore of little use in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. The Paris Commune was a working-class government that briefly assumed power in France in 1871. Davis here argues, contra some contemporary Marxists, that the “lumpen” can indeed be aroused and educated, as they were in Paris, and that they are capable of heroic action. She endorses the same kind of action on the part of Americans—especially blacks and other people of color—who could easily be dismissed as too poor and too marginal to take part in the revolutionary struggle. With the unemployment rate among black youth so high, it is little wonder that some turned to crime in order to survive. Hence the need for groups like the Black Panthers to organize these members of the lumpenproletariat.

Davis goes into some detail about the inequities of the prison system, noting, first, that not all prisoners have committed crimes and second, that prison terms meted out to black and brown inmates are disproportionately long. Imprisonment brings the inmate face to face with racism as an institutional phenomenon, leading more and more prisoners to recognize that they are, in fact, political prisoners. This growing awareness was reflected in such documents as the Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform, issued in conjunction with a nineteen-day inmate strike at the Folsom State Prison in California in 1970.

Prison and Revolutionary Movements

Davis’s tone sharpens when she refers to the “ruling circles” of America and their “repressive measures” and “fascist tactics” designed to curtail revolutionary movements, including the movement to end the war in Indochina (the Vietnam War). Herbert Marcuse, a German social and political theorist who had mentored Davis at Brandeis, was an opponent of capitalism, and a favorite writer among leftist revolutionaries. Specific instances of brutality at Soledad Prison are cited here, especially the men who were killed by a prison guard, the incident that sparked the Soledad Brothers case. She calls the Soledad Brothers “frame-up victims.”

Davis moves beyond literal imprisonment to address “racist oppression … on an infinite variety of levels.” Blacks, she says, are imprisoned by an economic system that fails to provide jobs with decent pay. Unemployment in the ghettos is high. Unemployment among black youth is 30 percent. Schools are substandard, medical care is poor, and housing in dilapidated. Amid this poverty in places like Birmingham in Alabama, Harlem in New York City, and the Watts district of Los Angeles, the police are numerous and ever present in a “grotesque caricature” of the mission of serving and protecting. The police “encircle the community with a shield of violence.” In this regard she refers to Franz Fanon, a mid-twentieth-century philosopher and revolutionary from Martinique whose work on colonial history, like that of Marcuse, was highly influential among leftists. Davis then goes into detail about how the judicial system abets the police as part of an “apparatus” that “summarily railroads black people into jails and prisons.” All of this is part of black ghetto existence, causing deep hatred of the police.

African American Resistance

In the final section Davis begins with the premise that “black people as a group have exhibited a greater potential for resistance than any other part of the population.” She rails against the racism and exploitation perpetrated, in her view, by the Nixon administration—an oppression that extends not only to blacks but also to Chicanos (that is, Hispanics), Puerto Ricans, and the antiwar movement. Despite the resistance of authorities, “black people are rushing full speed ahead” toward an understanding of repression and racism and are seeking liberation through armed revolution.

“Fascist,” in the leftist rhetoric of the 1960s, refers not merely to the right-wing ideology of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy but to any kind of repression directed against the poor, minorities, women, and other groups. In what Davis sees as a Fascist climate, thousands of people are political prisoners, including the Harrisburg Eight. The Harrisburg Eight, later Seven, were a group of religiously motivated antiwar activists led by Philip Berrigan, a Catholic priest, who were alleged to have plotted bombings and kidnappings in protest against the Vietnam War. For Davis, another symptom of this Fascism is the Nixon administration’s 1970 “Crime Bill” that gave the government, among other provisions, greater latitude to conduct wiretaps. These and other examples are evidence for Davis that revolutionaries must nip Fascism in the bud; she argues, too, that the mass of ordinary citizens have an interest in doing so, and one way they can take action is to take part in the struggle to abolish the prison system. In support of this view she quotes Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communist leader who had been prosecuted by the Nazis in 1933. Davis concludes by arguing that the white worker has a vested interest in issues of racism and political imprisonment, for “the merciless proliferation of the power of monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down the very same path of desperation.”

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