Posted on 01/29/2015 6:02:45 AM PST by artichokegrower
To understand recent responses to police violence against people of color, one must take a global and historical view, says Angela Davis.
The UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor spoke to hundreds at the Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation on Wednesday at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, which was filled to capacity.
Titled “Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine,” Davis’s talk drew connections between King’s work and uprisings today, in response to recent police killings of unarmed black men in Missouri and New York.
(Excerpt) Read more at santacruzsentinel.com ...
Not all in Jewish community oppose Davis
As a UCSC alumnus (Stevenson 1989), a person of Jewish decent whose mother is from Israel, and a member of the Santa Cruz community, I welcome Angela Davis’s speech to the UCSC and Santa Cruz community in honor of MLK. I also thank Chancellor Blumenthal for extending this invitation. In response to the letter from some Jewish alumni opposing Dr. Davis’ speech and threatening to withhold their support from UCSC, I would like to offer another view. The writers say they represent the Jewish community, but in reality, they represent one right wing, and increasingly isolated segment of American Jews. Like myself, there are many American Jews who oppose Israeli policies of racism, colonialism and exclusionary apartheid policies that attack the indigenous Palestinian Arab population. WE stand with Dr. Davis in opposing Israeli behavior and U.S. support for these policies. Many of us stand with the Palestinian people in their right to resist the Israeli occupation and its frequent violations of international law.
— Ron Kaufman, Santa Cruz
I guess Mr. Kaufman fits the definition of a self hating Jew.
The average Santa Cruz resident is the very definition of “hoary old hippie”, so the large turnout shouldn’t be too surprising.
This aging communist & accessory to murder just never goes away. And 1,000 aging hippies came to listen.
Does she still sport that afro that looks like an explosion in a Brillo factory?
“a blow for freedom”
What fries my butt is that the bring down America through violent revolution spokesperson is getting a taxpayer funded pension
http://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/search/?q=Angela+Davis
Code for;
I'm gonn'a tell you about a lot of horrible stuff that happened a century ago, but I'm gonn'a make it sound like it's present day, which is my intention, 'cause I still love to rouse the the rabble.
With so many “useful idiots” running around this country today I wonder how we will ever restore any semblance of sanity in our society.
NOt that large. Most large kegger parties when I was in college drew more people than that.
Trying to cover all the bases there. These old commies never die.
: From Ferguson to Palestine.....
well we know where ferguson is...
angela should move to...lebanon and see how well her lectures are attended
Foreword by Robert Byrd.
Or...
How The DemocRAT Party Maintains Power
Interesting how the likes of Angela Davis and Bill Ayers go into “education”
Its a government-funded existence, where one never had to give up one’s crazy leftist ideas, and can promote them to the young.
If you’re white and you do the things she’s done, you’re called a racist. If you’re black and you do these things, you’re called an “activist.”
Maybe Charlie Manson would take an endowed chair in Criminal Justice at UCLA? Or Juan Corona could teach Immigration Studies at UC Davis.
Oh, I don’t know....Angela’s afro looks like it could still scour the barnicles off a battleship.
I’d love to ask her if she gets a state-provided pension & then exclaim,
“Filthy capitalist DOLLARS, Angela!!? I thought you commies never touch the stuff!”
Jury Isn’t Out On Angela Davis
"Angela Davis, a black activist who came to prominence in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A. and the radical black group the Black Panther Party. Ms. Davis was such a high profile communist in the latter days of the Cold War that she was awarded the so-called “Lenin Peace Prize,” given to her in a Moscow ceremony by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev himself.
Of course, Ms. Davis, too, was a trailblazer in her own way.
She was the second black woman to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. She earned that distinction as a fugitive wanted on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from her role in a notorious attack on a courtroom in Marin County in California.
On Aug. 7, 1970, a black 17-year-old named Jonathan Jackson, toting a small arsenal of guns, entered the courtroom of Judge Harold Haley, where convict James McClain was facing murder charges in the death of a prison guard. Brandishing a gun, Jackson halted the proceedings and then armed McClain, after which they together armed two other convicts, who’d been called as witnesses in the case. Jackson and the three freed prisoners then took Judge Haley, the prosecutor and three female jurors hostage, bargaining chips in their effort to force the release from prison of older brother George Jackson, an armed robber who also was under indictment on murder charges in the death of another prison guard.
A career criminal turned Black Panther prison organizer, George Jackson was the author of “Soledad Brother,” a collection of his militant prison letters. The abductors fled with their hostages — Judge Haley now with a sawed-off shotgun taped under his chin, the others bound with piano wire — in a waiting van. They didn’t get far before reaching a police roadblock, where a shootout erupted, leaving Judge Haley, Jonathan Jackson and two other kidnappers dead, the prosecutor paralyzed for life and a juror wounded.
It was quickly established that Angela Davis had purchased at least two of the guns used in the deadly attack, including the shotgun that killed Judge Haley, which she had bought two days earlier and which was then sawed off. California law considered anyone complicit in commission of a crime a principal. As a result, Marin County Superior Judge Peter Smith charged Ms. Davis with “aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder” and issued an arrest warrant for her. Instead of surrendering for trial, Ms. Davis went into hiding. She was captured by the FBI almost three months later at a Howard Johnson motel on 10th Avenue in the heart of New York City.
Ms. Davis claimed that she was innocent, and her case became a cause celebre, as the international communist movement bankrolled her defense and organized a worldwide movement to “Free Angela.” Eventually, she was acquitted in 1972, despite her proven ownership of the murder weapons and a cache of letters she wrote to George Jackson in prison expressing her passionate romantic feelings for him and unambivalent solidarity with his commitment to political violence.
As in the O.J. Simpson trial, however, many remained convinced of the defendant’s guilt despite the jury’s verdict. Ms. Davis was acquitted, wrote author and ex-radical David Horowitz for his Front Page website, “in part because of the difficulty the prosecution had in establishing in court the real connections between Davis and Jackson, and in part because the jury was stacked with political sympathizers like Mary Timothy, an anti-Vietnam [War] activist,” who, according to Mr. Horowitz, would later become the “love interest” of Bettina Aptheker, a prominent Communist Party activist and organizer of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.
There is a further irony in the homage to Ms. Davis‘ “greatness” displayed for jurors in the D.C. Courthouse, the scene of people tried for actual crimes who might go to prison: Ms. Davis is these days a driving force in the prison-abolition movement and founder of a group called Critical Resistance, which is dedicated to smashing what she calls “the prison-industrial complex.”
Ms. Davis holds that any black serving a prison sentence in the United States is in reality a “political prisoner,” whatever offense they may have committed. In her lexicon, those convicted are only victims of “masked racism.” As she wrote in 1998, the poverty in which blacks are “ensconced” causes them to be “grouped together under the category ‘crime’ and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color.” The purpose of prison, in her eyes, is simply to “disappear” people who come from “poor, immigrant and racially marginalized communities.”
Ms. Davis imputes to the American ruling class what she terms “racial assumptions of criminality,” which enable the nation to lock up the innocent under a veneer of legality and “disappear the major social problems of our time.” As she explains, most people “have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment,” even though “prisons do not work.” Ms. Davis envisions linking her struggle against this “complex” with other “strands of resistance” to build a new “powerful movement for social transformation.”
In the D.C. Courthouse, as juror selection takes place, lawyers for both sides daily strive to winnow out even subtle biases that could impinge on a jury’s impartial hearing of trial evidence. With her blanket dismissal of evidence as irrelevant in trials of (automatically innocent) minority defendants, Ms. Davis indicts the entire American legal system as a rigged farce.
Did it occur to anyone in the D.C. court system that honoring her for the benefit of its jury pools might send a mixed message?
While Ms. Davis proudly wore the badge of political prisoner, and applies it to any black person who is held in prison, even when she was awaiting trial she steadfastly backed the imprisonment of Soviet political dissidents, whom she called common criminals. When Russian tanks and troops intervened in Czechoslovakia in 1968, she proudly defended the Soviet invasion. Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told the AFL-CIO in 1975 that given her own campaign on behalf of her freedom, it was more than hypocritical for her to oppose an appeal made to her for freedom by Czech dissidents. Ms. Davis has denied the claim.
Is Angela Davis, one must ask the federally funded D.C. Courts, really the kind of person to honor in their halls of justice as an esteemed person of color for jurors in the nation’s capital to emulate and look up to?
your question would be the recipe for an instant meltdown, brillopad and all
why shes not in prison I do not know
EVERYONE in the United States has access to education, including college education and vocational schools.
The education of children has been a legal requirement for many years.
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