Posted on 04/19/2007 3:17:20 PM PDT by llevrok
American socialist organizer and philosopher Angela Davis talks in front of the Stafford Creek Corrections Center Wednesday. Davis spoke at the prison, and then at Grays Harbor College.
Called upon to introduce famed radical activist Angela Davis to offenders at Stafford Creek Correctional Facility Wednesday, Gary Murrell paraphrased Eugene V. Debs, the legendary labor leader who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1918 for giving an anti-war speech.
“ ‘So long as there are prisoners in the U.S., I am among them,’ ” the Grays Harbor College history instructor recalled Debs saying. “If anyone exemplifies that kind of statement today, it is the wonderful Angela Davis.”
Davis, a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a former Black Panther, was in Aberdeen to speak at Grays Harbor College as part of series sponsored by the Grays Harbor Institute.
She’s been particularly outspoken about problems with the country’s prison system and spent a couple of hours at Stafford Creek in the afternoon, greeted by a room of 250 offenders.
She once spent 16 months in solitary confinement, accused of capital crimes she was eventually acquitted of.
It isn’t often that the prison gets speakers, said Dawn Taylor, a coordinator with the prison’s community partnership, and none as famous — or infamous, some would say — as Angela Davis.
Black History theme
Davis’ appearance even brought out a smattering of prison staffers. Doug Thaut, a hearings officer at the prison, said he wanted to see Davis because he grew up in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and remembered when Davis was jailed while awaiting trial for conspiracy, kidnapping and homicide.
“I didn’t want to see Tom Cruise, but I wanted to see Angela Davis,” Thaut said.
About 20 of the offenders on hand for the address were part of a Black History class offered by the prison and taught by Murrell. Several are reading her book “Women, Race and Class,” for their class and brought copies for her to sign.
Anthony Taylor, a black student in the class, said before the lecture that Davis’ book had opened his eyes to the striving women have undergone for equality.
“I have a lot more respect for women because of the struggles they’ve gone through,” Taylor said.
Patrick De Ryke, a white student in the class, said that in his nearly 40 years of incarceration, he has witnessed a lot of the changes Davis writes about.
“I remember when we had recovery and rehabilitation,” De Ryke said. “I’ve seen a lot of changes and I’m sure I’ll see a lot more.”
Gerald Hankerson, another offender in Murrell’s class, said he had grown up in a home with a big picture of Angela Davis posing with guns and ammo slung over her shoulder. He said growing up in the South, he learned about “the Harriet Tubmans,” but not the Nat Turners.
“I regret that school didn’t teach more,” Hankerson said.
Nat Turner was a slave who led a rebellion in Virginia in 1831.
Ex-Black Panther
Davis told the crowd about her reasons for supporting prison reform. As a Black Panther, she was committed to helping the “Soledad Brothers,” three Black prisoners accused of causing a prison uprising in which six people were killed. Before that, she said, she had been part of the effort to free accused Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Her mother, she said, worked to free the Scottsboro Nine, nine Black youths in Alabama convicted unfairly of rape.
“It’s something I’ve been doing since before I was born,” Davis said.
Davis said the weapons she had when she was arrested were in reaction to death threats she had received due to her fighting to retain her job at the University of California at Los Angeles.
“I was hired because they wanted someone to teach Marxism, and they tried to fire me because I was a Marxist,” Davis said, shaking her head. At that point, she explained, she was a member of the Communist Party, and then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and the school’s Board of Regents dismissed her for it. She was rehired by a court injunction.
The incident propelled Davis into the national limelight.
“I thought, if these people are defending my right to teach, I have to stand up for (the Soledad Brothers’) right to live,” Davis said.
In the years since, Davis has visited prisons and jails across the country and in Europe and Latin America.
A small “c”
In her speech at GHC last night she referred to the prison system as the “prison industrial complex” and contended that an economy has grown up around it in the same way as the “military industrial complex” has, perpetuating itself.
Davis, who ran for vice president on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984 with Gus Hall, said last night that she now considers herself a “communist with a small c.”
In a wide-ranging speech and question-and-answer session, Davis said citizens should realize that the economic system of capitalism needn’t be synonymous with the government system of democracy. Too often profit is valued at the expense of what is good for people, she said.
She challenged her evening audience to acknowledge the existence of the prison at the edge of town and asked how many had been there. Not many hands went up. She pointed out that here, as in many communities, they’re in out-of-the-way places that can’t be seen from the highway.
She asked how many black people live on Grays Harbor and when she was told that not many do, she pointed out that five minutes down the road at the prison, there were many black people and they should be counted and recognized, too.
In the U.S. on any given day, 2.2 million people are incarcerated somewhere, she told the prisoners she spoke to. Each year, 13.5 million people will have experienced being behind bars.
“That’s a lot of people,” Davis said. “I think it’s really about not dealing with the social problems that affect so many of our communities in this free world.”
“Prisons don’t rehabilitate people,” Davis said. “I think people in prisons rehabilitate themselves.”
Davis said poverty, an educational system that often fails to inspire a love of knowledge and a health care system that treats wellness as a commodity instead of a right are some of the problems. The social ills of racism, sexism, drug abuse and the rampant acceptance of violence are others.
The flip side
Much of Davis’ talk was made up of responses to prisoners. And while she remains sympathetic to their plight, she was not above tweaking their expectations.
In response to a leading question about the effect of the widespread incarceration of black men on black families, Davis turned the question around.
“We can talk about the overall conditions that make it extremely difficult for people who have not had the opportunity to get an education, are not able to get jobs to raise their families, and that’s simple,” Davis said. “But we can talk about ‘The Black Family’ and we don’t really know what we’re talking about.”
Asked about the way black women are referred to in many types of media (“You mean Don Imus?” Davis divined), Davis said people should not be shocked when racism rears its ugly head — it’s part of society.
“I always get angry when I see young black people being held responsible for their misogyny — I do not excuse them — but they’re not the ones who invented it,” Davis said. “Why does everyone always focus on Hip Hop and Hollywood and not governments?”
Davis also urged the offenders to become feminists. (Taylor and Hankerson, after the presentation, said they were “already there.”)
“Men who embrace feminism become all the stronger from it, they become powerful supporters of their communities, representatives of the struggle for justice,” Davis said. “Because we want justice for everyone, don’t we?”
Anthony Taylor said he was “uplifted” by the talk.
“We need more women, more people, to come in for talks, to inspire us and to lift us up,” he said. In prison, the only environment an offender has under his control is the one in his mind, and, just like Taylor’s Black History class opened his mind, so had hearing a talk about ideas.
“I liked to hear what she said instead of just interpreting what I read,” Hankerson said. “This is something I can tell my children and grandchildren about.”
Another 60’s retread leftist/socialist making the rounds.
Heya Llev. Thanks for making a bad week worse.
Having Angela Davis there on a speaking gig is just nauseating, though she’d be just at home in Olympia. She probably parked her Carbon Footprint at Boeing Field. Yikes.
Yes, she did. Judge Haley was murdered and my friend's dad, Prosecutor Gary Thomas, was taken hostage and paralyzed.
They literally blew Judge Haley's head off.
Judge Haley was well regarded by all sides of the aisles. And he was Christian. He upheld honor, integrity, fairness to ALL AND EACH regardless of the liberal/socialist/marxist shibboleths.
Wow. Learn stuff every day. How did she manage to get off if this was so cut and dried?
I’ve ordered two of the three books available on the trial, one written by a juror. I didn’t order the one written by a CPUSA memeber, though I may.
According to the court testimony she was in LA at the time of shooting, but of course they were all communists, so it could be a lie. But it seems unlikely SHE smuggled the weapons into court. The prosecution could not place her at the court, apparently. She certainly provided the weapons used to execute the judge. That’s not even in question.
A gal with a plan.
Angela Davis should be barred, prevented from teaching/lecturing in the already overcrowded, roiled California prison system.
She should have been detered from being an Academic, teaching. But therein lies an entire story about what happened long ago to folks in areas in CA which are now called "blue zones".
A recovered communist? No. An "established" communist. And she is still, the gal with a plan.
There are plenty of her pals willing to take the rap for her, given that they get the right lawyers, and the right judges.
Mena airport, comes immediately to mind. So does Vince Foster. People with a plan have people who need money or a "cause" to carry it out. Insiders and "quotas" are usually very useful players in the plan.
Enjoy your reading. It was the beginning of the end in my county of Marin. Up until that time, Marin had been the best place in the world to be among free, diverse thinkers and doers, pretty much all living by the Golden Rule. Bay Area was already hugely "diverse". And we mostly got along.
It wasn't long afterwards (Murder of Judge Haley) that Planned Parenthood and the entire Marxist Leviathan arrived en mass in the county (Human Rights Committees, ad nauseum). The Free Speech Movement. "Rhetoric and Semantics" at U Berkeley. The crocheted bikini. Bra-lessness. Communal birthings. Communes.
And not long after, again, when "coming out of the closet" began. And then EST. Michael Warner. Synanon. "How do you feel"; Feminist classes.
Like locusts -- at first it seemed like some exciting little carnival come to town. Something new, something unique and different. It was. And it was wicked.
The real turning point took place at the Civic Center, Frank Lloyd Wright Building (yes, it is *that* beautiful). The turning point -- was right then.
WA Ping...JFK
I misremembered. While Davis was the head of the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, she was not actually in the courtroom on the day of the breakout. She merely bought all four guns that were used in the breakout -- she bought the shotgun that was used to kill Judge Haley just two days before the event -- but the only other person who knew whether she was actively involved in the plot, or if (as was apparently the basis of her defense) the guns were taken and used without her knowledge or permission, was her friend and bodyguard, Jonathan Jackson, who died in the shootout.
D.A. Thomas was paralyzed? I'm sorry to hear that. From the contemporary news accounts it sounds like he was a real hero that day, and a lot more of the hostages would have died if he hadn't acted when he did.
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