The Angela Davis Moment

6 min readDec 17, 2020

The elite media canonize an apologist for revolutionary violence and totalitarianism

Radical professor and activist Angela Davis has enjoyed a resurgent popularity among left-wing activists for the past several years, ever since she was one of the stars of the January 21, 2017 Women’s March. Now, some people in progressive media seem determined to make 2020 the Year of Angela Davis — or perhaps the Year of Angela Davis’s Canonization.

Now 76, Davis turned into an international celebrity almost overnight half a century ago, after she fled from an arrest warrant on charges of three capital felonies including conspiracy to commit murder and was arrested in October 1970 after two months on the run. The University of California philosophy professor who was also a Communist activist and a member of the Black Panther Party was embraced as a hero by the American and European left. After her acquittal (more on which later), her fame faded, and for years she received only intermittent attention. But now, the remnants of the old left that worshipped her and its successors in today’s “woke” left have again taken up her cause, reviving her status as a role model for young far left radicals — especially for Black Lives Matter activists in the new civil rights movement.

This unflattering fact is, to use the language of the Times’ Nelson George, “sanitized” from Davis’s biographies. So is her support in 1969 for the Black Panthers who were on trial in New Haven, Connecticut, for the brutal torture-murder of Alex Rackley, a black teen wrongly suspected of being a police informer.

Was Davis a “political prisoner” persecuted because she was fighting racism? No. She was charged with purchasing guns for a courtroom raid carried out by her lover George Jackson’s brother, Jonathan, whose use of these guns in a shootout (while attempting to flee) killed one of the four people he had taken hostage, a man named Judge Harold Haley. Three other black men were also killed, and one juror and a prosecutor were injured. The purchase of these guns was easily traced to Davis who, rather than surrendering, fled to avoid being captured. She was eventually found at a motel on 8th Avenue in New York City, where she was taken into custody, having been charged by superior court judge Peter Smith with “aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder.”

Davis was found not guilty when she tried in 1972, despite the fact that 20 witnesses testified against her. There is much evidence that the jury was compromised and friendly to her from the trial’s beginning. Immediately after the acquittal, one of the jurors faced the reporters and TV networks and gave them the clenched-fist salute extensively used by revolutionaries. That juror, Ralph Delange, explained, “I did it because I wanted to show I felt an identity with the oppressed people in the crowd . . . and to express my sympathy with their struggle.” Afterward, jury members headed for big party thrown by the official Committee to Free Angela. The forewoman, Mary Timothy, quickly befriended the Committee’s head Bettina Aptheker, a lifelong Communist Party member; the two went on to have an intimate relationship. (In her 2006 book, Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, Aptheker wrote that during the trial, Timothy “was our bellwether on the jury because our community folks had told us she was progressive.”)

It is also worth noting that Davis’s commitment to human rights and her objections to prisons have never extended to far-left regimes.

A hardline Communist, Davis supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and relished being a guest of Fidel Castro in Cuba — where she went immediately following her acquittal. But her greatest love was for the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries it ruled over. In 1979, Davis received the Lenin Peace Prize (once known as the Stalin Peace Prize). Russian writer Vitaly Korotich, who met her in Moscow, noted later that Davis was “a useful tool for the Brezhnev government, used to bolster Communist ideals and speak out against the West during the Cold War.” When she left the Soviet Union, Davis stood on top of the ladder ascending to the entrance of her plane, her fist in the revolutionary salute, told the crowd of well-wishers, “Long live the science of Marxism-Leninism.”

She also did her part to excuse the imprisonment of Eastern European dissidents. In 1972, Czech dissident Jiri Pelikan wrote Davis an open letter asking her to speak up for his comrades “so they can defend themselves against their accusers as you have been able to do in your country.”

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Pelikan told Davis that he was one of a “half million Czech and Slovak communists” expelled from the party “simply because we refused to consider the occupation of our small socialist country by a foreign power, itself ‘socialist,’ as ‘fraternal aid.’” He also pointed out that hundreds of Czechs were languishing in prison — not “anti-socialist elements,” as the Czech regime claimed, but mostly communists and socialists: “intellectuals, students, workers, priests, and trade unionists.” They even included two journalists whose reportage from the United States had encouraged Czechs to “support the struggle of the American progressives against racism, McCarthyism, and the Vietnam war.” Unlike Davis, who had received notes of solidarity while in prison, these Czech prisoners could receive “no moral encouragement” from the outside.

Pelikan implored Davis to use her “moral authority” to help, rejecting the argument of some Western progressives that to speak up would be to “play into the hands of socialism’s enemies”:

That is precisely why you, Angela, and the millions of people who supported you and believe in a more just socialist society with more freedom, can no longer be silent about the violation of human rights in the countries that call themselves “socialist” and by their behavior discredit socialism more than any reactionary propaganda.

But Pelikan’s plea fell on deaf ears. Answering on Davis’s behalf, her comrade-in-arms Charlene Mitchell (previously the CPUSA’s presidential candidate) explained that Davis believed people were only jailed in the so-called People’s Democracies “if they were undermining the government.”

Alan Dershowitz, who worked as an unpaid consultant on some aspects of Davis’s defense in 1972, wrote in his 1991 book, Chutzpah, that he received a similarly callous response from Davis after he asked her to speak up on behalf of Jewish prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union (where she was about to travel to receive a “human rights award”). According to Dershowitz, whose account Davis has never challenged:

Several days later, I received a call back from Ms. Davis’s secretary informing me that Davis had looked into the people on my list and none of them were political prisoners. ‘They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.’ Davis would urge that they be kept in prison where they belonged.

This record reveals the true Davis: someone comfortable with every self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist “revolutionary,” no matter how brutal, and with every tyranny as long as it’s run by “her own.” Davis’s advocacy for prisoners or for civil liberties is limited to “freedom fighters” fighting against actual democracies, including Palestinian terrorists convicted in Israeli courts; to the Communist gulags, she never had the slightest objection.

In recent years, Davis has made a spectacular comeback as a cult figure among progressives. At a rally last year, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tearfully called her “one of my idols.” Just the other day, another “Squad” member, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), was gushing on Twitter about the honor of introducing Davis in an online discussion (in a tweet that received nearly 14,000 “likes” on the same day).

Now, Davis is also being raised to the status of celebrity and icon by the mainstream media. Like the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which posits slavery and racism as the very meaning of the United States in its formative years, this is a striking example of the extent to which respected media organizations such as the Times or Time magazine have become vehicles for left-wing mythology.

The Angela Davis Moment

Written by champion master