First of two parts
[img]1837|left|Ms. Davis||no_popup[/img]The cheering news for American liberals is that the Angela Davis of this morning, unsurprisingly, remains steadfastly unchanged from the fireball of a college-age girl in the 1960s when she shared the throne of the radical dimension of the civil rights movement.
You would recognize her anywhere by her handsome, still intact trademark Afro that she helped popularize when the civil rights movement still was a child, just past mid-century.
At 69 years old and, technically, retired from academia at U.C. Santa Cruz, Prof. Davis’s flaming rhetoric of 50 years ago burns just as ferociously as the summer day in 1970 when she was tried, along with the notorious Soledad brothers, and then acquitted in the abduction/murder of a Marin County judge.
Her fists remain doubled, her feet defiantly stomping and marching, and stentorian tones forcing the nearest walls to quake and almost apologize.
Rousing an older, likeminded crowd of 1,000 at this morning’s edition of Dr. Anthony Samad’s Urban Issues Breakfast Forum at the African American Museum, USC, Prof. Davis, in the name of extending her lifelong iron-strong demand for multi-colored, multi-flavored justice, yielding no ground, heaved an armload of oratorical bombs.
On the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, she severely scolded those who would call for celebration because the black community, long since, has won its final round of freedom and independence.
False, Prof. Davis proclaimed.
“We have so much more to achieve. The meanings of freedom have not nearly been exhausted.”
Her advertised theme, no longer her exclusive corner of the social justice platform, was The Impact of Massive Incarceration and the Prison Industrial Complex.
But that could wait.
To the delight of a unanimously supportive audience, she detoured a dozen times.
She devoted a lightning-paced hour to calling for immediate and widespread action to fight “continuing oppression.”
Sympathy for Palestinians
The victims –her own black people, people of color throughout the planet, especially Palestinians to whom she feels squeezingly close, and the poor, and then those minorities unjustly imprisoned.
Prof. Davis reserved some of her most muscular salvos for women. Summoning her entire arsenal of verbal authority, employing the rawest forms of communication, she urged them to fight back against their nastiest oppressors, namely violent men, corporate entities and so-called democratic governments.
‘Change Your Thinking’
She begged her passionate listeners, who accorded her numerous ovations, to dramatically re-order their thinking apparatus.
Instead of seeing thundering cultural developments as isolated acts, think network. There is a connection among all events in the world, especially in corporate dominated universes, she said.
Proud of her legacy as a Community, she conceded that last year’s “Lincoln” film was “amazing.”
That set up Prof. Davis to heave her first of numerous torches on the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (Jan. 1, 1863).
Sadly, she declared, the Spielberg movie perpetuated the “false” notion that Lincoln freed the slaves.
“Lincoln did not,” she said, unqualifiedly.
“If we set about actually celebrating (investigating) the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that it was not about freeing the slaves. It was a military strategy for winning the Civil War.
“The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to states not loyal to the union.
“As Frtederick Douglas said, it was not about freeing the slaves, but whether slaveholders could keep their slaves.
“It was a shrewd strategy. Lincoln was a shrewd President.”
(To be continued)
