Second in a series
Re “Lincoln Did Not Free the Slaves, Declares Angela Davis”
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Mr. Branton
Nineteen-sixties black radical Angela Davis was bound to carom from the deep background into the forefront of news this month –
Either because of her familiar 50-year-old Arise Now statements a week ago Friday at Dr. Anthony Samad’s Urban Issues Breakfast Forum in Exposition Park or the death the next day a few miles away of her lawyer, Leo Branton Jr., who helped her beat a murder rap 41 years ago.
In the racially flaming days of the early 1970s, Mr. Branton convinced an all-white jury in San Jose that Ms. Davis’s soul was of the driven snow variety after years of running around with edgy gentlemen who supped trouble and flaunted unacceptable behavior for their daily dessert.
Besides murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges were brought against Ms. Davis, and Mr. Branton, who was black, brilliantly sprang her.
Mr. Branton, who specialized in police abuse cases before, during and after the civil rights movement’s peak years, was 91 years old. No doubt he would have been proud of his star pupil’s fire-singed oratory on the eve of his death.
If she is one drop less angry today, it is the largest secret on the book-shlepping trail.
At 69 years old, supposedly retired from U.C. Santa Cruz, Ms. Davis still does not give ground, grudgingly or otherwise.
Addressing a thousand mostly black devotees at the African American Museum, she could have marched the whole room down Broadway to Chinatown, so sympatico were the two of them.
A boastful native of Birmingham, “the center of the world 50 years ago,” Ms. Davis said that those who branded the outcome of the civil rights movement as “the final victory for democracy,” were wrong.
Despite accomplishing the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and White House victories by President Obama in 2008 and 2012, “democracy is very much a work in progress,” said the communist sympathizer, still channeling one.
“We cannot afford the type of historical closures that usually are offered to us. We cannot afford to think of our struggles as behind us. They are not.
“So much more is to be achieved. The meanings of freedom have not been exhausted. There is so much more to do.
“In many ways, President Obama’s re-election last year was more important than 2008,” Ms. Davis believes. “With all of the voter suppression (Voter ID) laws, the election was set up for President Obama to lose. (Mitt) Romney thought he was going to win. He did not have a concession speech prepared. Because he had no idea black people, Latinos, poor people would stand in line for hours and hours to vote for Obama.”
And that triggered a thundering cheer.
“We learned something about the most suppressed populations.
“They have given us hope for the future.”
Without ever slowing or tripping, even in the slightest, Ms. Davis, not known for her religiosity, almost sounded as if she were reading the word of God from the Bible at a Sunday morning service, counting down her fist-doubling agenda.
(To be continued)
