Why the case of Angela Davis gives hope to the international BLM movements

For the people struggling to see the significance of their role in the BLM movement, remember the case of Angela Davis and remind yourself of the tenacity of a collective voice and the importance of international recognition.

@TheSketchish

The case of Angela Davis stands out as a beacon for social movements everywhere…

Angela Davis was an American lecturer of Philosophy at UCLA and a black revolutionary member of the communist party. Having a prominent voice within the civil rights movement at the time, she led the SoledadBrother’s Defence committee where she campaigned for justice for George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette who were falsely accused of murdering a white prison guard in Soledad State Prison in 1970.

In August 1970 a warrant was put out for Angela’s arrest after police discovered that a set of guns used by Jonathan Jackson – brother of George Jackson – to help three San Quentin prisoners escape from a MarinCounty Courthouse were, in fact, registered in Angela’s name.

Despite being nowhere near the courthouse, and having no reasonable motive for doing so, Angela was indicted for first degree murder, first degree kidnapping and conspiracy to commit both. She was facing either life imprisonment or the death penalty.

She was innocent.

Guilty until proven innocent

Like the men she was trying to defend, Angela’s guilt was presumed straight away – Nixon himself remarked, after her arrest and live on TV that she was a ‘dangerous terrorist’. She was guilty until proven innocent, the US justice system was deaf to the accusations of injustice and they hunted her down for months until she was eventually arrested in New York.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the trial of Angela, and perhaps most relevant today, is the international movement that campaigned for her freedom and the message of hope it sends for justice movements everywhere.

The Free Angela movement mobilised immediately after her arrest to garner international support from countries all over the world. Angela seemed to personify the racial injustice being faced by black people in America and the world was repulsed into action.

6,000 gathered in Florence, 7,000 in Bologna, 4,000 in Frankfurt, 3,000 in Hanover and 60,000 in Paris. Sister protests popped up in Latin America and East Asia. In Africa, where apartheid still plagued the south, mass protest and social unrest spread rapidly.

The case also caught the attention of celebrities who used their platform to push for justice. Still a relatively new phenomenon, celebrities took a political stance; Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, Carol Scott King, Nina Simone and Rev. Ralph David Abernathy all brought media attention to the case, making it impossible for governments to ignore.

Aretha Franklin – in what we can look at now as being an early Go-fund-me page, offered to put up $250,000 for her bail.

And it worked. The Free Angela movement won the bail they had requested and the trial later concluded that she was not guilty on all accounts. On making his decision to grant bail, the judge who granted bail was alleged to have said: 

“I have noticed that this case has garnered enormous international and national interests". 

He was, quite frankly, under too much scrutiny to allow racism to prevail.

The verdict was indeed great and felt by many around the world, comparable no doubt to the sense of justice felt when murder charges were brought to the policemen who killed George Floyd. But despite these victories, one fundamental question still plagues the US justice system:

Why does it take a chorus of celebrities and nations to motivate a judge into making this decision? Surely the leaders of the free world should not be reliant on celebrity crowd funders and civilian condemnation to realise the injustices carried out on their own doorstep. Evidently they are.

Fifty years later here we are, risking lives through a global pandemic to fight against racial injustices. The rise of social media has opened our eyes and connected us more than ever before – and this has become a threat to the corrupt institutions that have allowed injustice to go on for so long.

With all the technology that we have today, with all the videos and images and means of communication; international social movements have never been more powerful. If the Free Angela movement was able to succeed with nothing more than telephones and the printing press, then we must recognise the power that the international community has today and we must not remain silent.

It is wrong that the very people we put our faith in to serve us have failed, that they have denied many Americans their constitutional right to assemble, to a fair trial, to free speech. But the year is now 2020, the civil rights movement was supposedly won over 50 ago and there seems to be so little to show for it that we must continue to call out racism when we see it.

So next time you think that your voice is not needed or that your contribution will not make a difference, remember the case of Angela Davis and how each individual protest put the necessary pressure on the US justice system. We may not all be American citizens, we may not all be black, we may not all have suffered social injustice, but the power of international solidarity harnesses something so powerful, that even the world’s powerhouses have to heed.

We must refuse to believe that the killing of George Floyd was simply a case of a few bad apples. The orchid is rotten, it needs to be replanted and we are going to be the ones to do it.