News

POSTER CHILD: The icon featured on many bedroom posters

CIVIL RIGHTS icon Angela Davis recently graced the Capital Woman conference in London, addressing an audience of more than 3,000 people who came to hear her speak.

The most famous face of the ‘70s Black Panther movement still has followers, and still sports her towering afro. But Davis is tired of being remembered for her hairdo. She told The Voice: “Please don’t ask about my hair. I just don’t get the fascination.

“I was no different from any other woman in the ‘70s. Everyone talks about me as an afro and I have no idea where that came from. I was one of thousands, millions of women who wore afros at that time.”

Laughing, the 64-year-old former Black Panther added: “It is both humiliating and humbling that I am remembered as a hairdo.”

For many black people in America during the Civil Rights era, especially women, wearing an afro symbolized resistance to white oppression. They felt connected to their ‘sistas’ and ‘brothas’ within the black Diaspora.

With her fist raised high and her afro combed even higher, Davis’ hairdo was copied by blacks and others worldwide, after she was arrested as a suspected conspirator in the abortive attempt to free George Jackson from a courtroom in Marin County, California, on August 7, 1970. She was accused of supplying the gun that killed four people during the incident.

Only 26 years old at the time, Davis was seen as a rebel and a revolutionary, and became the third woman to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. She was later incarcerated on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy.

Her imprisonment gained international attention, and a massive ‘Free Angela Davis’ campaign was supported by many, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono who released the song Angela, and the Rolling Stones who sang Sweet Black Angel. The campaign later led to her acquittal by an all-white jury in 1972.

“I was finally arrested in New York after several months of being underground,” Davis recalled. “They took me to the women's house of detention, where they took female prisoners at that time.”

Asked how she felt, Davis said: “I was so scared. It was scary being grilled by the FBI and then being cast off to jail. I was not allowed to speak to anybody, including my attorneys. The FBI also chose to lock me up with the mentally disabled in order to isolate me…I felt very alone.”

She added: “While inside my cell I began to hear people chanting ‘free Angela’, and all the political prisoners and I knew straight away that everything was going to be okay.”

Born in the famously racist town of Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Davis was exposed to the humiliation of racial segregation from a young age. She is known for her remarkable strength, which she believes comes from her “relations with other people, particularly the communities of struggle,” that she has always been involved with.

Referring to her so-called ‘Angie followers’, Davis told The Voice: “I can remember the enormous support from the black communities from this country, including the Labour and Communist party. Had it not been for that community of struggle, I would probably still be in jail today. Many people would have probably forgotten my name.”

The author of several books, Davis remains committed to activism, concentrating on female issues especially around the area of violence.

For many years Davis has addressed issues regarding the state of prisons within America, and the death penalty. She spoke in defence of founder Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, founder of the notorious Crips gang, who was executed in 2005.

Davis sees herself as an ‘abolitionist’, not a prison reformer, and refers to the US prison system as the "prison-industrial complex."

“American society is still haunted by its failure to fully abolish slavery, and while physical chains may have been removed, others are left intact,” she said. “The fact that as many as one in nine young black men in the US are currently in prison demonstrates this.”

She added: “Prison is really the afterlife of slavery. We have to abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment if we are to begin to complete the process of abolishing slavery.”

For a long time she had been reluctant to discuss her sexuality, but in 1997 she came out as a lesbian in Out magazine and encouraged other homosexuals and transsexuals to “live out loud.”

No longer willing to live in the dark regarding her sexuality, Davis explained that her lesbianism is something that she is fine with as a “political statement.”

When asked for a critique of the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, Davis said she was pleased that there is now a black man and a white woman who are serious contenders for the US presidency. However, she cautioned people not to place all their hopes in either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or in any one candidate.

“I think we have a messiah complex in America,” she said, warning that diversity among those in power does not necessarily translate into liberation for all.

The veteran fighter concluded by saying that if we all stand together, we can beat war, violence, sexism and racism.

Published: 18 March 2008
Issue: 1312

site comments powered by Disqus