USA: Angela Davis: Eighty Roses for an Icon

I was twelve years old when, like thousands of others, I sent a postcard to the USA. It was addressed to the African American Angela Davis, imprisoned in a women’s prison. The postcard, decorated with a red rose, was part of a solidarity campaign initiated in January 1971 on the occasion of her birthday under the motto “A million roses for Angela Davis”.

Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama – an apartheid city where the African-American population was subject to rigid racial discrimination and segregation, and violence and lynchings were commonplace. The neighborhood where her family lived was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill” because of the Ku Klux Klan’s many bombings of poor black homes. The racist riots were accompanied by regionally specific anti-communism.

These experiences, as well as the political activism of her parents, shaped her growing up. At 15, she moved to New York, where her family decided she would graduate from high school. Her first reading of the “Communist Manifesto” also occurred during this time. The young woman gained a theoretical connection to the oppression she experienced herself from the Marxist theory of class struggle. In 1961 she began to learn French, and two years later she went to the Sorbonne in Paris for a year abroad.

Back in the USA she attended lectures by Herbert Marcuse, who saw Marxism as a critical theory. He became her intellectual mentor. It is thanks to his influence that Angela Davis began studying philosophy at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main in 1965 in order to better understand Kant, Hegel and Marx. During that time she also visited the GDR several times, among other things to buy the Marx-Engels edition. The West German student protest movement served as a source of inspiration in formulating a practice-oriented internationalist criticism of the capitalist system and US imperialism.

Back in the United States, Angela Davis joined the Black Power movement, where ideological differences and political conflicts abounded. In 1968 she became a member of the Communist Party of the USA and advocated an alliance with new radical left groups. Collaboration with the Black Panther Party took place in the form of classic grassroots activities.

In 1969, Angela Davis was one of the first African-American women to accept a professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was sharply attacked in the media because of her political activities. Even the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, later President of the USA, declared war on it. Angela Davis embodied several enemy images of conservative America: communist, black power activist, black feminist and opponent of the Vietnam War! This made her almost predestined for the role of hate figure for the ruling white elite.

In 1970, she became involved in the case of the Soledad Brothers, three African-American prisoners at California’s Soledad Prison who had been charged with an alleged murder of a guard. Among them was George Jackson, a leading figure in the Black Panthers’ resistance. During a court hearing there was a failed rescue operation. Since the weapons carried were registered in Angela Davis’ name, she was placed on the FBI list of the ten most wanted criminals in the USA in August 1970. She was arrested on October 13, 1970. On camera, President Richard Nixon congratulated FBI chief Edgar Hoover on her arrest.

This was followed by unprecedented public condemnation even before the charges were brought. At the same time, an impressive national and international protest broke out against the state’s actions against the Black Power activist. Aretha Franklin, the soul queen, offered to pay bail for her to be released from custody. Franz Josef Degenhardt, John Lennon, the Rolling Stones and the GDR rock band Panta Rhei each dedicated a song to Angela Davis. But much of the US media stylized her as the epitome of the violent enemy of the state. The prosecution accused her of murder, hostage-taking and “conspiracy,” which is why she faced the death penalty in a gas chamber if convicted in California.

The trial began in March 1972. There was not a single black person in the jury box. Despite the institutional racism in the US judiciary, the trial ended with an acquittal in June of that year. The unique global solidarity movement, which also included the postcard campaign in the GDR, contributed to this. Angela Davis still sees it today as a symbol that “the power of the many” can achieve what was and may be considered impossible.

Once released, Angela Davis placed questions of racial and political oppression in the context of the US prison system at the center of her work. She became a major theorist of prison abolitionism, a movement that calls for the abolition of prisons. In their opinion, keeping people in cages fails to achieve its supposed goal of resocializing or improving the prisoners. The “mass incarceration” that began in the United States in the 1980s had almost no effect on crime rates. Which is why Angela Davis continually questions the economic, political and ideological role of prisons. She sees the new “lust for punishment” in the context of the global development of capitalism, the de-industrialization of the US economy and the development of neoliberalism. Class and racism primarily determine who goes to prison. Around 70 percent of the approximately 2.5 million prisoners in the USA are people of color.

According to Angela Davis, the prison institution serves as a storage facility for people and manages the waste of capitalist society. In addition, the increasingly privatized prisons, including the outsourcing of the services required there to private companies, are a huge profit business. The larger the prison population, the higher the rate of profit.

In this respect, Angela Davis also speaks of a “prison industrial complex” to highlight the interconnectedness of incarceration and capitalism. The call for more prison sentences ignores deeper problems: racism, impoverishment, unemployment, lack of education, lack of health care. This in turn relieves the burden on politicians to find structural solutions to socio-economic problems, which instead concentrate on winning election campaigns with law-and-order promises.

From this fundamental position, Angela Davis criticizes the “criminal feminism” practiced mostly by white, middle-class women, according to which law enforcement and incarceration should be the solution to the fight against sexual violence. “Criminal law feminism” ignores two things. First, prisons are, by their structure, total institutions; Executing a prison sentence means an isolated existence, authoritarian rules, violence, lawlessness, and violation of human rights. Prisons reproduce violence. Secondly: “Criminal law feminism” generally contributes to the legitimization of state punishments. Angela Davis believes a society without prisons is realistic – “but in a redesigned society in which human needs are the driving force rather than profits.” In order to make this vision a reality, she continues to be active in a variety of initiatives that aim to break down the power structures from below. For them these are movements towards socialism.

It should come as no surprise that Angela Davis is also active in the Black Lives Matter movement. For them, the fatal police violence against George Floyd and many other black people is an expression of structural racism. What is characteristic of them is the combination of different dimensions of oppression – especially race, class and gender. Their approach is called intersectionality. A comparison of class and “identity politics,” which is currently dismantling a left-wing party in this country, cannot be made with Angela Davis. Symbolically, 80 roses were sent across the Atlantic for her birthday today.