Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Content Warning: This section contains extensive discussion of systemic racism, including the police murders of Black Americans, mass incarceration, Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist terrorist organizations, and the history of enslavement in the US.

Angela Davis goes into hiding in Los Angeles in August 1970 after the Marin County Courthouse revolt in Northern California. She struggles to conceal her identity as she puts on a wig in her friend Helen’s home, and she mourns the death of her friend Jonathan Jackson in the revolt.

As night falls, Davis and Helen leave to begin Davis’s journey to evade the FBI. She is placed on their most wanted list: A gun registered to Davis was used in the courthouse revolt that led to the death of a judge and several others, including Davis’s fellow activist, Jackson. Davis is already known to authorities because of her membership in the Communist Party, and California governor Ronald Regan had her fired from her teaching position in the philosophy department at UCLA. Moving from home to home, escorted by friends and allies, Davis eventually makes her way to Miami and then New York City, accompanied and aided by her friend David Poindexter.

Davis worries about her family in Alabama, with whom it is too dangerous to communicate. The media falsely reports that she was seen at the family home and pursued by police. By the following month, it is too dangerous for Davis to remain in Miami.

She flees with Poindexter to New York, where the FBI eventually arrests her at Howard Johnson Motor Lodge. She is taken first to the FBI headquarters and then to a women’s jail in Greenwich Village: the New York Women’s House of Detention, a building not unfamiliar to her. Davis attended Elizabeth Irwin High School nearby and passed the mysterious building frequently: “At age fifteen I accepted some of the myths surrounding prisoners. I did not see them as quite the criminals society said they were, but they did seem like aliens in the world I inhabited” (16). The women’s jail is old, unkempt, and unwelcoming. Davis is relegated to a bench and observes that all the other women entering are either Black or Puerto Rican. The Black staff tell Davis that they sympathize with her cause.

Davis is put into the area of the jail known as 4b, where prisoners with mental health conditions are housed. Her jailers justify this placement by arguing that she will be safer there than among the general population, who might attack her for her radical beliefs. The truth is that they do not want Davis, a political prisoner, interacting with and influencing the other women. Davis is heartened when she hears from another inmate that a diverse crowd has gathered outside the jail to protest her arrest. Listening closely, she hears calls to free her. Davis reflects that although she is awaiting extradition to California on serious federal charges that could result in the death penalty, “there [is] already a hint of victory” (20).

The next morning, Davis makes her first court appearance. As she is led outside, she catches sight of a newspaper headline announcing her arrest. For the Right, she is a symbolic figure who could be used to discredit the movement for Black liberation and leftist politics, including communism. Davis is soon able to see her lawyers, John Abt and Margaret Burnham. Burnham is a long-time friend of her family and thus a comforting figure during Davis’s ordeal. Davis’s bail is set at $250,000, an enormous sum that means she will remain in jail. Though the judge later rescinds her bail, Davis remains jailed because she is turned over to the New York state authorities.

Back in her cell, Davis fights the urge to center her current predicament and reflects on other Black men and women who faced similar if not worse scenarios. She is mostly isolated on 4b; most of the prisoners there receive tranquilizers, making them unresponsive to attempts to converse. Davis reflects that their time on the ward has done nothing to improve their conditions and has in fact systematically worsened their lives.

When she visits her attorneys, Davis passes through the general prison population from whom the authorities claim to be shielding her. The women she passes express sympathy and solidarity with her cause. Burnham struggles to have Davis moved out of 4b but eventually succeeds. Among the main population, Davis has conversations with fellow prisoners about communism and is soon put into an improvised isolated cell: “It was not hard to see the probable connection between the harmless discussion with the sisters upstairs about communism and this abrupt and unexplained move into solitary confinement” (35). Davis and her lawyers launch a federal lawsuit charging her jailers with discrimination and mistreatment of political prisoners. She sees this move as part of a larger campaign to prevent future suppression of political activism and speech. Davis soon goes on a hunger strike to protest her conditions, as do her fellow prisoners in solitary. A federal court eventually rules in Davis’s favor, and her jailers move Davis out of solitary. She recalls the good-night calls between the women in their cells on the seventh floor as a reminder of solidarity.

Jail life is full of deprivation, as limited access to items from the commissary shows. Davis recounts the difficulty she has, for instance, in getting books while jailed. When she gets extra copies of George Jackson’s prison memoir, Soledad Brother, the jailers forbid her from sharing them with other inmates. Moreover, organized activities pass the time each day but are mostly meaningless, offering no enrichment or education. Likewise, prisoners are often denied basic medical care. Prisoners create their own family systems, including some sexual relationships, to care for one another. This kinship structure combats their sense of dehumanization. Davis believes that sexual relationships distract the women from the unhappiness with jail life that would lead to “political dissatisfaction.”

Systemic racism often prevents people jailed from getting bail. Davis’s jailed “sisters” are attracted to her communist ideas because of their potential to counter racism. A sense of solidarity develops, and Davis invites the sisters to her daily exercises in the hallways. This solidarity extends to a newly created bail fund for the women in the House of Detention: “When a woman was elected [by her fellow prisoners] to be the beneficiary, she would not only have her bail paid, but would have responsibilities to the bail fund as well” (56). Released women work to raise more money for the fund, thus assisting those who remain inside.

In December 1970, there is a demonstration to free Davis outside of the jail. Those inside join in the chants calling for her freedom, but Davis is mindful that this movement is not only about her. She adds calls for the freedom of her sisters inside to the chants. Davis is abruptly awakened later that night and roughly put in a caravan that takes her to New Jersey’s McGuire Air Force Base. She is extradited to California, where she faces a possible death penalty.