The Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/9905/15/text/features9.html CIVIL RIGHTS Angela's clashes Date: 15/05/99 Angela Davis - you remember the afro. The '60s activist, as committed as ever to civil rights, sees clear parallels between race struggles in the US and Australia. John Huxley writes. UNDER cloudless skies, in the vast, grassed square overlooked by San Francisco's glorious "beaux arts" City Hall, a scene is unfolding that could easily have been created, choreographed, even coloured-in, in the '60s. With a prolonged wail, the rasta rhythms of E.W. Wainwright's African Roots jazz band wind down. A wild-haired, wild-eyed man, dressed in floral shirt and khaki shorts, jumps onto the makeshift stage, built on the back of a truck. He grabs the microphone. He surveys the boisterous crowd, joyfully gathering for the sort of political demonstration that has helped make San Francisco the protest capital of the world. He starts yelling. "You look beautiful! You look beautiful! You look just so beautiful!" The crowd - which has swelled to more than 25,000 as other demonstrators stream across town to join the freedom rally - responds with delight. Its members whoop and cheer and chant, with prompted, metronomic precision, their support for the release of a black prisoner being held on death row. "We're going to free [pause] Mumia [pause] Abu-Jamal, [pause] we're going to tear down the prisons [pause] wall by wall." The beautiful people have been "mobilised" specifically to campaign for the release of Jamal, a Pennsylvanian journalist who they insist was wrongfully found guilty of shooting a police officer, but the rally has attracted all kinds of action groups. All sorts of banners: International Black Women for Wages for Housework. Universal Zulu Nation. The Plumbers, Steam and Refrigeration Fitters (local 393, San Jose). Tenderloin AIDS Resource Centre. Nation of Islam. Workers World Party. And the Longshore and Warehouse Union, which in an unprecedented move has closed all western seaboard ports for the weekend in support of Jamal's release. And all types of T-shirt slogans: "US Out of Yugoslavia" (Socialist Workers). "That's Mr Dyke to You" (Gay and Lesbian Alliance). "Set San Francisco on Fire" (Anarchy in the USA). "Fix Muni!" (a lone protester fighting for an on-time bus service). Somewhere in this rainbow cacophony, this raging kaleidoscope, sitting regally on the grass, smiling serenely at the developing drama, is a striking black woman, plainly but elegantly attired in brown jacket and black trousers, her dark, Afro-style hair tinged with gold. Friends pause to speak to her. Strangers stop to be photographed with her or simply to shake her hand. And, when eventually she climbs on the stage to speak, the crowd gives her the loudest and longest ovation of the day. To American audiences, she needs no lengthy introduction. "Angela Davis ..." the man with the microphone says economically, "... woman of principle." Woman of principles. This month, those principles will be applied for the first time to Australia, when Davis visits the country as a guest speaker at the Sydney Writers' Festival. It promises to be a lively, thought- provoking, controversial encounter. "This is my first visit," she says, "but, of course, I am familiar through my research with the White Australia Policy and with the extent to which the prison system in Australia serves as a racist tool to control the Aboriginal population." The plain-speak, the passion, is typical of a woman who as student, teacher, writer, scholar, prisoner, black icon, but always as left- wing political activist, has been a leading participant in key social struggles of the contemporary era - against racism, sexism and what her supporters insist on calling "classism". Other black - and white - militants may have dropped out, sold out or burned out, but at 55 Davis has maintained the rage, her passion for political change undiminished, her optimism undimmed, her views, for many, almost seditiously unpalatable. IT IS WITH a mixture of amusement and alarm that Davis recalls being introduced recently to a man who could not quite place her. After some prompting, a flicker of recognition flashed across his face. "Oh," he said, "Angela Davis - the afro." Recalling the incident, Davis laughs. But only a little. "It's funny, but it also disturbs me." As she says in a magazine article reproduced in a recent anthology, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, "It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo." For one thing, she says, it reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion. It was 30 years ago that Davis was catapulted to international prominence by two pivotal events. First, she was removed from her teaching position in the philosophy department at the University of California at Los Angeles as a result of her involvement with the radical Black Panthers and membership of the Communist Party. At the time, Ronald Reagan - then governor of California - vowed she would never teach in the State again. Today, she is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco. More dramatically, in 1970, she was placed on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, driven underground, arrested after an intense police search, and charged with kidnapping, murder and conspiracy in connection with a shoot-out at Marin County courthouse, in northern California. Her incarceration, for a total of 16 months, prompted a worldwide "Free Angela Davis" campaign. When eventually she came to trial she was acquitted. Today, she is a tireless campaigner for the abolition of the "prison industrial system" and critic of "the institutionalised racism of the criminal justice system", of which, she argues, Australian Aborigines and American black activists such as Mumia Abu-Jamal are victims. "Almost 2million people are currently locked up in the immense network of US prisons," she explained in a recent story. "More than 70per cent of the imprisoned population are people of colour. "Coloured bodies constitute the human raw material in this vast experiment to 'disappear' the major social problems of our times. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution, what is revealed is racism, class bias and parasitic seduction of capitalist profit." Mass incarceration is as much a threat to liberty in Australia as it is in America, she says. "The problem is global." Two of the largest private prison companies in the US, the Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, are active in Victoria, she says. Inevitably, Davis's jailhouse experiences, chillingly described in a 1974 autobiography, continue to inform and inspire her campaign for the abolition of prisons. She has also described, movingly, the effect on her of learning, while studying overseas, that four childhood friends had been killed in the fire-bombing of a church by white racists. "I carried around in my head for many years an imagined representation of the bombing's aftermath that was far more terrifying than any cinematic image of violence ... the fixed eyes of Carole's and Cynthia's bloody, decapitated heads and their dismembered limbs strewn haphazardly among the dynamited bricks ..." The ghosts of those slain will never be exorcised, but Davis insists that her political career owes more to her upbringing than to any specific events. "People often ask what caused me to dedicate my life to politics. But there was no one cause. No epiphany. "I grew up from a very small child with a sense of a need to fight for justice. For that I must be very thankful to my parents." Davis was born and grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood in Birmingham, Alabama, that was dubbed "Dynamite Hill" following Ku Klux Klan attacks on black families being integrated into previously white areas. Her parents taught in the public school system, though her father later opened a petrol station. From an early age, Davis attended civil rights demonstrations with her mother, who was a leading activist in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organisation associated with the Communist Party. A straight-A student, also proficient at music and sport, Davis went to school in New York before moving to France to spend an undergraduate year at the University of Paris, where she studied Marxism, learnt more first-hand of the treatment of racial minorities ... and made a dazzling personal impression. According to a story in Life in 1970, "Her beauty was so striking that men followed her down Paris streets and stumbled over each other to light her cigarettes. She seemed not to notice them." Philosophers, as Karl Marx once wrote, "have interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Angela Davis agreed. After completing her bachelor's degree in New York and studying philosophy at the prestigious Goethe-Institut in Frankfurt, she returned to California to complete her MA under the supervision of the leading Marxian scholar Herbert Marcuse. Immediately, she became a civil rights activist, initially working alongside members of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, groups with which she later became disillusioned. She also joined the Communist Party, for which she ran for the United States presidency. Eight years ago she was "purged" from its leadership after a row over restructuring. The spotlight of publicity may have been directed elsewhere, passions may have cooled, but over the past 25 years Davis has continued the fight, lecturing in all 50 of the United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the former Soviet Union. Occasional bomb scares, such as one that disrupted a meeting in New Jersey recently, remind her that while she may no longer be "America's most wanted woman", her views are still sufficiently dangerous to provoke the threat of violence. Apart from her university commitments, she has been a prolific writer of articles and books. Her most recent, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, examines the relationship of race and music through the songs of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. She is working on a book about the prison industrial complex and planning speaking tours to Europe and South America as well as Australia. While here she wants to meet Aboriginal women and talk on a black radio station. She is considering a suggestion that she stand for public office again, this time as a Green candidate. "I'd only agree in the context of educating people and raising public consciousness about issues," she says. WHATEVER her decision, her workload, always demanding, has become daunting. "Angela's schedule is just a mess," says her business manager, Annette Goldman Mosqueda. "She is so terribly busy. She never stops." Worse, Davis only recently recovered from a serious fall, sustained while chasing her dogs near her home in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. Indeed, telephone callers to her office are greeted with a recorded message that she will not be available for any further engagements until the northern autumn. Relenting to speak to the Herald, Davis admits, "Right now, I feel utterly overwhelmed. My activism and my research overlap. Though I am on sabbatical from the university, it is difficult to find space for the things I want to do personally and politically." Davis, who has remained single despite being loved for her courage and charisma by legions of admirers, dismisses the suggestions of comrades that her political career has involved considerable personal sacrifices. "Things could have turned out differently," she says, seemingly uncomfortable at being asked to address private issues, "but I do not separate my personal and political life. That is the way I have always lived my life." Modestly, Davis suggests that, yes, people like herself have made an impact on issues such as civil rights. But she is wary of celebration: "Progress, victories, call them what you will, are not necessarily permanent. Changes in civil rights law has not eliminated racism. We cannot live off the success of the past." Pushed, she concedes that she is occasionally nostalgic for the '60s and early '70s. Then, there was so much "global political passion", so many inspiring political thinkers, "such as Che [Guevara], Fidel [Castro] and [Patrice] Lumumba. We don't have that any more, certainly. But every generation finds its own way. It's so important to listen to young people. I believe that now my energy and inspiration comes from a willingness to work on the basis of equality with young people." So saying, she surveys the scene outside the San Francisco City Hall. And smiles at the '90s demonstration of youthful '60s passion. Angela Davis and Louise Adler will discuss The Prison Industry at Centennial Hall, Sydney Town Hall, from 8.30pm to 10pm next Saturday. Bookings (02) 9364 9400. 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