Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (62 page)

IN THE FALL
of 1969, with Charlene Mitchell’s campaign behind her, Angela Davis planned to quietly nestle into her first teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles. The FBI had other plans. J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had launched an all-out, unapologetic war to destroy the Black Power movement that year. The FBI’s messenger at the
San Francisco Examiner
, Ed Montgomery, reported Davis’s membership in the Communist Party (and Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panther Party). In the ensuing hubbub, California governor Ronald Reagan, eager to pick up points from the anti-Red, anti-student, anti-Black law-and-order voters, deployed an old anti-Communist regulation and fired the twenty-five-year-old Angela Davis. She appealed to the California courts, setting off a confrontation between the state’s racists and antiracists, Communists and anti-Communists, academic emancipators and academic enslavers. Angela Davis had entered into the public light. Her detractors framed her as hate-filled and biased, hate mail started filling up her mailbox, she received threatening phone calls, and police officers started harassing her. On October 20, 1969, California Superior Court judge Jerry Pacht ruled that the anti-Communist regulation was unconstitutional. Davis resumed her teaching post, and Reagan began searching for another way to fire her.
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Sometime in February 1970, Davis’s Che-Lumumba Club received word of the campaign to free three Black inmates at Soledad State Prison near San Jose. With evidence only that they were Black Power activists, George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo had
been indicted for the murder of a prison guard during a racially charged prison fight. In 1961, the eighteen-year-old George Jackson had been sentenced to serve one year to life for armed robbery; allegedly he had used a gun to steal $70 from a gas station. He had been transferred to Soledad in 1969, after experiencing a political transformation akin to Malcolm X’s and Cleaver’s, but his prison activism turned his $70 conviction into a life sentence. Davis became very close to George Jackson and his serious younger brother, Jonathan, who had dedicated his life to freeing his brother.
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Angela Davis spoke to a lively rally called “Free the Soledad Brothers” in Los Angeles within sight of the California Department of Corrections on June 19, 1970. It was the same day that Reagan’s Board of Regents once again fired Davis from UCLA, this time on the grounds that her political speeches were “unbefitting a university professor.” As evidence, Davis’s terminators had cited, among other things, her rebuke of UC Berkeley educational psychologist Arthur Jensen, who represented the revival of segregationist scholars in the late 1960s. There was “an increasing realization” in psychology that the lower Black IQ scores could not be “completely or directly attributed to discrimination or inequalities in education,” Jensen had written in the
Harvard Educational Review
in 1969. “It seems not unreasonable . . . to hypothesize that genetic factors may play a part in this picture.” The Regents admonished Davis for not practicing the “appropriate restraint in the exercise of academic freedom” in soundly critiquing Jensen, who had engaged, according to the Regents, in “years of study” before publishing the “lengthy article.” Academics, apparently, were only truly free to espouse racist ideas.
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As reporters peppered Davis for a response to her firing at the rally, she connected her academic enslavement to the judicial enslavement of political prisoners. A photographer snapped a shot of Davis carrying a sign. It read: “
SAVE THE SOLEDAD BROTHERS FROM LEGAL LYNCHING
.” Jonathan Jackson stood behind her, holding another sign: “
END POLITICAL REPRESSION IN PRISONS
.”
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On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in California’s Marin County, holding three guns, and took the judge, the
prosecutor, and three jurors hostage. Aided by three inmates, whom he freed in the courtroom, the seventeen-year-old younger brother of George Jackson led the hostages at gunpoint to a van parked outside. Police opened fire. The shootout took the lives of Jackson, the judge, and two inmates. Police traced the ownership of one of Jackson’s guns to Angela Davis. A week later, Davis was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy, and a warrant was issued for her arrest. Still grieving Jackson’s death, she saw the political repression on the wall—a death sentence if found guilty. She fled the massive womanhunt, a fugitive trying to avoid slavery or worse, like so many of her political peers and ancestors had done before her. J. Edgar Hoover, months before his death, placed the “dangerous” Davis on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list. The two pictures—one with shades, one without—on the “Wanted by the FBI” poster showcased the woman who became the iconic female activist of the Black Power movement.
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It showed her famous Afro, too. But the era’s most popular Afro—the woman who really transformed the hairstyle from an anti-assimilationist political statement into a fashion statement—was the biggest, boldest, baddest, and Blackest woman, the movie star of
Foxy Brown
(1974) and
Coffy
(1973)—Pam Grier. The more African Americans let their Afros grow out like Grier’s in the early 1970s, the more they faced the wrath of assimilationist parents, preachers, and employers, who called Afros ugly, “a disgrace”—like going “back to the jungle.” African Americans were assimilationists not when they permed their own hair, but when they classified natural styles as unprofessional or aesthetically inferior to permed styles.
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The Afro was ever present in Hollywood’s “Blaxploitation” genre of Black action-adventure films, a genre that peaked in popularity between 1969 and 1974. Facing economic ruin in the late 1960s, and mounting antiracist criticism of the Sidney Poitier–type characters prevalent in the integrationist film narratives of the 1960s, Hollywood decided to solve its economic and political woes by exploiting the popularity of Blackness. Blaxploitation’s kingpin was Melvin Van Peebles. His
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
in 1971 was the story of a
bad
Black stud who violently reacts to police repression, flees a massive
police manhunt by using any weapon he can (including his penis), and escapes into the Mexican sunset. Along the way he is aided by Black children, preachers, gamblers, pimps, and prostitutes. The tornadoes of police repression over the past few years offscreen and the popular racist idea of the super-sexual, no-longer-emasculated Black male no doubt were factors helping the film become so enormously popular among African Americans.

But not all Blacks loved the film. In a literary explosion in
Ebony
, public intellectual Lerone Bennett Jr. judged it “neither revolutionary nor black” for romanticizing the poverty and misery of Black urban America. Bennett had a point. Whenever Black artists ordained financially deprived Black folk as the truest representatives of Black people, they were trekking through the back door into racist ideas. Too often, they regarded the world of poverty, hustling, prostitution, gambling, and criminality as the
Black
world, as if non-Blacks did not hustle, prostitute, deal drugs, gamble, and commit crimes at similar rates. And yet, whenever these artists humanized pimps, gangsters, criminals, and prostitutes, they were at their antiracist best. But those who made up the civil rights opposition to Blaxploitation films—in their unerring belief in media suasion—hardly looked for this humanist distinction. They simply saw unsavory stereotypes reinforcing Black characters offscreen. “The transformation from the stereotyped Stepin Fetchit to Super Nigger on screen is just another form of cultural genocide,” the civil rights Coalition of Blaxploitation charged in 1972.
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THE WOMANHUNT CAUGHT
up to Angela Davis in New York on October 13, 1970. Davis was jailed at the New York Women’s House of Detention. It was there, surrounded by incarcerated Black and Brown women, that Davis began developing her “embryonic Black feminist consciousness,” as she called it. It was that year, 1970, that the women’s movement at last reached the mainstream consciousness of the United States. Norma L. McCorvey (under the alias Jane Roe) had filed suit in Texas to abort her pregnancy. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in
Roe v. Wade
three years later, President Nixon professed
there were only two “times when an abortion is necessary”: “when you have a black and a white or a rape.”
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On August 25, 1970, Frances Beal and her sisters in the newly renamed Third World Women’s Alliance showed up with their placards (“Hands Off Angela Davis”), joining more than 20,000 feminists at the National Organization for Women (NOW) Strike for Equality in New York. Seeing the Beal poster, a NOW official rushed over and snapped, “Angela Davis has nothing to do with women’s liberation.” Beal snapped back, “It has nothing to do with the kind of liberation you’re talking about. But it has everything to do with the kind of liberation we’re talking about.” As novelist Toni Morrison explained in the
New York Times Magazine
months later, Black women “look at White women and see the enemy for they know that racism is not confined to white men and that there are more white women than men in the country.” Toni Morrison had just put out
The Bluest Eye
, an anti-assimilationist account of a Black girl’s zealous pursuit of “beautiful” blue eyes. Morrison’s debut novel was as moving fictionally as the real life account
I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings
(1969), Maya Angelou’s award-winning autobiographical journey from the thorny woods of racist ideas (where she wished she could wake up from her “black ugly dream”) into the clearing of antiracist dignity and resistance.
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IN DECEMBER
1970, Angela Davis was extradited back to California. She spent most of her jail time awaiting trial in solitary confinement, where she read and responded to letters from her thousands of supporters, studied her case, and thought about America. She sometimes heard the chants of “Free Angela,” “Free all Political Prisoners.” Two hundred defense committees in the United States and sixty-seven defense committees abroad were shouting the same words. The defense committees formed a broad interracial coalition of supporters who believed that Nixon’s America had gone too far—too far in harassing, imprisoning, and killing hordes of antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and anti-imperialist activists and condemning them for their ideas. Those ideas, at the moment, were wrapped up in the mind and
body of Angela Davis, a mind and body that Nixon’s and Reagan’s law-and-order America wanted dead.
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The antiracist ideas that Davis embodied were argued in a different case before the Supreme Court around the time the police brought her back to California. In the 1950s, Duke Power’s Dan River plant in North Carolina had publicly forced its Black workers into its lowest-paying jobs. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Duke Power adopted private discrimination—requiring high school diplomas and IQ tests—that produced the same outcome: Whites receiving the bulk of its high paying jobs. On March 8, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in
Griggs v. Duke Power Co
. that Duke Power’s new requirements had no bearing on job performance.

The Civil Rights Act “proscribes not only overt discrimination,” opined Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, “but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” If the
Griggs
decision sounded too good for antiracists, then it was. It did not necessarily bar practices and policies that yielded racial disparities. Although Duke Power changed its policy on the day the Civil Rights Act took effect, the Supreme Court, astonishingly, upheld the appeals court supposition that there was no “discriminatory intent.” And Chief Justice Burger gave employers a loophole for the progression of racism. “The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.” Racist employers could then simply ensure that their discriminatory hiring and promotion practices were related to job performance, and therefore, to business necessity.
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The
Griggs
ruling hardly mattered to Black Power activists. They had no faith anyway that the US Supreme Court would outlaw the latest progression of institutional racism. Their attention was turned to their local struggles, the Davis case, and the largest Black convention in US history. Some 8,000 people attended the largest meeting of the six-year-old Black Power movement on March 10, 1972, in Gary, Indiana. The largest Black middle class in history was represented in that crowd—the New Black America. The emergence of these Black elites was the result of the activism and reforms of the civil rights
and
Black Power movements as well as of the strong economy of the 1960s. By 1973, the rate of Black poverty would dip to its lowest level in US history. Black income levels were rising and political-economic racial disparities closing before the recession hit in 1973.
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By the opening of the Gary convention, Blacks had taken political control over many of the majority-Black cities and counties. But some Black voters had to learn the hard way that empowering a Black person in government did not automatically empower an antiracist. And so, the main demand of independents at the Gary convention—for an independent Black political party—would not have automatically been an antiracist upgrade over the current situation, marked by assimilationists in the Democratic Party. But self-serving Black politicians squashed the plan over the next few years anyway.
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