Black militant works on in prison

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32587, 22 April 1971, Page 7

Black militant works on in prison

(N.Z.P. A--Reuter—Copyright) SAN RAFAEL (California). . About 30 letters and telegrams arrive daily at the Marin County Gaol addressed to the prison’s most celebrated inmate—27-year-old Angela Davis, a highly intellectual Black militant.

Miss Davis, held since last October, is awaiting trial on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. She is alleged to have supplied the weapons for a gun battle last August in which a Superior Court judge. Judge Harold Haley, and three of his kidnappers were killed. Arrainged with Miss Davis is Rucelle Magee, a convict, who was wounded in the gun battle.

Miss Davis, a former philosophy instructor at the University of California in Los Angeles, is a heroine to many of America’s radical Left. She has declared her innocence of the charges, maintaining that she is the victim of a political frame-up. TWO CELLS Miss Davis is held in the women’s prison inside the Marin Hall of Justice. She has her own cell and another in which to work. She keeps occupied by reading her mail, working out her revolutionary thoughts, and preparing a political defence, a regular visitor reports. She was visited in gaol in February by Miss Bernadette Devlin, the Irish civil rights campaigner and member of the British Parliament. Miss Devlin and 20 other members of the British Parliament have written to President Nixon expressing anxiety about Miss Davis’s case. Other visitors who have talked with Miss Davis in gaol include the American actress, Jane Fonda, and Professor Herbert Marcuse, the 72-year-old Marxist philosopher at the University of California and Miss Davis’s former mentor. BRILLIANT SCHOLAR Rightly or wrongly. Miss Davis, who comes from the Deep South’s Black bourgeoisie, and is a brilliant scholar, has become for many people in America a symbol of political martyrdom. To the prosecution, she is a conspirator in a kidnap escape attempt by convicts, in which four people died. No date has yet been set for her | trial.

Miss Davis and Magee, a 31-year-old Negro inmate of

• California’s San Quentin I Prison, appeared in court on ' March 17. On that occasion Superior Court Judge John McMurray retired from the lease, saying that he refused to act any further, in the matter. He accepted Magee’s petition to be tried by a Federal t court, which must now deliberate whether it will accept the case. Miss Davis’s chief counsel, Mr Howard Moore, told the Judge that Miss Davis was being detained “under punitive conditions,”, and said her health and powers of concentration were detriorating. Outside the court, the lawyer said he planned to appeal for bail to either the State or Federal Court of Appeals or the California Supreme Court But a weekly visitor to the gaol, the Rev. Cecil Williams, a Methodist pastor, was impressed with her continued intellectual capacity. “You have to keep up,” he said. “You had better read and study if you want to sit down and talk to Angela.” PROTESTED INNOCENCE At her first opportunity, Miss Davis protested her innocence of the charges, declaring her presence in the courtroom to be “unrelated to any political act.” She was the “target of a political frame-up which, far from pointing to my culpability, implicates the state of California as an agent of political repression.” An admitted card-carrying Communist Party member, she smiles at her supporters on her court appearances and raises her clenched fist in a Communist salute. Miss Davis was bom in January, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of a middle-class Black family. Her childhood was one of segregation at school, church, and even in the girl scouts. SCHOLARSHIPS From her girlhood she was I an outstanding scholar, gain- : ing scholarships to study in , New York and then at the : Brandeis University in Walt- < ham. Massachusetts, where ; she graduated with honours ■,

in 1965. She had studied at the Sorbonne University, Paris, in 1963-64.

After graduation, she returned to Europe and spent two years studying under Theodore Adorno, a leading Marxist thinker at the Geothe University in Frankfurt, West Germany. She impressed her colleagues and teachers as a fine student with an amazing ability to reason in a foreign language. Miss Davis completed her Master of Arts degree in 1968 and travelled to the University of California at San Diego where Professor Marcuse was in residence, to start work on her doctorate.

During this period her political beliefs became formalised. She joined the Communist Party and the Che-Lumumba club, a group of Black, radical Leftists.

She was accepted as a teacher in the philosophy department on the university’s big Los Angeles campus. Nine months later, when news of her Communist Party membership became public knowledge, the university regents ordered her teaching contract terminated. The centre of a storm of controversy, the regents’ decision was contested in the courts. Miss Davis was allowed to teach a non-credit course. More than 2000 students gave her an ovation at her first lecture.

C.W.I. officers.—Officers of the North Canterbury Federation of Country Women’s Institutes elected are: president, Mrs J. A. Calder (Balmoral); committee, Mesdames R. Hide (Kaiapoi), W. L. Stewart (Rangiora), K. Prenderville (Scargill-Motunau), W. Middle ton (Kaiapoi). L. C. Lindsay (Pines Beach), R. W. Robertson (Hawarden), S. I. R. Hide (Ohoka), M. E. Daly (Domett), and D. Pickering (Balmoral).