Recalling the Free Angela Davis Movement: Daughter of the Revolution
“As black women, we must liberate ourselves and provide the impetus for the liberation of black men from this whole network of lies around the oppression of black women which serve only to divide us, thus impeding the advance of our total liberation struggle.”
– Angela Davis –
(February 1971)
“You know what her crime is? She is black, a black woman, beautiful and brilliant and brave, rising in 1970 in the tradition of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, a tribune of her people.”
These were the words of Joseph North, who represented a group of US journalists as he made an impassioned plea for world wide support for the release of Angela Davis at the Seventh Congress of the International Organisation of Journalists, which was held in Havana, Cuba, in January 1971.
According to North, Angela Davis “was awarded a professorship in the University of California to teach philosophy. She won the support overwhelmingly of the students and faculty. This enraged the racists there. They sent her threats of death. After the murders of such heroes as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and countless others, unknown and known to the black people and their white allies determined to safeguard the precious life of Angela.
“She had worked her way through a torrent of various ideas swirling across the USA today, anarchism, go-it-alone-ism and much else and she decided that the valia
