Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - March 1, 1972, Winnipeg, Manitoba i the crucifixion will continue. By Charles Foley san Francisco a bumper sticker in California runs the world is watching America and America is watching now 400 Tele vision program executives have gathered in san Francis co to debate what America is watching will watch and ought to be watching on the Small screen. These Are the people who must entertain and inform 100 million viewers and at the same time satisfy commercial sponsors. The first qualification of a program executive is therefore an ability to read and interpret the Nielsen ratings that popularity score card which tells advertisers the most profitable spot for a sales pitch. The economics of . To dictate that it must constantly seek out the lowest common denominator or taste. This season the Law n order thriller is King. There Are cops in All. Shapes and sizes fat and thin Blind and crippled. Following hot on the heels of the Model policemen Adam-12, dragnet the Fri Corines the eccentric individualistic criminal Crusher who usually takes an hour of prime time Longstreet the detective with the guide dog no american in recent years has aroused such deep j feeling throughout the world or embodied so Many contemporary causes As Angelada vis a 27-year-old University teacher of philosophy who isl also Black and Beautiful. On monday february 28, at san Jose near san Francisco s she went on trial charged with murder conspiracy and j kidnapping. The state is seek j ing to link her with the death s of a judge shot in August 1970 outside his own court room at san Rafael beyond t the Golden Gate that Bridges san Francisco Bay. And miss Davis will be presented As an enemy of society dangerously threatening a Way of life which reaches Many at its most extravagant peaks in California. If a girl who escaped from the restrictions of her South Ern Home town and disclosed rare intellectual gifts at bran dels University and the Sor Bonne miss Davis is today a communist. But As their Mili Tant and rational Champion she has won the loyalty of countless Black americans who do not share her Doc Trine but do As the Singer Sammy Davis puts it share her blackness. Dismissed in 1970 by Gover nor Reagan and his University relents for her political activities assistant professor Davis came to represent the cause of academic Freedom. But she is also magically a student Leader she was work if on Feer pad thesis when the Fri listed her among the most and finally her status in the realm of women s lib reaches away to ulan Bator to judge by a re cent Telegram which reads we mongolian women de Mand not guilty. Brave Ange la Davis must be until recently ago her life was in jeopardy. Then Cali fornia s supreme court ruled that death in the Gas chamber was by modern methods too cruel a punishment to be tolerated under the . Constitution. But the level of risk for miss Davis seems uncertainly reduced. The implacable governor Ronald Reagan is Bent on getting the ruling reversed. If it the extramural Active for which the governor and his regents finally got miss Davis removed from her University Post were mainly in support of the Soledad Brothers the three Black convicts accused of murdering a guard at Soledad jail. They were led by George Jackson who had served 11 years for stealing Flora a petrol Sta tin when be was is. Along Side miss Davis at rallies i support of the Soledad Trio was Jonathan Jackson be Edge s y o u g e r brother aged 17. George Jackson s real says miss Davis is t he a rotated into a Revou y. Be had began to or of his Jar far Bis release led tetors later mum by the awl to she wrote to George two months before the san Rafael gunfight out of which the charges against her arise. My love and your love rein Force my fighting instincts. They Tell me to go to it was Jonathan who smuggled the san Rafael courtroom in an attempt to Rescue George destined to be a riot at san Quentin prison a year later. The state alleges that miss Davis bought the weapons for Jonathan that the two visited the scene. Of the crime to Gether ithe Day before tack and that she fled when it failed. The defence will argue that miss Davis would not have encouraged a teen Ager like Jonathan in such a venture in which he was killed. It will be suggested she bought the guns for Jonathan because he was her necessary bodyguard and that at san Rafael he used them for his own Pur poses. But miss Davis herself brushes such arguments aside. She is in her own eyes apolitical prisoner being hounded by authority because she tried to organize her peo ple against a corrupt Degen Erate society. Her 16 months in custody have made her lose weight and there Are dark smudges under her eyes. But she has not lost the proud disdainful front she offers to her judges. If if it was White violence that first moved Angela towards this attitude of rejection. As a child in Birmingham Alabama she suffered the daily humiliations of segregated life. But she is herself one Quarter White and this started her out along the path of racial co operation. When i was she says i tried to organize inter racial study groups. They were broken up by the to her political Awakening came in september 1963, when segregationists bombed a negro Church in Bir Mingham and killed four Chil Dren. Three of them were known to Angela who was then 19 and just starting life at Brandeis the elite Eastern University to which she had won a scholarship sponsored by the quakers. Her serenity was shattered and from that moment she abjured her father s accursed father As one of the White slave masters who looked or. Black women As sex and she has turned her Back on White liberals who she says merely perpetuate racism by trying to integrate us into a dying new ideas about the direction to be taken by the Black movement in America came to her at the sorbonne at Paris. The algerian Revorn Tara was at its height during her year there and she Learned Naradi from studying action by the National Lybera toss front ret Wosnig to Brandeis Sofce came tender the frs Psi of the comb rated Malorse. Att reduced Fer to Radical Pitso safey. Her to Che 72 marxist returned. Angela he says was the Best student he Ever had a person of extraordinary intelligence and Fantas tic he sent after graduation to an old Friend at the Goethe University in Frankfurt professor Theodor Adorno father of the West German school of marxist social philosophy. She returned in 1968 to Marcuse who had moved to the University of California s Campus at la Jolla a luxuriant coastal enclave frequented by Scholastic celebrities and Multi millionaires. Here Angela settled Down to her pad thesis an analysis of kantian theory about individual violence and the state. The faculty made much of her As a typically european sized new leftist Only to learn with incredulity that she had joined the . Communist party a step they ranked in eccentricity with becoming a holy roller. The party Branch she joined was if. Fact an entity called the Che Lumumba club com posed of poor Black radicals who Are Independent minded and often at Odds with party Headquarters. Their Leader is an angry Young Man named Franklin Delano Alexander who dresses in Black wet look leather and breathes fire at anything White. It was he who persuaded miss Davis that Only communist could put their people on the Road to Freedom and create an army of Freedom to overthrow the capitalist class. Turning offer to teach at Princeton she took a More humdrum Post at the University of California s los Angeles Campus because there amid a Large Black Stu Dent body she could work directly on the problems of her people. It was from Here in september 1989, that the governor and his regents tried co fire her under a 30-year-old Rule barring communists from the staff. A year s struggle began with the faculty condemning the ban by 551 to four. But then As a pretext for ending her contract the regents cited those extramural activities that led Angela Davis to san Rafael to her flight and dramatic capture by the Fri in new York and so to prison. It governor Reagan to whom the downfall of miss Davis once seemed an election year gift is now beginning to re Gret the fuss fury and expense of it and. If she is found guilty and harshly sentenced there could be violent out Breaks on a scale unknown since the assassination of Martin Luther King. Miss Davis herself seems prepared for Mayo inf. Even acquittal by the morally Cor rope courts would leave her certainties me stubbed. If i am eventually allowed to leave Ray she says i Shad not consider myself free. My Freedom a Fol he Cowe a reality Only when we Hack have destroyed ;