Originally published in Synapse on March 15, 1984.
The women’s movement in this country must be broadened to address issues relevant to Black and working-class people, political activist Angela Davis told a Cole Hall audience last Wednesday.
“Those who control the government and the economy in this country probably care very little about issues surrounding working-class women,” charged Davis, who urged her listeners to help defeat President Ronald Reagan in this year’s election by supporting Democratic candidate Jesse Jackson.
Davis gained celebrity in 1969 when the UC Regents, headed by then-governor Ronald Reagan, fired her as a UCLA philosophy professor because of her Communist Party membership. Two years later, she was arrested after an attempt to free the “Soledad Brothers” ended with three deaths at a Marin County courthouse.
Although political supporters across and outside the country feared she could never get a fair trial, Davis was acquitted on all counts. (See also, page three.) Last week, Davis channeled her once strident political fervor into a thoughtful look at the history of the U.S. women’s movement and some recommendations for women voters today.
Although women’s studies programs and centers are essential, Davis said, the very existence of International Women’s Week is a comment on the fact that women’s history is not normally taught in elementary schools.
“We ought to speak about and learn about women 365 days a year,” said Davis, who teaches women’s and ethnic studies at San Francisco State University.
Women are emerging for the first time as an independent political force because they are no longer following the voting patterns of their husbands and fathers, according to Davis.
At the same time, the women’s movement needs to widen its scope to address racism and economic issues, she said.
“If we are to build an effective women’s movement in this country, it must be a multiracial movement and a movement that focuses sharply on issues relevant to working-class women.”
The biggest weakness of the women’s liberation movement is its tendency to focus on the problems of white middle-class women, assuming that these issues are universal, she noted.
But “women experience oppression in different ways, and one cannot just talk about women and expect everything to be homogeneous,” Davis explained.
Racism and sexism linked
The fight against racism gave rise to both the women’s suffrage movement and this generation’s women’s liberation movement, Davis said.
“White women became conscious of their oppression as women while working against slavery,” the activist noted. But later, once the women’s movement of the late 1800s became autonomous, it forgot its roots as Black and working lass women were excluded. It began to address issues only of relevance to middle-class women, Davis said.
For example, the latter-day women’s movement focused on marriage as an example of an oppressive institution.
“But what about those slave women who were not even allowed to get married?” Davis asked. “For them, marriage was not relevant.”
The leaders of the women’s suffrage movement chose to ignore issues concerning working-class women because they claimed that such causes would dissipate their energies, Davis said.
“They said, ‘Once we win the right to vote, then we’ll eradicate racism...’ but of course that didn’t happen,” she said.
Women who got the vote followed the political preferences of white men around them, and Black people were still disenfranchised. The development of the women’s liberation movement today, and the chasms which remain between women of different races and classes, parallel the women’s suffrage movement, Davis said.
Like the suffrage movement, white women who pioneered the current liberation movement acquired their skills as civil rights workers in the South, she claimed. Davis was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the genesis of today’s movement.
She recalled that “As Black women, we didn’t want anything to do with the women’s movement.”
As with the women’s suffrage movement decades ago, Black women viewed the women’s movement as addressing issues primarily of interest to white middle-class women. For example, consciousness-raising sessions were designed to fight socially imposed docility among white women, Davis said.
But meanwhile, Black women were being criticized as too aggressive: “As a result of our experiences, we had learned to stand up, speak out, and fight back,” Davis pointed out. “Today, it is absolutely essential to build bridges across those (racial and economic) chasms if we are to defeat Ronald Reagan, move on and deal with pressing issues.”
If women at the bottom of the economic pyramid make progress, all women will benefit, Davis said. She added that some women, such as Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor, win personal victories but leave the rest of women unaffected, Davis said.
“What has she (O’Connor) done for women?” she asked, adding, “Reagan knows how to find the women he needs — he knows how to find Blacks against affirmative action.”
Throughout her speech, Davis missed few chances to direct barbs at the president. Her battle cry, “Out the door in ‘84!” drew applause from the audience.
Reagan is “a man with an itchy trigger finger whose political experiences were nourished during the anti-Communist crusade,” Davis said, but urged her listeners to view him only as a symbol of the problems of racism, sexism, and monopolistic businesses.
Some of the most pressing issues women should address today, according to Davis, include police brutality against minorities, the “massive epidemic” of rape and the need for childcare for working women.
She added, “It is absolutely critical for women to play an aggressive role in the movement against nuclear war.”
The military industrial sector, which stands to reap the profits of war, discounts the social cutbacks necessitated by defense spending.
“All they care about is profits, and they’re willing to risk everything for that, even the future of the world,” Davis claimed. “And they know if Ronald Reagan is reelected, he can do anything he wants.”
To stop Reagan, women should become involved in the Jesse Jackson campaign, the activist urged. She said that Jackson has the potential to register Blacks and Latinos who don’t consider themselves part of the electoral process.
In response to a question that Jackson could polarize the Democratic Party, she said, “We must defeat Ronald Reagan, but we can’t talk about the movement to defeat Ronald Reagan if we forego dealing with the question of racism, forego taking a strong position on the importance of ending the nuclear arms race.
“If one says to Jesse Jackson, ‘Don’t take votes from the best person,’ that ‘best person’ will be able to totally ignore those issues which relate to millions of people in this country,” she went on.
“Whoever becomes the nominee will have to deal with the movement galvanized around Jesse Jackson.”
Davis herself is running for vice president on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall. While she stumped for Jackson, she told voters who believe the two-party system is bankrupt to vote for her.
The educator ended her talk on a note reminiscent of more militant days, saying, “This is not a (women’s, Black and anti-war) movement which will end with the primaries… This is a period in which we not only have to become politically active at the polls, but we have to march and demonstrate in the streets once more.”
Angela Davis’s roots
Few people can claim to have stirred more emotions — from wrath to adulation — in the last 15 years than Angela Yvonne Davis. This Marxist philosopher, university professor and above all, revolutionary, played one of the most prominent roles in the political upheaval of the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis attended college preparatory school in New York City on an American Friends Service Committee Scholarship. From there she moved on to Brandeis University, where she met the man who became her mentor and most important political influence, the late Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
It was Marcuse who drew the intellectually gifted Davis into the world of Marxist thought and revolutionary ideals. She learned her lessons well.
Marcuse has been quoted as saying “I consider her the best student I have ever had in the more than 30 years I have been teaching.”
After a twenty year hiatus to study Under Marxist scholars in Germany, Davis joined Marcuse, now at UCLA, to complete her doctorate in philosophy.
This was an exciting time to be on a major university campus. Sentiment against the Vietnam War was igniting protests across the nation and the Black power movement was rising along with it. Davis threw herself into the burgeoning radical actions.
Her striking physical presence, charisma and intellectual brilliance soon made her a leader. In 1969, after being appointed to the faculty at UCLA at the tender age of 25, Davis became the subject of the most heated test of UC’s political principles since the loyalty oath controversy of the 1950s.
Under pressure from then-governor Ronald Reagan, the UC regents fired her expressly because of her membership in the communist party. Although Davis contested the firing in court and won the case, her reinstatement was only temporary.
The regents fired her again — this time for her militant political speeches, which were considered inflammatory and a breach of professional ethics. Davis was out of UCLA In February of 1970, three Black men, including the revolutionary George Jackson, were indicted for the Soledad Prison killing of a white guard.
The death had followed the murders of three Blacks in the prison yard by another white guard. It was widely believed that Jackson and the others had been framed because of their radical-left political views.
Davis became one of the defendants’ leading advocates in a militant national support movement. These supporters compared Black prisoners to political prisoners in other countries — their prison terms being the direct or indirect result of racism and political repression at the hands of America’s white power.
Then in August of the same year, a dramatic escape attempt was made in the Marin County Courthouse, during the defendants’ trial. Jackson’s 17-year-old brother Jonathan pulled out a carbine rifle and led the judge, prosecutor and several jurors, as well as the three prisoners, out of the courtroom.
Once outside a guard opened fire on the group, and in the ensuing gun battle, the judge, Jonathan and several others were killed. It was later discovered that one of the weapons carried by Jonathan was registered in Davis’s name.
She became a fugitive — certain she could never get a fair trial under the existing political conditions. Her name rose to the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list.
Two months later she was captured. Sixteen months in prison followed (during which time George Jackson himself was killed by prison guards).
Publicity for what became a major show trial was intense arid overwhelmingly negative. But despite widespread fears among her supporters that Davis could never get a fair trial, in 1972 she was acquitted of all charges.
Life has calmed down somewhat for Davis since then. She now teaches ethnic and women’s studies at San Francisco State University.
Her rhetoric has softened, and her tactics have been transformed. But her revolutionary goals have not. During 1980 and for this year’s election, Davis had been the candidate for vice president on the Community Party ticket.
Her charisma has held for the last decade — although the front page headlines are in the past, she still draws a crowd wherever she speaks. And when she speaks it’s always about obtaining social justice for Blacks and working people.
