Free Angela and All Political Prisoners Page #3

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revolution was right around the corner,

and we had to do everything we could

to usher it in.

I'm representing the Che Lumumba Club

of the Communist Party.

There is a conspiracy in the land.

It's a conspiracy to wipe out, to murder

every single Black Panther in America

and to wipe out

the black community as a whole.

Brothers and sisters, this is genocide.

We have to call it by its name.

This is genocide.

Right on.

This conspiracy

to commit murder and genocide

on our people forces us

to exercise our constitutional right

to bear arms

and to use those arms to defend

our community, our families and ourselves.

Power to the people!

The overwhelming majority

of the faculty at UCLA

would have supported the position,

and did support the position I took.

But the majority of the general population,

who don't understand

what academic freedom really is,

had concerns about

Angela Davis as a communist,

Angela Davis as a black,

Angela Davis as a woman,

Angela Davis as an activist.

You couldn't have

put things together with anyone

that would've been more

problem-creating than with Angela Davis.

Today, in a rare action,

the Board of Regents voted 15-6

to overrule the university and fire her.

Governor Reagan voted with the majority.

He said it wasn't

because she's a communist,

but rather because she is unprofessional.

While the regents were voting, Miss

Davis was a few blocks away in a rally

protesting the treatment of black

prisoners in Soledad State Prison.

She sees her dismissal

as a case of political repression

which she may or may not challenge.

I'm gonna keep on struggling

to free the Soledad Brothers

and all political prisoners,

because I think that

what has happened to me

is only a very tiny, minute example

of what is happening to them.

I suppose I just lost that job at UCLA

as a result of

my political opinions and activities.

Some UCLA professors plan

to raise money to pay her salary

so she can continue to teach.

The controversy is not over.

I was still at UCLA

defending my right to teach,

and this case emerged

involving three, then young,

black men at Soledad Prison.

All I could think about was

the image of three black men

walking into a silent courtroom

in the city of Salinas

with chains around their waists,

chains under their crotch,

their hands chained,

while their only crime was having attempted

to organize the human beings

inside the Soledad Prison.

They were the ones who were singled out

to serve as examples to any

and everyone in this country

who dares stands up for the truth.

So, what connected these three men,

and what gave rise to the Soledad

Brothers' case, is that a white guard

was killed in Soledad

by being thrown from an upper tier.

George Jackson, John Clutchette

and Fleeta Drumgo

were very prominent

in the prison reform movement

and were basically singled out

and accused of killing this prison guard.

These individuals,

while they may have been incarcerated

for crimes,

now they have become persecuted

because of their political belief.

I hope the people on this campus realize...

What Angela Davis does is

become a primary spokesman

for a quest to free political prisoners.

We have to start fighting back.

Those three brothers in Soledad Prison

are fighting back.

They'd all been convicted

of relatively minor property crimes.

One of them had been accused

of stealing a television set.

George had been accused of stealing $70.

He had been in solitary confinement

for seven years.

He'd been in prison for 11,

and seven of those years

had been in solitary confinement.

Once he got into prison,

he was a strong-willed,

rebellious personality

who continued to defy authorities.

And then he also found his voice as a writer.

And he studied and he became radicalized.

And, I think, once he emerged

as someone who could

articulate revolutionary ideas,

people gravitated to that kind of leadership.

Look...

One of the most important elements of

guerrilla warfare is to maintain secrecy.

I've killed nobody until, you know,

it's been proven.

And they'll never be able

to prove anything like that.

Most people I knew

thought George Jackson was a hero.

The fact that he may have also been

a criminal was glossed over.

I first saw him

at a hearing.

We may have mouthed some words,

but it was, of course, illegal to

communicate with prisoners in the court.

I was, you know, drawn by

a kind of tenderness

that I did not expect to find in prisoners.

He was a beautiful writer,

a powerful writer, passionate writer.

And I eventually felt very much

seduced by that.

Brother George Jackson,

one of the Soledad Brothers,

has been in prison for 10 years

since he was 18 years old

on a second degree robbery charge.

One of the things that we really have

to talk about and come to grips with

is this whole question of crime.

What does it mean to be

a criminal in this society?

George had a younger brother, Jonathan,

who was about 16, I think,

when I first met him.

He was an incredible writer,

and wrote for his school newspaper,

and wrote articles about his brother

and the Soledad Brothers' case.

I think he was totally devastated

that his brother had been

behind bars for 10 years.

I came to realize that

the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee

was really a lifeline for him.

He needed to have some hope

that the person he most identified

with in life

was one day going to be free.

In San Rafael, California,

north of San Francisco,

a judge and three other persons

were shot to death today

in an attempt

by a group of convicts to escape.

Judge Harold Haley was hearing the case

of a San Quentin inmate

when an unidentified man armed

with dynamite and an automatic weapon

entered the courtroom.

The defendant, along with

two other inmates testifying for him,

reportedly joined with the unidentified man

in rounding up the judge, a deputy

district attorney and three women jurors.

When it was over, Judge Haley was dead,

the deputy district attorney

had been critically wounded in the back,

one woman juror was wounded in the arm,

two of the inmates were dead,

as was the unidentified man.

I could not deal with the fact that

this young man,

who was 17 at the time,

that he ends up lying on the cold cement

in a parking lot

in one of the most wealthy counties

in the country.

The funeral for Superior Judge

Harold Haley was a major civic event.

The cortege escorted by a detail of

60 police officers

from cities all over the San Francisco Bay.

Judge Haley, after all, was a prominent man.

And his death deeply shocked

and angered his peers.

His kidnappers,

they described as hoodlums,

who called themselves revolutionaries.

Across the Bay in Oakland, there was

another funeral for Jonathan Jackson,

the young Panther who was supposed to

have staged the bloody kidnap attempt.

I, and my husband,

we went to Jonathan's funeral.

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