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Angela Davis speaks to sold out Boise State crowd
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Dr. Angela Davis, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and formerly the third woman in history to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, spoke last Friday to a sold-out crowd of BSU students, faculty and members of the Boise community. Davis began by describing BSU’s Martin Luther King Human Rights Week as “the most impressive I have witnessed.”
What impressed her most, she told the audience, was the celebration’s theme: “Racist Idaho?” She said human rights celebrations often treat racism as part of a “tarnished past.” She said this year’s theme was “provocative,” and “designed to make people think about the characteristics of racism in the 21st century, which expresses itself in ways very different than when Dr. Martin Luther King was marching.”
Many speakers today, she said, take a similar approach when it comes to King’s vision. “It may have been true that Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream many years ago, but we are now living the dream. (BSU Martin Luther King) Committee members invite you to think very differently.” Key elements in her speech that lasted over 90 minutes included the recent presidential election, her opposition to the death penalty and the growth of what she, among others, refers to as the “prison-industrial complex.”
In opposition to George W. Bush, who would be inaugurated the day after her speech, she said that the Bush administration would work to “undo the progress of the civil rights movement.” She cited literature from King and from NAACP leaders of the 1920s to compare what she called the “disenfranchisement” of African American voters in the current election with Jim Crow laws designed to keep blacks from voting in the old South. She criticized the minorities in Bush’s administration as being a part of “Uncle Tom’s cabinet.”
Davis drew from her own biography to link institutionalized racism with the prison system. She said that over half of the two million people in prison are black, and that America is one of the few democracies that strips convicted felons of voting rights even after they are released from their terms. “There is no other country in the world that does this, and we are considered the paragon of democracy,” she said. She said that 3.9 million were currently disenfranchised by being felons or ex-felons, which she said amounted to 31 percent of black men who could not vote – a fate she called “civil death.”
A great portion of her talk on prisons focused on the death penalty. She said she had been “absolutely in favor of abolishing the death penalty since I myself was charged with three capital crimes and before that.” Davis referred to the period in 1970 when she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and subjected to an intense police search which drove her underground and culminated in a spectacular trial where she was acquitted of all charges. She was also removed from the Philosophy Department of UCLA in 1969 for her involvement with the Communist Party, on whose ticket she once ran for political office.
Davis was soft-spoken and frequently elicited laughter from the audience. When she stopped her speech worried that she had gone past her allotted time, audience members shouted out “keep going” and “we’re with you.” She concluded that people must remain politically active. “We cannot leave our future in the hands of the head of state.”
Sean Hayes