The Campaign to Free Angela Davis
and Ruchell Magee
By
SOL STERN
an Rafael, Calif. -- The drive to the Marin County Hall of Justice
is north out of San Francisco on Highway 101, over the Golden Gate Bridge and
through a widening peninsula of rolling green hills and sun-speckled canyons.
To the east is a curving bayshore studded with yacht harbors, houseboat
communities and tiny tourist towns with mellow sounding names like Tiburon and
Belvedere. To the west, beyond a magnificent stand of giant redwoods, is the
beginning of 100 miles of the most beautiful Pacific coastline in the state.
Marin
County is a commuters' paradise that measures up to every travel magazine's
stereotype of California good living. The average family income is $13,000, and
the rich WASP Republicans who are in the majority seem to get along with the
hippies who have settled there in increasing numbers. There is only one tiny
black ghetto (in Marin City) and, on the whole, county residents have been
spared the urban violence of the past decade.
One
reminder of the agonies they have escaped is San Quentin, the oldest, biggest
and most notorious facility in the bloody battleground that is the state prison
system. Quentin is hidden away in an isolated cove overlooking the bay--an
eyesore that might be ignored, except that the county is responsible for administering
justice when there is any violation of state law within the prison's walls. And
so in recent years an ever longer parade of inmates has been trucked north
several miles for court appearances at the sumptuous Marin Civic Center, a
Frank Lloyd Wright-designed structure surrounded by lagoons and water cascades
and bright, orange blossomed Clivia beds. The Hall of Justice, housing the
courtrooms and the county jail, is an incredible caterpillar-like structure,
with a pagoda-style roof, spanning two hills. In this blue and gold judicial
Shangri-La reality-- nineteen-seventies American-style--finally caught up with
Marin County.
On
Aug. 7 last year, Jonathan Jackson, a tall, thin black youth from Pasadena
walked into one of the circular, walnut-paneled courtrooms carrying three guns
underneath his coat. In the middle of the proceedings he stood up, brandishing
his weapons, and shouted, "O.K., this is it! Everyone freeze!"
Jackson gave the weapons to the defendant, James McClain, who was on trial for
a prison stabbing at Quentin, and two other inmates, William Christmas and
Ruchell Magee, who were there as witnesses for McClain. Together they rounded
up Judge Harold J. Haley, the D.A. and three jurors as hostages, and marched
the five whites out of the courthouse to an adjacent parking lot. They piled
into a yellow van and started moving in the direction of Highway 101, but
before they could get out of the parking lot, a gun battle erupted. When the
smoke had cleared, the judge, Jonathan Jackson and two of the Quentin inmates
were dead; Ruchell Magee, the D.A. and one of the jurors lay seriously wounded.
The
"Marin shootout" stunned just about everyone in the Bay Area. Civic
leaders in the county demanded that the state hold all future trials of
convicts behind San Quentin's walls. Security was tightened not only in Marin
but in all Bay Area courts, as frantic officials speculated about more armed
attempts by revolutionaries to free prisoners. (Most Bay Area radicals regarded
the escape attempt as a revolutionary act.) Later, despite all the additional
security, the Marin Hall of Justice was bombed by the revolutionary
underground.
A
few days after the shooting, Judge Haley was eulogized at a gentle funeral in
San Rafael. Jonathan Jackson and William Christmas received a
"revolutionary funeral" at a black church in Oakland, their coffins
draped with the Black Panther flag and surrounded by an honor guard of
leather-jacketed Panthers. In the streets outside, 3,000 black and white
revolutionaries raised their fists in salute as they stood before loudspeakers,
listening to Huey Newton's eulogy:
"Our
comrades Jonathan Jackson and William A. Christmas have taught us a
revolutionary lesson. They have intensified the struggle and placed it on a
higher level.
A
picture is worth a thousand words, but action is supreme. Comrades Jonathan
Jackson and William A. Christmas have made the ultimate sacrifice. They have
given the revolution their lives."
In
the next issue of the Panther newspaper, Berkeley revolutionary Tom Hayden offer
this fantasy:
"A
revolutionary funeral guarantees that guerrilla ghosts will haunt the
reactionaries, reminding them of their guilt, until warriors among the living
take their ultimate revenge."
In
the months that followed, attention in the radical community shifted toward
Angela Davis, whom the state had charged with supplying the weapons that young
Jackson had brought into court. Later, a county grand jury returned an
indictment against her, formally specifying counts of kidnapping, murder, and
conspiracy. When partial grand jury minutes were released, some of the state's
evidence was disclosed: Witnesses had testified that Angela had purchased the
guns, the last one several days before Aug. 7. The state also made much of an
allegation that she had been working closely with Jackson, who was a member of
the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. Jonathan's real brother, George, is one
of the three blacks known as the Soledad "brothers," who are awaiting
trial for murder of a guard at Soledad prison. The state alleged that the
purpose of the Aug. 7 action was to use the hostages to free the men.
Maintaining
the Angela is totally innocent, her lawyers have argued that the state has
presented no evidence of her involvement in any conspiracy, and that the open purchase
of guns, for which she had to sign her name, could not possibly be the act of
anyone with a criminal intent.
Even
before the shootout, Angela Davis was a popular figure among radical blacks and
whites because of her forthright stand on the issue of her membership in the
Communist party and her subsequent confrontation with the Reagan
administration. She was fired from her position as a philosophy instructor at
U.C.L.A. in 1969 after she admitted her party affiliation. After Aug. 7, when
she went underground and made the F.B.I.'s most- wanted list, she became almost
a legendary figure to the left. Radical households displayed posters which
said, "Angela is welcome here."
In
the meantime, 31-year-old Ruchell Magee recovered from his wounds and was taken
back to San Quentin where he had already spent the last seven years of his
life. A seventh-grade dropout from rural Louisiana, Magee had been sent up for
a 1963 Los Angeles robbery-kidnapping conviction resulting from a typical
ghetto hassle over a $10 marijuana transaction that ended with guns being
pulled. No one was hurt but, unfortunately for Magee, the scuffle with another
man involved took place in a moving car so that technically a kidnapping charge
could be added--with a one-year-to-life sentence. He has been fighting the
conviction ever since, claiming it was a frame-up, but now he was charged with
the murder of Judge Haley, which for a convicted felon like Magee carries a
mandatory death penalty. Magee was literally dragged, shackled and chained,
into several pretrial hearings at San Quentin last fall. But at the time local
radicals paid little attention to him.
With
Angela Davis back in California, the Marin Civic Center is again an
international news center, but the country-club setting has become more
militarized. To get into the court building you must submit to a thorough
pat-down body search, as well as pass through an electronic metal detector.
Upstairs, in front of the courtroom where pretrial hearings take place, there
is another metal detector and another thorough search. All spectators must sign
in and show identification. Reporters are required to have their pictures taken
and are fingerprinted. The hallway outside the courtroom is filled with a dozen
armed sheriff'' deputies, as well as several plainclothesmen.
Miss
Davis is held in a two-cell area of the county jail, adjacent to the courtroom
but isolated from other county prisoners. Magee is brought in from San Quentin
for the numerous hearings. Reporters and TV crews from all over the world pop
in for a hearing now and then, as they wait for the big trial to get going.
They come mostly to see about Angela, but inevitably their attention becomes
riveted on "the other defendant," as he used to be called by the
local reporters.
Magee
is an accomplished jailhouse lawyer who practically learned to read in the
prison law library. The hand-written petitions he has filed in his own behalf,
with their raw grammar but punctilious attention to cases and precedents, have
managed to get several judges removed from the case, and he has almost by
himself tied up the case for six months--despite the fact that the court has
refused to allow him officially to act as his own counsel on the basis of
prison-administered tests which show he has an I.Q. of 78.
During
the first months of the case, reporters were fond of comparing him,
invidiously, to his renowned codefendant. How ironic, they suggested in their
stories, that this uneducated, violent con should wind up in the same courtroom
as the beautiful, talented professor.
The
reporters are now taking Magee more seriously, though there are, no doubt,
serious contrasts to be drawn. At the hearings, she walks in briskly, trailing
her matrons behind her, and turns, very tall and regal, to give spectators the
clenched-fist salute. She wears bright mini-dresses, and in the soft lights
reflecting off the hand-rubbed walnut furniture (made by state prison inmates),
she glows with a tawny, imperious beauty. At her table she sits upright and
attentive, conferring animatedly with her lawyers, her dignity hardly bruised
by six months in jail.
Magee
comes in shackled, walking slowly in a prison gait and escorted on each arm by
guards who chain him to his chair, which is chained to the floor. Dressed in a
formless gray prison jacket, he is short and sullen--the blackest man in the
court. He hardly has a word for his numerous court-appointed lawyers. He sits
sprawled in his chair, his head cocked to tone side, seemingly taking in the
proceedings out of the corner of one eye, insisting on his right to speak for
himself.
A
small defense group, consisting mostly of blacks with a few white radicals, has
recently been organized to work with him, but so fare it has been ineffectual
and without funds. He fights essentially alone, using only his painfully
gathered knowledge of the legal systems and the notoriety of the case to get
his message out: that he is innocent because he was imprisoned illegally in the
first place, that he has been kept a "slave" for seven years and that
what happened on Aug. 7 was, in his words, a "slave rebellion" to
remove the conditions of his bondage.
Angela's
lawyers are taking a different tack and their resources are more impressive. No
less than six experienced, talented lawyers, several investigators and
researchers and legal clerks are working on a defense that one of the lawyers
estimates may cost up to half a million dollars.
Even
more important, she has an unprecedented political campaign being waged for her
release all over the world. It is not to belittle the seriousness of her
situation to say that she has the best-organized, most broad-based defense
effort in the recent history of radical political trials--more potent that that
afforded to any of the Panther leaders or the Chicago Seven.
Much
of the strength of the campaign is due to the considerable resources which the
Communist party, U.S.A., still alive and kicking after many lean years, is
putting into the struggle. And, as one Bay Area radical put it: "If
there's one thing the C.P. does well, it's organizing a legal defense."
On
Oct. 15, 1970, two days after Angela Davis was captured by F.B.I. agents in a
New York City motel, a press conference was called in Los Angeles by the
Communist party to announce that it was going to build "the largest,
broadest, most all-encompassing people's movement the country has ever seen to
free our comrade, Angela Davis-- political prisoner." The speaker was
Franklin Alexander, a close friend of Angela's and chairman of the party's
all-black Che-Lumumba Club. The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis
was formed shortly thereafter, with Alexander and Fania Davis Jordan, Angela's
23-year-old younger sister, as national coordinators.
According
to Alexander, there are now 60 fully functioning local committees in operation
around the country. The national committee staff coordinates the work of the
local committees, supplies them with literature, posters and speakers, and, in
conjunction with the legal staff, sets the over-all political-legal strategy.
The national staff also worries about money, and right now it is looking for a
full-time fundraiser. So far, without really trying very hard, it has
raised--and spent--more than $30,000 for the political work of the committee,
but the estimate is that as the trial runs it course it will need up to 10
times that amount (excluding strictly legal costs). Full-time committee staff
members (there are seven now) drew salaries of $75 per week each.
The
money that pays the salaries and other expenses comes in steadily from a
variety of sources: from people on traditionally liberal mailing lists who have
been sent letters; from collection cans set up outside supermarkets; from
spontaneous, unsolicited donations, such as the $10,000 recently given by an
affiliate of the United Presbyterian Church, and from the profits of
extravaganzas such as the birthday celebration for Angela attended by about
5,000 people at the Manhattan Center in New York last February, with the Rev.
Ralph Abernathy, chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as
speaker.
When
people call and ask what they can do to help, local committees will often
suggest that they have fund-raising parties in their houses. A recent
successful and typical example was the dinner party thrown by a young couple
living in the Berkeley hills. About a hundred people showed up, most of them
white, middle-class liberals. They enjoyed a modest buffet dinner, watched a
belly dancer named Sabah perform and listened to a committee staff member
answer questions about the case. When it was over, the committee had collected
around $300.
The
committee is about to open a suite of offices in downtown San Francisco, but in
the meantime the members operate out of a large, rambling redwood house in an
integrated neighborhood in southwest Berkeley--a kind of political commune,
since most of them live there as well. The house is owned by Roscoe Proctor, a
black longshoreman and veteran Communist functionary, who has been working in
New York on party business. Party dignitaries such as General Secretary Gus
Ahall have often stayed at the Proctor house during their visits to the Bay
Area. It is an open, informal place, full of dogs and neighborhood kids who
come in to listen to soul music on the hi-fi. In the spacious living room, decorated
with Soviet posters, the committee has held marathon staff meetings with the
lawyers.
Often
the discussions are punctuated by the crying of the baby that was recently born
to Angela's sister, Fania, who has had to take something of a maternity leave
from her hectic cross-country speaking tours for the committee. Fania looks so
much like her sister that when she gets up on a platform to speak, some people
actually believe they are seeing Angela. Politically, she also seems to be
following her sister's footsteps. She worked with the Black Panther party in
San Diego until, she says, "it was just about wiped out"; she has
picked sugar cane in Cuba as a member of the "Venceremos Brigade,"
and when she came back from there last fall, she threw herself completely into
the work of the committee. Now she says, "I am in almost total agreement
with my sister's politics."
A
frequent visitor to the house is Fania's mother, Mrs. Sally Davis, who will
soon be taking a leave from her teaching job in a Birmingham, Ala., grade
school to spend all her time working with the committee. She has already
traveled extensively, speaking mostly in black communities. Other members of
the family have done the same, including Angela's brothers, Ben, a 25-year-old
defensive back for the Cleveland Browns football teams, and Reginald, who is 20
and a student at Defiance College in Ohio. Fania says that even her father, who
runs a gas station in Birmingham and was initially reluctant to get involved
politically, has begun to do some speaking.
The
Davis children were raised on "Dynamite Hill" in Bull Connor's
Birmingham; they knew the four black girls killed in the bombing of a church
there in 1963. Political struggle is familiar to them. "My mother was very
active in her time and for her age," says Fania. "She was very
involved in the desegregation struggle in Birmingham, and she instilled in all
of us a sense of dignity and human worth. I can remember times when she would
go downtown and some white man would call her 'Sally'--and she really reacted!
That influenced us."
And,
says Fania, there isn't too much difference between the struggles in Birmingham
and Marin County. "People's politics are constantly changing as they
confront reality. I would say my brothers' and parents' beliefs are coming
closed to Angela's as they work in her behalf."
The
committee dynamo is 30-year-old Franklin Alexander, who has been working for
the Communist party for 12 years. Alexander's sister is Charlene Mitchell, a
high-ranking American Communist who was the party's candidate for President in
1968. He was, for a time, national chairman of the Du Boise Clubs and later
devoted much of his time in Los Angeles to the Communist Che-Lumumba Club,
which, with its all-black membership, seems to contradict the party's opposition
to black nationalism and separatism. Padding around barefoot in the upstairs of
the Proctor house recently, the tall, muscular Alexander interrupted a phone
call long enough to explain:
"It
was the view of the party when we created the Che-Lumumba Club four years ago
that in this moment of history there was need for an all-black collective in
the party to operate in the black community. It was a period when nationalist
sentiment among our people couldn't be ignored and required a black confrontation
with our problems."
It
was Alexander and his wife, Kendra, who recruited Angela Davis into the club,
at a time when she was still active in the Black Panthers. Her decision to join
the Communist party was the result of considerable experience. As an undergraduate
at Brandeis University, she spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris and got to
know Algerian nationalist students. Later she did graduate work in philosophy
in West Germany, and became active in the League of Socialist German Students,
a counterpart of the S.D.S. Then there were her two years in San Diego studying
with the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In San Diego, she came into
contact with the Panthers, and later two of her friends in the organization
were killed on the U.C.L.A. campus. Of her final conversion to Communism, she
once wrote:
"My
decision to join the Communist party emanated from my belief that the only true
path of liberation for Black people is the one that leads toward a complete
overthrow of the capitalist class in this country. . . . Convinced of the need
to employ Marxist-Leninist principles in the struggle for liberation, I joined
the Che-Lumumba Club, which is a militant, all-Black collective of the
Communist party in Los Angeles committed to the task of rendering Marxism-Leninism
relevant to Black people. . . ."
In
the same vein, the committee to free Angela today looks to the black community
for its main sources of support. That there is mass sentiment to be tapped is
indicated by a recent Louis Harris poll taken among blacks in Los Angeles; 80
per cent of those questioned believed that Angela Davis could not get a fair
trial.
The
committee has an almost exclusively black leadership. "That is a conscious
policy," says Alexander. "It's our view that there must be an organized,
black-community base in this campaign. Angela is a symbol first and foremost to
black people and their struggles. The organization of the black community
around the issue of political prisoners is essential to victory."
The
search for a chief trial lawyer with a proper black image for Angela took the
committee to Howard Moore, a 39-year-old Atlantan who has defended Rap Brown
and Stokely Carmichael, and represented Julian Bond (Moore's brother-in-law) in
his successful battle to be seated in the Georgia legislature.
Moore
is a lanky, distinguished-looking man with a graying Afro and a Vandyke beard
who can be, alternately, aristocratic and hip. Working with him as co-counsel
is 26-year- old Margaret Burnham, a black who is an old grade-school classmate
of Angela's from Birmingham. Four other local San Francisco lawyers--all
white--with a wealth of criminal and constitutional experience have assisted
them in various stages of pretrial work, in legal research and investigation.
But Moore and Miss Burnham make it emphatically clear that blacks will be
calling the signals.
"I
would hate to see Angela, a beautiful black woman, having a white
defense," says Moore. "She's going to get a black defense."
Later, he elaborates on the meaning of a "black defense":
"Look,
I have tried many cases before red-neck juries. When the jury knows you are
committed and you are a true adversary, they respond in a positive manner.
Especially when you deal openly and up front [frankly] with the question of
racism. White people know they are racists, and if you conduct yourself in a
manner in which you try to hide the fact that you know it, they don't respect
you. You can't deal honestly with the kind of jury we're going to get unless
you deal frontally with the question of racism. And that's what we're going to
do."
Both
the lawyers are particularly touchy about the role of the party in the defense,
but Margaret Burnham meets reporters' questions on this issue head on:
"The
party is playing a major role. Angela is a member and it is incumbent on the
party to come to her defense. I say that because we want to be up front about
it. There is no 'infiltration' in the case--they are there."
There
are, of course, thousands of people who are supporting Angela Davis for their
own reasons. The committee has a long, truly impressive list of support from
such prominent blacks as Coretta King, Ralph Abernathy, and Aretha Franklin,
who offered to post Angela's bail (if it were not granted) ". . .not
because I believe in Communism but because she is a black woman and she wants
freedom for black people." Organizations supporting Angela range from the
Urban League to the Black Panthers. But it is clear that the Communist party
people on the committee are making the key decisions about how this broad front
is to be used in the legal battle.
Furthermore,
according to Alexander, several top party functionaries, including Charlene
Mitchell and National Chairman Henry Winston, as well as the entire Legal
Defense Commission of the party, are working full time on the case. And all of
this, concedes Alexander, is not too bad for the party's health:
"It
has put the party in a position in which it is moving in wider areas that it
has in the past. I would say the party has been strengthened."
The
party's connections seem even more significant in the Free Angela
demonstrations overseas. There isn't a day that goes by without the committee
receiving word of some demonstration, protest or petition somewhere in the
world. Here is a sampling from the committee's files:
In
Ceylon, a three-day vigil by 2,500 women in front of the American embassy; in
Sydney, Australia, a march by 700 women; a telegram demanding Angela's freedom
signed by the entire cast and crew of the film "Z," including Yves
Montand, Simone Signoret, director Costa Gavras and composer Mikis Theodorakis.
Sometimes,
it is too much to handle. "We have received 100,000 pieces of mail from
East Germany alone," sighs Rob Baker, the long-haired publicity director
who is the only white on the national staff. "They're lying around in
hundreds of mail bags unopened-- because we don't have a big enough staff to do
the work."
Communist
party-oriented mass organizations such as the Women's International Democratic
Federation, with headquarters in East Berlin, have set up Free Angela
committees in scores of countries. In the committee files is a letter from the
World Federation of Democratic Youth, based in Budapest, telling the committee
that "huge solidarity actions were and are undertaken by all our member
organizations in support of Angela Davis."
"In
some countries--in Italy, for instance--the party has taken a heavy
responsibility," says Baker. "They have printed up thousand of
postcards for people to send to Angela, with copies to Reagan, or Hoover, or
Nixon. On the other hand, we get things like a letter from a woman who runs a
coffee shop in Utrecht and wants to print up thousands of copies of Angela's
statement to the court. I would say it is a mixture of party support and
nonparty support in every country."
But
what does the slogan "Free Angela" mean when it is carried in a
demonstration in Sydney or East Berlin? Does the committee think such pressure
might result in her being freed without a trial?
"Well,"
says Margaret Burnham, "we mean it literally. It is a bogus prosecution.
The prosecution is a fraud. If she didn't have the color or politics that
Angela has she would be free. Since she is going to be prosecuted, though, she
should have a fair trial."
Howard
Moore amplifies this: "She is in the clutches of the law. A trial is
inevitable. She is being tried for her life. Given the deep-seated racial
hatred and the political nature of the trial, the only way she can be freed is
to bring enough pressure to insure that she has a fair trial. The outside pressure
forces them to be more scrupulous. It is salutary."
The
committee was given a considerable lift by the recent decision in Connecticut
to drop the charges against Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, and the acquittal
of the Panther 13 in New York City. "They were significant
victories," said an elated Howard Moore recently. "They were
victories for all people who are struggling around political trials such as the
one we have here." When I asked Moore what specific lessons might be
learned from those trials, he stressed the importance of getting a large number
of blacks on the jury:
"We
are going to raise the question of the national status of blacks in the
courtroom. When we say that Angela should be judged by her peers, we mean by
other blacks. What was significant and critical about the New Haven and New
York cases was the number of blacks on the jury. It prevented the prosecutor
from making openly racist appeals in court and it prevented white jurors from
making racist arguments in the jury room."
Because
of the small number of blacks in Marin County the lawyers are seriously
thinking about requesting a change of venue to another county where they might
be guaranteed a large percentage of blacks on the jury panel. "If we can
get Angela a jury of her peers," says Moore confidently, " the
question of the outcome of this trial doesn't even have to be guessed at."
Los
Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty has publicly suggested that Angela Davis be deported to
Algeria, while Los Angeles County Supervisor Warren Dorn has said that she
"should be sent back to Russia, the country that she loves." Such
traditional Red-baiting the committee was prepared for. What really has them
shaking their heads is the flak they have been getting from the left.
It
first came into the open last Jan. 23 when the Black Panther paper published a
statement by Eldridge Cleaver from Algiers. Cleaver made the startling charge
that the Free Angela movement was started by the "Communist party in
collusion with the U.S. fascists," in order to divert attention, resources
and support away from the trial of Bobby Seale in New Haven. Cleaver's
accusation was easily turned aside by the committee, but the extravagance of it
all obscured an ideological rift of substance about how to defend
"political prisoners."
The
Panthers, at that time, were publicly despairing of the efficacy of fighting in
the courts. Their model still seemed to be the Marin type of
"revolutionary violence"--and if you had to be in court you should
present a "revolutionary" defense. The Communist party, on the other
hand, believe in the mobilizing broad, united-front support groups and
legalistic defenses.
The
most public aspects of the controversy died quickly. After the Newton-Cleaver
split, the Oakland-based Panthers began to retrench and rebuild their shattered
alliances in the black community. Huey Newton publicly affirmed the Black
Panther party's support for Angela Davis and her defense committee.
What
lingers is an undercurrent of suspicion, particularly among white radicals,
about the motives and politics of the committee. Much of this centers on the
committee's relationship, or lack of it, to Ruchell Magee. He, after all, is
the lone living symbol of Aug. 7, which the committee seems to want people to
forget--even though Angela herself has praised the courthouse shootout as
"an insurrectionary act."
Speaking
of the committee's official coolness toward Magee, a young radical lawyer said,
"How much of this is the ideology of the C.P. and their political line of
the united front, and how much she approves of, I don't know. I have a feeling
she is more radical than that. But they certainly give you a strong feeling
that they are going to steer clear of Magee."
Such
feelings are fed by every reported instance of friction in the courtroom
between Magee and the Davis lawyers. He has, several times, denounced them
openly in court for failing to support some of his motions. On one occasion, he
managed to disqualify a judge, just as her lawyers were getting ready to argue
substantive pretrial motions. Their annoyance with him was obvious. Outside the
courtroom one of her attorneys commented on "the irony of this unlettered
man," raising such complicated legal points. At a National Lawyers Guild
meeting at which Margaret Burnham was speaking about the case, someone in the
audience asked why the committee wasn't doing more for Magee. Alan Brodsky,
another of Angela's lawyers, started to reply by reminding the audience that
Angela is innocent. Afterward, he explained that he did not mean to imply that
Magee was guilty, but some people felt damage had been done to Magee.
Sandra
Close, a local radical journalist who has taken an interest in the Magee case,
is convinced that incidents such as this one reflect a widespread attitude.
"The whole idea that has been pervasive throughout this case is that Magee
is finished, that his goose is cooked and he is going to the gas chamber,"
she says. "That has enabled people to put the priorities on Angela Davis.
No one in that courtroom is on his side. He stands alone. He isn't a celebrity.
He represents poor people who have to get by on their instincts and their
cunning--who, when they are trapped and backed into a corner, like he is, have
to learn, on their own, how to survive. If there had been no Angela case, no
one would have cared if Magee was guilty or innocent."
The
committee, sensitive to the increasing criticism, has been going to
considerable lengths of late to express solidarity with Magee. In court, the
lawyers support his motions more frequently. In a recent regional conference of
West Coast defense committees, national publicity director Baker made a speech
in which he said, "We must recognize that Ruchell has educated all of
us"; he spoke about the necessity of expanding the narrow defense of
Angela into a broader movement to defend prisoners such as Magee. So far,
thought, this has not happened. The Magee committee functions without any
material support from the Davis committee. It is clear that the broad base of
support for Angela would be undercut to some extent if there were a
"United Committee to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee."
A
good deal of the friction has to do simply with the objective differences in
their respective current legal predicaments. Since Magee is already on a life
sentence, he is desperately flailing about, using every legal maneuver he can
think of to dramatize his plight. He is in no hurry. The Davis attorneys, in
contrast, obviously want the proceedings expedited at this stage. Their client
has been kept in solitary confinement for six months without even having had
her substantive pretrial motions heard yet.
That
is why the committee made a strategic decision several months ago to focus on a
broad political campaign to secure bail. A petition addressed to the California
Supreme Court, on which they still hope to get a million signatures, is
circulating around the country. The petition compares her case with that of
Lieut. William Calley, pointing out that although she has never been convicted
of any crime (or even arrested prior to the current case), she is "held
under punitive conditions of detention while awaiting trial, and Lieut. William
Calley, a felon convicted of the premeditated murder of more than a score of
Vietnamese civilians, is released to his own quarters while appealing that
conviction."
A
major role in the bail campaign was played by David Poindexter, the
"mystery man" who was arrested with Miss Davis in New York and
subsequently acquitted in Federal District Court of aiding and abetting her
flight. Poindexter went on a major speaking tour in the Midwest and the East.
Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, the Urban League and the California Federation of Teachers came out in
favor of bail.
With
Angela out on the streets, many of the ambiguities about the case might be
resolved, and the conflict with Magee could be tempered. She would be free,
presumably, to speak out, and would be in a better position to help Magee if
that is her inclination, as many people believe it still is. The lawyers could
afford to take a little more relaxed attitude toward the pretrial process and
thus to Magee's own efforts. She would also be an enormous asset in rallying
more mass support to the defense.
When
a bail hearing was finally held in early June before Judge Richard E. Arnason,
the latest judge in the case, the defense presented stacks of petitions and
several bound volumes of resolutions and statements favoring bail from
countless labor groups and prominent individuals. Arnason seemed sympathetic to
the lawyers' arguments and their hopes were high. Later, the county Probation
Department also strongly recommended bail for Angela. But on June 15, the judge
ruled against her release, indicating he did not think there was a risk of
flight but that the law prohibited bail in her case. He also stayed all further
state proceedings until Magee's petitions for removal to the Federal courts
were disposed of. Thus, no one is even talking about a trial date yet.
Davis
committee members and supporters were visibly disappointed as they came out of
the court. An angry Franklin Alexander told a quickly assembled press
conference that this was no the end of the effort to get bail. The lawyers were
going to appeal but, more importantly, said Alexander--to shouts of "Right
on!"--"the only place justice is going to come from is the streets.
Ours was a method of bringing together the legal and mass struggle," he
explained. "But the scales are unbalanced now, and we're going to have to
go into the streets in Sacramento to see that justice is done."
Sol Stern is a freelance writer and a contributing editor of
Ramparts magazine.
