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.
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