Notes from Book Discussion Mar. 4, 2023
Angela Davis, an Autobiography ©1974, 1988, 2021
Fourteen of us met on Saturday March 4th to discuss Angela Davis: An Autobiography. This is the newest edition of her autobiography and the prefaces to the first, second, and now third editions are included at the beginning.
I admitted to the group that I had a little trouble reading this book. I’m sure that I read the autobiography when I was younger and remember harboring some ingrained prejudice against communism, due to indoctrination, not at all by my own logic or reasoning. I think when I was very young and I read this I was like “Communists, Oh my God!” I was also a little put off by the structure. I started our discussion by having the group turn to the Table of Contents and review each section.
Part One is “Nets,” Nets begins when she was underground in New York as a result of what had happened when she was in California. The upshot was that she wasn’t present at the courthouse incident, but the gun used was registered to her, so a warrant was issued for her arrest. I thought that beginning her story at the part where she was underground in New York was somewhat confusing.
Part Two was “Rocks” and it goes all the way back to childhood. This is a very different kind of structure. I’m used to an autobiography starting with “I was born here…”
At this point, Shelara interjected, “But who was her editor? Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison was no respecter of sequence.”
Part three is “Waters” which is about going overseas. The section describes her starting at Brandeis and her student travels, being involved in various student protests around the world. She was in Germany; she was in France. She went to Cuba.
The title of Part Four is “Flames,” the longest chapter and there was so much action in that chapter, specifically when the police raided the Panthers’ headquarters.
Then Part Five was “Walls” which involved the extradition from New York to California. That was another thing that wasn’t linear. She was attacked on every side, even in the so-called Black Liberation Movements.
The title of Part Six is “Bridges.” The phrase under the chapter title is “Walls turned sideways are bridges.” The section is all about the trial and her eventual acquittal.
Amy shared that she also really loved the structure. “I listened to the book on Hoopla. I chose to listen to it, which has its pros and cons. I really enjoyed her voice: so slow and deliberate, an autobiography paying so much attention to storytelling. What I appreciated about this structure it gives a sense of how this woman became Angela Davis. For me, this story began the year before I was born, she was such a larger-than-life person. I thought this was a very different arc of storytelling.”
I admitted to the group that another point of confusion for me was that she had visited New York before as a child and then she went back to New York to go to high school. When the book opens in New York (while she’s on the run) I’m asking myself, “Wait, wasn’t she in California?” Her parents were very progressive. When I think about how I was raised and how strict my mother was, and here, Angela Davis’s parents let her decide if she wanted to go to Fisk or to New York when she was only sixteen.
Meghan pointed out, “She’s so young to be off on her own. I wanted to get to know her parents better. Her sister is just as progressive and rebellious as she is, so they must have come from a family that believed in social change and in standing up for yourself.”
Barb offered, “One of the things that really struck me was in the first preface when she said, “When I decided to write the book at all it was because I had come to envision it as a political autobiography” That really set the stage for me when it didn’t turn out to be the linear personal biography we’re more accustomed to. There were times when I was wondering at the fact that we hear about her political comrades, but not so much about her personal feelings.”
Patricia said that one of the things that really struck her was that Angela Davis was born around the same time in the deep South as Winfred Rembert. and that Angela Davis and Winfred Rembert both had PTSD based on their experiences in the South.
“I just thought about what fate and fortune has to do with things like how if he had had her progressive parents. Her parents had so much to do with how she turned out. I know when I was growing up if you talked about communism or socialism people looked at you like you were nuts. I had innate sort of negative feelings about communism. It was very interesting for me to read about communism from a different point of view. For me this was a crash course on communism, the Vietnam war, the Black Panthers, etc. I didn’t get an idea (perhaps from the preface to this edition?) about how Angela Davis feels about communism now.”
Bonnie shared with the group, “Well, my parents were communists in the 1930s, but when Stalin came into power, my parents and their peers quit the Communist Party. To me right now from what I know nationwide there's only 350 members of the CPUSA. They’re pro union, pro healthcare, they’re not about the government owning everything, so I think there’s real confusion between communism and socialism.
Patricia said she came away from the book wanting to know more. Davis had so much support when she was in jail. There were so many complexities. “I’ve read unsavory things about her just like I’ve read unsavory things about Bobby Seale, Erika Huggins, and I’d love to know more about both sides of these stories. When you read about people like James Baldwin and Aretha Franklin fighting for her and so many people were helping her, I would love to know the details.”
Robin told us she also really liked the structure. “It was helpful understanding. I always had Socialist tendencies. I have a sister who was one year behind Angela Davis at Brandeis. I was four when my sister went to college. So interesting to understand why she felt so militant.”
Bonnie: I remember Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. In the book Andrew Goodman’s mother wrote, My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice, she said the way Goodman was brought up he had no choice but to go to Mississippi and help Black people to get the right to vote.
There was a New York Times essay called "Just Walk on By." The writer, Brent Staples talked about being in New York and he’d be walking, and white people would cross the street because they were afraid of him, so he started whistling classical music to make them feel at ease. Professor Claude Steele wrote a book about this in his book called Whistling Vivaldi.
Shelara: The thing that struck me was the political persecution done to these people. Their free speech was denied. Their right to a fair trial was denied. There were agent provocateurs sowing dissention, our government’s COINTELPRO. I’m struck by how we can read this and not see that this is going on now and that the fascism that we should be afraid of has never left. This is not history. This is happening now. I’m outraged that this brilliant woman and her brilliant colleagues had to go through this, and I’m outraged by the fact that this was done by the state. This was state-sponsored terrorism and persecution of American citizens.
Bonnie: Justice Roberts eviscerated the Voting Rights Act. Once the federal oversight was gone, it was nothing, the same thing happened in Reconstruction. It was federal oversight and then they took away the feds and then you got Jim Crow.
Shelara: He made his career as a lawyer by arguing against the Voting Rights Act. You certainly can’t have bodily autonomy. Angela Davis grew up in a place called Dynamite Hill. Of course, you're going to be militant. I didn’t expect anything less. There was a book called We Will Shoot Back.
There are books that are against non-violence. There were people in the South who said we need to defend ourselves. Dr. King was a pacifist and a socialist. He died fighting for the unionization of the sanitation workers in Memphis, while he was planning the Poor People’s Campaign.
Jamilah remarked that, “Dr. King gave a speech in New York at Riverside Church in which he condemned the United States for our part in the Vietnam War. This was a year before he was killed.”
Barb: In the book, when I read the third preface, I thought it was going to be comprehensive up until the time she was writing that preface.
Amy: One of the things I was thinking about was how she said Black people in Brooklyn would walk past other Black people and not speak. This is the opposite from down South. My parents had that true desire to live differently than they had in the South.
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| Angela Davis on the cover of Time Magazine 1971 |
p.79 “Without a doubt, the children who attended the de jure segregated schools of the South had an advantage over those who attended the de facto segregated schools of the North. During my summer trips to New York, I found that many of the Black children there had never heard of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman. At Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School, Black identity was thrust upon us by the circumstances of oppression...Yet...it should not be idealized. As I look back, I recall the pervasive ambivalence at school...On the one hand, there was a strong tendency affirming our identity as Black people that ran through all the school activities. But on the other hand, many teachers tended to inculcate in us the official, racist explanation for our misery. And they encouraged an individualistic, competitive way out of this torment...”
Laura: I keep thinking about when she was in jail and an inmate shouted out, "Angela, what does imperialism mean?” I think that hearing Angela Davis’s story and the Dynamite Hill, really seeing where someone comes from in their life that leads them to have a sense of solidarity with other people rather than just have the individualistic “let me get the hell out of here.”
Em: That sense of solidarity led to her being against the capitalist agenda as well. I was struck by the part where she was talking about her frustration with infighting. She had from early on such a strong identification with the people. She had an amazing mind.
Patricia: I’m still stuck on the Communism thing. I don’t know how the concept of “All for one, one for all.” Would be able to work. Is it possible?
Debbie: I was in Junior High went to school with people whose parents had been communists, but they turned from communism when they heard about the things Stalin had done. The idea is that no one should be left behind and the idea that there shouldn’t be just a small group of people who own the means of production and just profit from everyone’s labor. To me shared cooperation is absolutely something we should still be working for. We must be diligent to watch and see if people are just trying to amass power for themselves. There’s always a struggle to make things good for everyone.
Meghan: Shelara, you said that there’s this lack of empathy. Our ability to identify someone else as having humanity. I think empathy is the opposite of greed.
Shelara: Those countries that have these programs are changing. As these countries become more diverse, the governments are spending less money on these programs. Corporations love welfare, as long as they’re the ones getting the welfare. The way this country is going, I’m scared.
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| Angela Davis in more recent years |
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