Angela Davis -- heroine of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther, once honored by the Rolling Stones while facing murder charges, also a member of the Communist Party USA -- has been denied a high honor by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
She was originally approved, and then the offer was withdrawn after public comment. They didn't explain exactly what it was that caused them to change their mind. I'd be interested to know.
6 comments:
Basically because she was a Commie: hard core. Moreover, she purchased arms used to kill a judge.
There is a comment at the link that cites the Wiki article on Angela Davis, so I will also quote from Wikipedia
1)Soledad Brothers: Angela Davis purchased several of the guns used.
Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates accused of killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison.[26]
On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, a heavily armed 17-year-old African-American high-school student, gained control over a courtroom in Marin County, California. He armed the black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three female jurors as hostages.[27][28] As Jackson transported the hostages and two black convicts away from the courtroom, the police began shooting at the vehicle. The judge and the three black men were killed in the melee; one of the jurors and the prosecutor were injured. Although the judge was shot in the head with a blast from a shotgun, he also suffered a chest wound from a bullet that may have been fired from outside the van. Evidence during the trial showed that either could have been fatal.[29] Davis had purchased several of the firearms Jackson used in the attack,[30] including the shotgun used to shoot Haley, which she bought at a San Francisco pawn shop two days before the incident.[28][31] She was also found to have been corresponding with one of the inmates involved.[32]
2)Glorious name of Lenin? Shaking hands with Honecker?
On May 1, 1979, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union.[50] She visited Moscow later that month to accept the prize, where she praised "the glorious name" of Lenin and the "great October Revolution".[51]
2)For prisoner rights in US but not in Soviet bloc. From Wiki:
In a New York City speech on July 9, 1975, Russian dissident and Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told an AFL-CIO meeting that Davis was derelict in having failed to support prisoners in various socialist countries around the world, given her strong opposition to the US prison system. He claimed a group of Czech prisoners had appealed to Davis for support, which Solzhenitsyn said she had declined.[61] In fact, Jiří Pelikán wrote an open letter asking her to support Czech prisoners, which Davis refused, believing that the Czech prisoners were undermining the Husák government and that Pelikán, in exile in Italy, was attacking his own country.[62]
The above would be for me, at least, sufficient reason to not honor Angela Davis.
Soledad Brothers reminds me of another connection. David Horowitz's and Peter Collier's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties has a rather sad chapter on Fay Stender (Requiem for a Radical)a radical lawyer who got involved with Soledad Brother George Jackson. Her involvement with black prisoners ended nearly a decade later when she was shot at her home, which paralyzed her. Several years later she committed suicide.
I understand why she's controversial with us, Gringo; I was curious what caused this particular venue to decide she wasn't right for them. It's a little surprising.
The Wikipedia article on the Reverend Shuttlesworth, for whom the award is named, is very insistent on his embrace of MLK's message of non-violence and forgiveness, reportedly in the face of his own relatively confrontational personality. So perhaps Ms. Davis' enthusiastic embrace of violence was a bridge too far for the BCRI.
The Wikipedia article on Ms. Davis also places her among Jim Jones' admirers.
Not enough palms greased. Award Denied.
Humans are as predictable as they are corrupt.
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