The Selling of Angela

Angela Davis goes on trial this month, after more than a year of legal wrangling over her case, and in that time every stop on the mighty organ of liberal-left propaganda has been pulled out. The infants of Ulan Bator, Mongolia demand the release of the intrepid Angela no less than the funky-looking dudes in leather pieces who wait outside the supermarkets in Watts with collecting boxes. Attorney Howard Moore, sister Fania et al. have stumped the globe, spreading the word, addressing vast rallies in European capitals—twenty thousand in Paris—all of which accept the innocence of Angela as an article of faith and find the idea of “guilt” absurdly irrelevant. You do not ask La Pasionaria if she’s been giving out guns lately. European intellectuals pass like swami into states of revolutionary samadhi at mention of the magic name. How inspiring, how intensely moving, how almost unbearable (wrote Kenneth Tynan the other day), it is to receive such “fiery, free-spirited messages from inside the enemy camp.”

Miss Davis is becoming a national industry. If her freedom fund is as broke as they say, perhaps it is because the product has been oversold. There are Angela movies, Angela plays, Angela books, Angela long-playing records. In Soul and Soledad, we may hear her “crack up” when an interviewer asks, “Are you against capitalism?” At the Oakland office of the Free Angela Committee, “Free Angela” posters bring in $400 a month, and there are some two hundred such offices around the world, if we may believe her publicists. In the bookstores If They Come in the Morning, by Angela Y. Davis and other political prisoners, “a searing impassioned story set in America at this moment” (Third Press, $7.95), is piled high on the counters. A worker for the Los Angeles chapter of the Angela movement told me recently that the last two performances of Angela Is Happening, a play by Elvie Moore, realized some $10,000; and soon itistobe made into a film. There is already one well-made, hour-long documentary on the left-movie circuit: Miss Davis stars in Angela: Portrait of a Revolutionary, and all over the world, one supposes, people are receiving lavishly printed invitations from “Committees of the Arts To Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners” (donation $4 a head). Mine promised an extra treat: “Your host, Dalton Trumbo.” And having read that this was the best available study of a phenomenon unequaled in the annals of political injustice, I went along.

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W. I. Scobie

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Angela Davis goes on trial this month, after more than a year of legal wrangling over her case, and in that time every stop on the mighty organ of liberal-left propaganda has been pulled out. The infants of Ulan Bator, Mongolia demand the release of the intrepid Angela no less than the funky-looking dudes in leather pieces who wait outside the supermarkets in Watts with collecting boxes. Attorney Howard Moore, sister Fania et al. have stumped the globe, spreading the word, addressing vast rallies in European capitals—twenty thousand in Paris—all of which accept the innocence of Angela as an article of faith and find the idea of “guilt” absurdly irrelevant. You do not ask La Pasionaria if she’s been giving out guns lately. European intellectuals pass like swami into states of revolutionary samadhi at mention of the magic name. How inspiring, how intensely moving, how almost unbearable (wrote Kenneth Tynan the other day), it is to receive such “fiery, free-spirited messages from inside the enemy camp.”

Miss Davis is becoming a national industry. If her freedom fund is as broke as they say, perhaps it is because the product has been oversold. There are Angela movies, Angela plays, Angela books, Angela long-playing records. In Soul and Soledad, we may hear her “crack up” when an interviewer asks, “Are you against capitalism?” At the Oakland office of the Free Angela Committee, “Free Angela” posters bring in $400 a month, and there are some two hundred such offices around the world, if we may believe her publicists. In the bookstores If They Come in the Morning, by Angela Y. Davis and other political prisoners, “a searing impassioned story set in America at this moment” (Third Press, $7.95), is piled high on the counters. A worker for the Los Angeles chapter of the Angela movement told me recently that the last two performances of Angela Is Happening, a play by Elvie Moore, realized some $10,000; and soon itistobe made into a film. There is already one well-made, hour-long documentary on the left-movie circuit: Miss Davis stars in Angela: Portrait of a Revolutionary, and all over the world, one supposes, people are receiving lavishly printed invitations from “Committees of the Arts To Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners” (donation $4 a head). Mine promised an extra treat: “Your host, Dalton Trumbo.” And having read that this was the best available study of a phenomenon unequaled in the annals of political injustice, I went along.