It was quickly established that Angela Davis had purchased at least two of the guns used in the deadly attack, including the shotgun that killed Judge Haley, which she had bought two days earlier and which was then sawed off. California law considered anyone complicit in commission of a crime a principal. As a result, Marin County Superior Judge Peter Smith charged Ms. Davis with “aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder” and issued an arrest warrant for her. Instead of surrendering for trial, Ms. Davis went into hiding. She was captured by the FBI almost three months later at a Howard Johnson motel on 10th Avenue in the heart of New York City.
A poster hanging on the wall in the D.C. Superior Court building in Washington, D.C. shows “Black Women Paving the Way to Greatness in Politics.” It curiously includes Ms. Davis.
Potential jurors reporting for jury duty in the D.C. Superior Court building have of late been passing a photo exhibit celebrating renowned black women in a series of posters, each featuring portraits of trailblazers exemplifying greatness in their respective fields.
Included among the posters, hung for Black History Month on the walls outside the jurors’ lounge, is one in which the D.C. courts — the federally funded judicial branch of the D.C. government — honor eight “Black Women Paving the Way to Greatness in Politics.”
One might quibble with some of the choices, but most of them are women who indeed deserved to be celebrated. They include: Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman and the first black woman who sought to run for president; Carol Moseley Braun, the first black female U.S. senator; former National Security Council adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the first black female to hold both offices; Patricia Roberts Harris, the first black female Cabinet secretary, U.S. ambassador and law school dean; and our current first lady, Michelle Obama.
One of these personifications of “greatness,” however, comes as a shock, especially in the context of a court of law. It is none other than Angela Davis, a black activist who came to prominence in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A. and the radical black group the Black Panther Party. Ms. Davis was such a high profile communist in the latter days of the Cold War that she was awarded the so-called “Lenin Peace Prize,” given to her in a Moscow ceremony by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev himself.
Of course, Ms. Davis, too, was a trailblazer in her own way.
She was the second black woman to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. She earned that distinction as a fugitive wanted on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from her role in a notorious attack on a courtroom in Marin County in California.
On Aug. 7, 1970, a black 17-year-old named Jonathan Jackson, toting a small arsenal of guns, entered the courtroom of Judge Harold Haley, where convict James McClain was facing murder charges in the death of a prison guard. Brandishing a gun, Jackson halted the proceedings and then armed McClain, after which they together armed two other convicts, who’d been called as witnesses in the case. Jackson and the three freed prisoners then took Judge Haley, the prosecutor and three female jurors hostage, bargaining chips in their effort to force the release from prison of older brother George Jackson, an armed robber who also was under indictment on murder charges in the death of another prison guard.
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