ANGELA DAVIS - 1970 FBI MOST WANTED POSTER - BLACK PANTHER PARTY - CIVIL RIGHTS

Description

FOR SALE:
ANGELA DAVIS
FBI MOST WANTED
POSTER
Measures 10 3/8" X 16"
Printed on glossy, heavy paper stock. Folded down middle, as shown.
Exact REPRODUCTION copy. Exact same as the original. Look at the photos. From a smoke-free household.
"Angela Yvonne Davis
(born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, academic, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960's as a leader of the Communist Party USA and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
As a result of purchasing firearms used in the 1970 armed take-over of a Marin County, California courtroom, in which four persons were killed, she was prosecuted for conspiracy. She was later acquitted of this charge.
She is a professor emerita at the University Of California, Santa Cruz, in its History Of Consciousness Department. She is also a former director of the university's Feminist Studies department.
Her research interests are feminism,
African American Studies, critical theory,
Marxism,
popular music, social consciousness
, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. She co-founded Critical Resistance
an organization working to abolish the prison industrial complex.
Davis's membership in the CPUSA led California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969 to attempt to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She supported the governments of the Soviet Bloc for several decades. During the 1980's, she was twice a candidate for Vice President on the CPUSA ticket. She left the party in 1991.
Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates accused of killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison.
On August 7, 1970,
J
onathan Jackson, a heavily armed, 17-year-old African-American high-school student, gained control over a courtroom in Marin County, California. Once in the courtroom, Jackson armed the black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three female jurors as hostages. 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 the shotgun, he also suffered a chest wound from a bullet that may have been fired from outside the van. Evidence during the trial showed, however, that either could have been fatal. The firearms which Jackson used in the attack, including the shotgun used to kill Judge Haley, had been purchased by Davis two days prior, and the barrel of the shotgun had been sawn off. Davis was found to have been corresponding with one of the inmates involved.
As California considers "all persons concerned in the commission of a crime, whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense... principals in any crime so committed", Marin County Superior Judge Peter Allen Smith charged Davis with "aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley" and issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours after the judge issued the warrant on August 14, 1970, a massive attempt to locate and arrest Angela Davis began. On August 18, 1970, four days after the initial warrant was issued, the FBI director
J
. Edgar Hoover listed Davis on the
F
BI's Most Wanted List; she was the third woman and the 309th person to be listed.
Soon after, Davis became a fugitive and fled California. According to her autobiography, during this time she hid in friends' homes and moved at night. On October 13, 1970, FBI agents found her at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City. President Richard M. Nixon congratulated the FBI on its "capture of the dangerous terrorist, Angela Davis."
On January 5, 1971, Davis appeared at the Marin County Superior Court and declared her innocence before the court and nation: "I now declare publicly before the court, before the people of this country that I am innocent of all charges which have been leveled against me by the state of California." John Abt, general counsel of Communist Party, USA, was one of the first attorneys to represent Davis for her alleged involvement in the shooting. While being held in the Women's Detention Center, Davis was initially segregated from other prisoners, in solitary confinement. With the help of her legal team, she obtained a federal
c
ourt order to get out of the segregated area.
Across the nation, thousands of people began organizing a movement to gain her release. In New York City, black writers formed a committee called the Black People in Defense of Angela Davis. By February 1971 more than 200 local committees in the United States, and 67 in foreign countries, worked to free Davis from prison. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed to this campaign with the song: "Angela". In 1972, after a sixteen-month incarceration, the state allowed her release on bail from county jail.On February 23, 1972, Rodger McAfee, a dairy farmer from
F
resno, California, paid her 0,000 bail with the help of Steve Sparacino, a wealthy business owner. Portions of her legal defense expenses were paid for by the United Presbyterian Church.
A defense motion for a change of venue was granted, and the trial was moved to Santa Clara County. On June 4, 1972, after 13 hours of deliberations,the all-white jury returned a verdict of
n
ot guilty. The fact that she owned the guns used in the crime was judged insufficient to establish her responsibility in the plot. She was represented by Leo Branton, Jr., who hired psychologists to help the defense determine who in the jury pool might favor their arguments, ;that has since become more common. He hired experts to discredit the reliability of eyewitness accounts."
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