I was struck by the convergence of two stories in a recent edition of the New York Times.
The first, on the front page, was an anodyne anniversary feature: The Berlin Wall, which went up in 1961 and came down in 1989, has now (in the Times’s words) been “gone for as long as it stood.” The milestone was observed quietly in unified Germany, which has been grappling these past few decades with the problems of integrating West and East, with mixed success.
It’s an old and, from my perspective, predictable story as well. For as one who first explored Erich Honecker’s German Democratic Republic as a journalist in the 1970s and revisited several times thereafter, the fact that the reunion of the impoverished East and the prosperous Federal Republic of Germany has been a long and arduous one—still leaving the East at a measurable disadvantage—is far less surprising than the fact, still astonishing and exhilarating in retrospect, that the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall was reduced to rubble.
Standing on either side of the famous landmark, I never imagined that the Cold War’s ugliest metaphor would disappear in my lifetime. Indeed, the two impressions I always took away from Communist East Germany were sadness about the grim, repressive regime that seemed to penetrate every corner of its gray landscape and the evident stasis—the empty streets, furtive glances, shabby architecture, even the unreconstructed bomb damage from World War II—characteristic of the whole Kremlin empire. (And East Germany, lest we forget, was the economic “success story” of the Soviet bloc.)
Which makes the second story in that same Times edition either cruelly ironic or deeply obtuse: “The [Angela] Davis Papers: Harvard Gets Them.”
According to the Times account, the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—surviving remnant of Harvard’s old coordinate college for women—has purchased, for an undisclosed sum, “more than 150 boxes of papers, photographs, pamphlets and other material” from the archive of the veteran left-wing radical Angela Davis, who stands (in the words of the library’s director, Jane Kamensky) “at the intersection of feminism, American political radicalism and global political radicalism.”
According to Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., Davis is “one of the major political theorists of the second half of the 20th century.” With all due respect to Professor Gates, who is no slouch at salesmanship, it is probably more accurate to describe Davis as a political activist rather than a theorist—evidence for which is comparatively thin—and, to a larger degree, an artifact of a passing generation of left-wing radicalism.
It is true that Davis, now 74, spent most of her career in and around the academy, where she initially parlayed her black nationalist credentials and East German doctorate into offers from Princeton and Swarthmore, settling, in 1969, at UCLA. She might well have remained in Los Angeles, just up Interstate 5 from her mentor, the German-born New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, at UC San Diego. But the call to action, then and always, stirred her more strongly than scholarship.
Her militant rhetoric had already attracted the critical attention of Governor Ronald Reagan and the University of California regents when guns she had registered were supplied to the teenaged brother of an inmate named George Jackson, who was facing trial for the murder of a prison guard and much lionized by the left.
Seeking to free his brother, Jonathan Jackson in August 1970 managed to gain control of a courtroom in San Rafael while a trial was underway. Jackson and three prisoners seized the judge, prosecutor, and three female jurors as hostages and briefly escaped from the courthouse. In an ensuing gun battle, however, Jackson and two of the prisoners were killed, along with Judge Harold Haley, who was shot in the head with a sawed-off shotgun.
Under California law, this ghastly melodrama made Angela Davis vulnerable to criminal charges of assisting a kidnapping and homicide, and she became a fugitive. It is perhaps a measure of those times that when she was apprehended two months later in New York and returned to California for trial, she became a cause célèbre on the left, a nationwide campus hero, and global celebrity. Her now-familiar face and voluminous afro adorned thousands of “Free Angela” banners and posters, and she earned the admiration of other celebrities—Yoko Ono, Noam Chomsky, Jane Fonda, even the Rolling Stones.
Here, however, the story takes an interesting turn. For in June 1972, to the surprise of most Americans and in all likelihood Davis herself, she was acquitted on all counts by an all-white jury. No doubt she and her admirers were relieved by the verdict, which could easily have been deeply punitive. At the same time, the judicial martyrdom that would have guaranteed her icon status was denied her. When she embarked on a worldwide victory tour, which kept her out of the country for months on end, she disappeared from the American consciousness, never again a household name.
There was another irony as well. The late 1960s and early ’70s were a period of left-radical rebirth in America, but while Angela Davis was friendly to innumerable factions of the New Left—from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the Black Panthers—she was also a member of the Communist party and twice in subsequent years (1980, 1984) its vice-presidential nominee.
It is difficult, now as then, to explain this incongruity. In the hip radical circles where Davis thrived in the Age of Aquarius, the Communist Party USA had become something of a joke—a downscale, arguably geriatric, collection of old labor insurgents and would-be spymasters in threadbare suits, singing “Joe Hill” and pledging strict allegiance to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
But of course, that was not the glamorous USSR of Leon Trotsky’s Bolshevik armies or John Reed and Reds (1981) but the squalid, puritanical, anti-Semitic, nuclear-armed autocracy of Leonid Brezhnev and his Kremlin council of elders. Not to mention the careerists, party hacks, and secret policemen led by Erich Honecker, who governed the East German state captured so poignantly in the Times’s other story.
It was into welcoming arms in Moscow and Havana and East Berlin and other bleak capitals of the Communist universe that Davis threw herself in common cause for years on end. And apart from a few startling detours in subsequent decades—solidarity with the Rev. Jim Jones of Peoples Temple/Jonestown fame, for example—she has since combined her radical activism with an enviable succession of faculty sinecures.
Not surprisingly, the Times account of Radcliffe’s newest treasure moves directly from the “Free Angela” days to that contemporary “intersection of feminism . . . and global political radicalism.” And apart from a photograph of some letters of support from East German schoolchildren, delivered during her trial, Davis’s adventures in the German Democratic Republic, celebrating the oppression of the victims described in that other Times story, go unmentioned.
To be sure, all of this tells us more about Harvard and the New York Times than about Angela Davis. But I do hope that the Davis papers in Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library include her Lenin Peace Prize or, with luck, the Star of People’s Friendship, bestowed upon her by Erich Honecker himself.
