The College noted Black History Month with a number of events, but none matched the excitement of a visit by Angela Davis.
One of the most famous of the protestors of the 1960s, Davis now is a professor in the History and Consciousness Program at the University of California in Santa Cruz.
She urged the hundreds who crowded Memorial Chapel to search for their own ways to work for change.
“There's a tendency to look back at the '60s and '70s as a revolutionary era, as if it descended upon us,” she said. “What is not pointed out is the hard work people did.”
Some of that hard work, she noted, went into the “Free Angela” movement that spread after her arrest in connection with a shootout outside a courthouse in California. Although she wasn't present, she was later arrested and spent twenty-two months in jail awaiting trial on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy for allegedly helping to plan the attack. She was acquitted after a four-month trial.
She told the Union audience that the methods used to change society then were different from those needed today, and that only today's activists can decide what will work best for them.
The country needs more such organizing and critical thinking, she said skills that seem to have been lost.
Look at the circular arguments advanced to justify building more prisons, she said. Even though prisons cannot stop crime, she said, the common response to more crime is to build more prisons. More funds ought to be spent on steps to prevent crime, she said.
“I want to suggest that one of the campaigns that can be taken up by students as well as workers and others is a new abolitionism,” referring to reforming the criminal justice system.
She also paid tribute to several women who received much less publicity than the high-profile organizers who created the country's Civil Rights movement. Women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Ruby Robinson played crucial roles in the early efforts to register black voters in the South
an example, she said, of the strength of diligent, grass-roots organizing.