Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Davis is taken to the Marin County Civic Center after landing in California in late December 1970. There she is met by a demonstration calling out for her freedom, which brings her comfort and strength. The Marin County facility is sterile with bright lighting, in sharp contrast to the jail in New York. In her cell, unable to sleep, Davis thinks of the Soledad Brothers and Ruchell Magee, her co-defendant: “I knew the gas chamber was waiting for us all” (249).

Davis gathers a new legal team in California, with Margaret Burnham, her friend and attorney from New York, remaining part of her defense. Davis insists that the attorneys recognize she is a political prisoner and craft their defense accordingly. The state formally charges Davis and Magee on January 5, 1971. The two were linked after the FBI raided Davis’s apartment, where they uncovered an unopened letter from Magee to Davis written months earlier. The court therefore plans to try them together for the events at the Marin County Courthouse.

When the Marin County jail is evacuated due to a bomb threat, Davis and several other non-white prisoners are led out in handcuffs while a white woman prisoner is left uncuffed. A judge allows Davis use of a conference room and a different cell after her attorneys initiate legal action arguing that her rights are being violated because she is being held in solitary confinement. Nevertheless, she is still not allowed contact with the general population at the jail, and the jailers, led by the jail’s head matron, retaliate by forbidding Davis from eating and exercising in the work cell:

For months, this work cell was the center of a constantly raging battle between the head matron and me. She noticed, for instance, through her spy window that I would sometimes lie down in the bottom bunk in the work cell and read in that position. Within a short time, the mattresses were removed from the cell (263).

Davis manages to feel a sense of community with other prisoners despite her isolation in jail. For example, one night before bed, another woman in the “main tank,” approximately 200 feet away, calls good night to her, and Davis returns the gesture. She also begins work on a book project with Bettina Aptheker, an old friend and fellow Communist from New York. The anthology is titled If They Come in the Morning and is intended to raise awareness of political imprisonment and deepen Davis’s own understanding of the general prison population.

Conditions improve for Davis after she is refused bail. The judge orders that she be permitted to use a typewriter and radio. Moreover, she is allowed some time with the women held in the jail’s “main tank.”

Davis reflects on the jail’s “outlets” for women prisoners, such as well-used games that are intended to simply take up time. Another time-consuming activity is laundry, which Davis deems “overwhelmingly sexist” because male prisoners’ clothing is sent out to be washed while the women do their own. The authorities operate under the assumption that “women, because they are women, lack an essential part of their existence if they are separated from their domestic chores” (270). The laundry system is also tainted by racism. When Black prisoners volunteer to work they are denied in favor of white women; however, when none of the women volunteer to work, Black women prisoners are forced into laundry duty.

Davis is allowed a meeting with Magee and the Soledad Brothers in preparation for her trial, in which she is permitted to act as co-counsel in her defense. She is moved by the sight of George in chains, which she describes to him in a letter after the meeting. At her meeting with Magee, her co-defendant, the two decide against being tried together because Davis wishes to be tried by the state court, while he feels a federal trial would better serve him.

Guards at San Quentin kill George a little over a month later, in August 1971. Davis doubts the official account that George procured a gun, calling this claim absurd. Alone in her cell, she weeps over the loss of her dear friend. She gathers her strength, however, treating George’s death as “a lodestone” that compels her to carry on the fight for freedom.

Davis and her team argue that her trial must be moved from Marin County because it is primarily wealthy and white. The judge grants the motion and moves the trial to San Jose. Davis is transported to the Santa Clara jail in Palo Alto. The conditions of her cell are disgusting, and movement activity forces the jailers to improve it. Davis decides she will spend the remainder of her life advocating for the freedom and rights of the imprisoned: “The tremendous energy of the movement that had so swiftly transformed my jail situation was energy my sisters and brothers had a more than equal right to” (286).

Shortly thereafter, California’s supreme court abolishes the death penalty, a fate that awaited Davis if convicted. She is overjoyed that her fellow captives, such as Magee and the two remaining Soledad Brothers, will no longer be subject to a death sentence. The state court’s ruling also means that the judge’s previous decision to deny Davis bail is void: “In his original decision denying me bail, Arnason had emphatically stated that if not for the fact that I was accused of a capital crime, he would be more than willing to set me free on bail” (289). The judge grants Davis bail in late February 1972 after facing public pressure to do so. Davis and her supporters celebrate, and she moves into a rental with Margaret Burnham to prepare for the trial. She reunites with her mother, for whom her imprisonment has been especially hard. Davis also attends the remaining Soledad Brothers’ trial, where she speaks to the press about the need to liberate all political prisoners. She is “back in the struggle” (302).