"Political repression in the United States has reached monstrous proportions. Black and Brown peoples especially � victims of the most vicious and calculated forms of class, national and racial oppression -- bear the brunt of the repression even as it now engulfs the most presumably respectable groups and individuals including members of Congress. Literally tens of thousands of innocent men and women � fill the jails and prisons; hundreds of thousands more are the subject of police, FBI and military intelligence investigations�. It seems to us that the most important fact to be considered in the midst of this repression is that it and its attendant paraphernalia for coercion, manipulation and control reflect serious infirmities in the present social order. That is, while we do not we do not underestimate the coercive resources � available to the state to suppress all forms of opposition (and the centralisation of control over those forces), we think that the necessity to resort to such repression is reflective of profound social crisis, of systemic disintegration."
I think you�ll have to agree that it could have been written today, not 32 years ago. Yet who today has read this book? How many of you have even heard of Angela Y Davis or know of her frame-up by the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan? The assault on the Black Panthers during the latter half of the 1960s and into the 70s was accompanied by the same hysteria that surrounds the current �terrorist menace�. Surveillance, infiltration, the illegal detention of opponents by the Nixon administration and even cold-blooded murder, were carried out in an atmosphere of paranoia and the demonisation of all opponents, especially the Panthers, who not only dared defend themselves, but more importantly carried their mission into communities, creating schools and breakfast programmes for children, organised communities and defended them against a racist police and racist state institutions. It was for these, practical examples more than their armed defiance, that the wrath and the full force of the state descended on them and destroyed them. But the most important thing they destroyed was our power to remember.
William Bowles, quoting Sister AngelaAngela Davis live in 1970 at Soul and Soledad
at Al-Jazeerah.info 05/15/03
("Al-Jazeerah.info is independent. It is NOT related to Aljazeera of Qatar, or to any other website with a similar name")
Angela Davis bio at the African American Registry
