Angela Davis, Indomitable Panther

At age 69, African-American activist Angela Davis is the star of a documentary that tells her story. It’s a story about a miscarriage of justice that, in the 1970s, nearly sent her to the electric chair.

Not everyone has the distinction of being considered a public enemy by the likes of the occupant of the White House (at that time, Richard Nixon), the governor of California (Ronald Reagan) and the head of the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover). It is similarly uncommon to be on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. But that is exactly what happened to Angela Davis in 1970, for a crime she did not commit, but of which she wasn’t accused by chance. This brilliant scholar benefited from an international support campaign that narrowly saved her from the electric chair after 18 months in prison.

Even before she got to that macabre place, Angela Davis alone symbolized everything that white, conservative American leaders hated in those years: She was black, a feminist, close to the Black Panthers, active in the Che-Lumumba Club — an arm of the American Communist Party — and a philosophy and literature teacher with Marxist beliefs, having had as a mentor Herbert Marcuse, a revolutionary thinker close to the Frankfurt School. It didn’t take more than that for the FBI to monitor her, especially after she took up the defense of black inmates whom she considered to be political prisoners. Among them was George Jackson, with whom she fell in love. Leader of an anti-racist organization within the Soledad, Calif. prison, he had been sentenced 11 years earlier for the theft of $70. When Jackson and two other “Soledad brothers” tried to escape during a hostage situation — the operation turned into a bloodbath after police intervened — Angela was accused of having provided them with the weapons they had used. She was accused without proof, but wasn’t she the ideal culprit?

The Powerful Ones

Designed like a thriller and enriched by commentary from Angela Davis, as well as numerous archived recordings, Shola Lynch’s remarkable documentary revisits this iconic story. “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” — the title takes the name of the committee that was formed to support the accused — is not very favorable toward the person to whom the film is dedicated. But the American filmmaker was convinced of the importance of revisiting this matter, where a miscarriage of justice was avoided by determined activists, even in the face of men as powerful as Nixon, Reagan and Hoover.

Far from settling down, Angela Davis, today 69-years-old, has never stopped fighting for her beliefs. If in Obama’s America, the struggle for civil rights is effectively over, this born activist, still a communist sympathizer even if she is no longer a party member, remains convinced that all progressive causes are linked and continues the fight. She participates in all the battles against global capitalism. And in a country that uses the prison system as a tool to exclude certain categories of people — 25 percent of all of the world’s prisoners are in the United States — she supports the Prison Abolition Movement. As a result of her sensitivity to the issue of deprivation of liberty, she regularly denounces the fate of the Palestinians, condemned to live in “the largest open-air prison on the planet.” On March 20, for the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, she called once more for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.