Dr. Angela Davis comes to the University of San Francisco

Angela Davis was never a member of the Black Panther Party, a black nationalist organization. She belonged to the Communist Party, a labor oriented group, viewing the workingclass as international, from her 20s (the late 1960s) to 1991, and most of that time, she was a member of the CP's Central Committee. She was never convicted of anything as she successfully defended her innocence in the superior court, She spent around 14 months in jail until she made bail. She was charged with "aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley" in the Marin County Courthouse shooting incident of August 7, 1970. For more, either ask her or see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis

For a good description of the Los Angeles police setup in the 1970 Marin County Courthouse shooting incident, see

"Hugo Pinell, last of the “San Quentin Six,” murdered in prison" by Evan Blake and Patrick Martin, 8/18/15 at
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/18/fols-a18.html

Angela Davis has recently come out in support of millionaire, fascist war criminal Barack Obama. See
Angela Davis Has Lost Her Mind Over Obama by Glen Ford, 3/27/12 at
http://blackagendareport.com/content/angela-davis-lost-her-mind-over-obama
The author, Glen Ford, states:
“Angela Davis says that Barack Obama is a man who identifies with the Black radical tradition.”

Barack Obama comes from a CIA family. His parents met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii around 1960. Unless one was of Russian descent or planning to be an opera singer of Russian opera or something similar, you did not take Russian in 1960 for fear of being labeled a dirty Red which would cause you to lose your job and everything else. After his parents' divorce, his mother took him (as a small child) to Indonesia, where the CIA carried out a coup that resulted in a million deaths of alleged communists in 1965-1966. There is not now nor has there been anything every radical about Barack Obama. As Michael Moore, the movie maker and proud Democrat states, he is very disappointed in Barack Obama because his only legacy is that he is the first black president.

For more on the reactionary record of Barack Obama, see:
The Obama Craze, by Matt Gonzalez, 2/29/08, Counterpunch at
http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/02/29/the-obama-craze/

The Black Panther Party existed from 1966 to 1974 and in that 8 years achieved a status as a charity organization, helping poor blacks, a worthy cause, but not revolutionary. It did not transform society in any way, as only a labor organization or a socialist organization, which is based on labor, can. Angela Davis, age 71, is best known as a prison reform advocate, calling for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, that is the prison punishment system. This is a worthy reform movement but cannot be the focus of a anyone trying to achieve major change.

Those of us who are of the same generation as Angela Davis but look to labor and socialist organizations as a means of fundamental change are horrified at how this society has regressed since 1980 when the homeless crisis started under Democrat Pres. Carter and understand that the decline is due to the fact that labor is only 10% organized. We know that the end of legal segregation, the abolition of the universal draft and the renewal of the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements that were the outgrowth of the 1950s-1960s civil rights movements came as a result of the comparative prosperity of the 1960s and 1970s made possible by the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Those achievements pale in comparison to labor’s achievements because labor feeds the hungry and houses the homeless, and until that is done today, all of the civil rights movements have very little meaning.

From the labor movement, we won the 8 hour day, the 40 hour workweek, the weekend, paid sick leave, paid holidays, state disability coverage and workers’ compensation insurance. From the 1934 general strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo we won, in 1935, Social Security for old age and disability, unemployment insurance and the right to organize labor unions. In 1965, labor won Medicare, which is a weak form of socialized medicine for old people. From the labor movement we have today public school education, public libraries, a public healthcare system, public housing (cut since 1980 as labor became weaker as it sang the Democrat-Republican capitalist tune) and labor contracts that forbid discrimination on the job due to color, gender or sexual orientation. Only a strong labor movement can end police killings, police brutality, the death penalty and the prison-punishment system because the entire police state exists to terrorize and divide the workingclass to prevent labor organizing as labor organizing threatens the profits of the capitalist class, maximization of profits being the primary goal of the bankrupt social order in which we live, capitalism.

If you want to end racism, police killings, the prison system and all the other ills that adversely affect the entire workingclass, you have to do or support labor organizing. When Barack Obama took over bankrupt General Motors, he cut the workers’ wages in half, further impoverishing the black and the rest of the workingclass. Barack Obama is part of the capitalist reactionary tradition, contrary to Angela Davis, who should know better. At the very least, read labor history, and always read the history of the people whom you are honoring before you do so.