Cambridge University should be ashamed of itself for honoring Angela Davis

Remember Angela Davis? Few people under fifty do. Was Cambridge University counting on that historical ignorance when it decided to honor Angela Davis with an honorary degree?  

In case you, Dear Reader, are a little fuzzy about Davis, I note for the record that the former Black Panther and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall is the recipient of many honors, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize. 

Cambridge University, of course, has long demonstrated a certain fondness for Commies, as the names “Kim Philby,” “Guy Burgess” and “Anthony Blunt” remind us. But as far as I have been able to discover, Angela Davis is the first person who appeared on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list to have been honored by Cambridge.

After a middle-class upbringing that included college at Brandeis (where she fell under the spell of the Frankfurt School Marxist guru Herbert Marcuse) and postgraduate work in Europe, Ms. Davis emerged as a doyenne of the violent, revolutionary fringe of 1960s radicalism. In 1970 she became romantically involved with George Jackson, a career criminal and Black Panther serving time in Soledad Prison for armed robbery.

In 1970, Jackson was one of several prisoners implicated in the murder of a prison guard. That August, Jackson’s 17-year-old brother Jonathan burst into a Marin County courthouse during a trial. He distributed arms to the defendants and took the judge, the prosecutor and at least one juror hostage. Some of the weapons, as later testimony at her trial revealed, had been bought by Davis two days before. Jonathan intended to trade the hostages for the release of his brother and then flee to Cuba.

In what became a shootout, Jonathan and two of the defendants were killed. The judge’s head was blown off by a shotgun taped under his chin. Another hostage was paralyzed for life. In 1971, in a detail omitted by “Free Angela,” a documentary about Davis’s life, George Jackson and several other inmates murdered three prison guards and two white inmates, before being shot himself.

After the bloody courthouse melee, Davis fled and went underground. The FBI apprehended her in New York some months later. “Free Angela” argues that she was prosecuted because she was a Communist and black. In fact, she was prosecuted as a material accessory to murder.

How did she get off? In part, for the same reason that O. J. Simpson got off: celebrity, edged with racial grievance mongering. There was also the temper of the times. When she was apprehended, a hue and cry went around the world – especially in precincts hostile to American interests.

The spectacle of Angela Davis being honored at one of England’s most storied universities is partly ironical, partly contemptible. The irony emerged from the discrepancy between the now-rancid radical rhetoric and comfy bourgeois reality, underwritten by capitalist enterprise. Things are “really, really rotten” in the United States, Davis insists.

But not, of course, for her. When she was in prison awaiting trial, an unidentified farmer pledged his property to raise the $100,000 bail to secure Ms. Davis’s release. 

Angela Davis travels the world these days collecting honors. She once supported the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan while refusing to speak up for political prisoners in socialist countries. Naturally, she championed the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements and regularly derides the police and capitalist West, mouthing radical slogans that, if acted upon, would destroy the civilization that coddles her. Cambridge University should be ashamed of itself, but of course the sense of shame is an early casualty of wokeness, a toxic ideology to which Britain is surrendering just as America is waking up from wokeness.