Angela Davis: Heads She Wins, Tails They Lose

Wellington’s words “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won” are particularly apposite as a comment on the outcome of the trial of Miss Angela Davis, which will now be made the subject of very nearly as much random agitation of the uvula on the part of the far Left as would have been the case if she had been convicted. Had she been found guilty, the verdict would have been proclaimed a perversion of justice on the part of racist America, and the judge and jury denounced as the willing tools of a conspiracy to destroy those brave freedom fighters who are struggling to liberate the United States from such abominable indignities as elections, free speech, open justice etc. and to substitute for these shackles of imperialism an immeasurably more democratic system like that enjoyed at present by the citizens of, say, Czechoslovakia. Her acquittal on all the charges against her might be thought to have made such an argument difficult to deploy, but those who think so must have forgotten the scene in Arthur Koestler’s Age of Longing in which the Russian delegate (clearly meant to be Ehrenburg) to the Western protest-meeting, when halfway through his speech, gets a message whispered to him by a Soviet official, and without pause or noticeable discomfiture puts his typescript back in his left-hand breast pocket, draws a similar-looking packet from his right-hand one, and proceeds to deliver the second half of a speech containing sentiments of an exactly opposite persuasion to those expressed in the first half of the speech he has just been making.

So will it now be with Miss Davis. The argument was that she could not possibly expect a fair trial or an acquittal; those who argued thus will now be no more abashed than was Mr. Kingman Brewster, President of Yale University, when he announced that it was impossible for any Negro to get a fair trial in the United States and had the doubtless mortifying experience of seeing the particular Negro whose trial had given rise to his idiotic remark acquitted almost before he had finished uttering it, though without, so far as I know, causing Mr. Brewster to offer any explanation let alone apology. The argument will now simply be turned on its head, and the acquittal hailed as a victory, achieved by those who demanded it, over the forces of imperialist reaction which were compelled to retreat in the face of international working-class solidarity. Exit Angela the Blessed Martyr, shamefully done to death by fascism; enter Angela the living Soul Sister, liberated by her comrades from an otherwise certain death on the scaffold.

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Bernard Levin

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Wellington’s words “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won” are particularly apposite as a comment on the outcome of the trial of Miss Angela Davis, which will now be made the subject of very nearly as much random agitation of the uvula on the part of the far Left as would have been the case if she had been convicted. Had she been found guilty, the verdict would have been proclaimed a perversion of justice on the part of racist America, and the judge and jury denounced as the willing tools of a conspiracy to destroy those brave freedom fighters who are struggling to liberate the United States from such abominable indignities as elections, free speech, open justice etc. and to substitute for these shackles of imperialism an immeasurably more democratic system like that enjoyed at present by the citizens of, say, Czechoslovakia. Her acquittal on all the charges against her might be thought to have made such an argument difficult to deploy, but those who think so must have forgotten the scene in Arthur Koestler’s Age of Longing in which the Russian delegate (clearly meant to be Ehrenburg) to the Western protest-meeting, when halfway through his speech, gets a message whispered to him by a Soviet official, and without pause or noticeable discomfiture puts his typescript back in his left-hand breast pocket, draws a similar-looking packet from his right-hand one, and proceeds to deliver the second half of a speech containing sentiments of an exactly opposite persuasion to those expressed in the first half of the speech he has just been making.

So will it now be with Miss Davis. The argument was that she could not possibly expect a fair trial or an acquittal; those who argued thus will now be no more abashed than was Mr. Kingman Brewster, President of Yale University, when he announced that it was impossible for any Negro to get a fair trial in the United States and had the doubtless mortifying experience of seeing the particular Negro whose trial had given rise to his idiotic remark acquitted almost before he had finished uttering it, though without, so far as I know, causing Mr. Brewster to offer any explanation let alone apology. The argument will now simply be turned on its head, and the acquittal hailed as a victory, achieved by those who demanded it, over the forces of imperialist reaction which were compelled to retreat in the face of international working-class solidarity. Exit Angela the Blessed Martyr, shamefully done to death by fascism; enter Angela the living Soul Sister, liberated by her comrades from an otherwise certain death on the scaffold.