By Linda Weiford, WSU News
PULLMAN, WASH. – Angela Davis still draws big crowds. Not in the streets where young people raise fists and sport peace signs but inside universities where audiences hail from all ages, all races.
Just two days short of her 71st birthday, the renowned scholar and social justice activist who was a public face of the ‘70s black power movement spoke before a crowd of more than 1,000 at Washington State University Thursday night.
Humble, humorous and at times spirited, Davis addressed social justice issues spanning a half century, including the 1963 bombing of an African American church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four girls, the election of our nation’s first black president and the police shooting deaths in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City.
Davis, a distinguished professor emerita at UC, Santa Cruz where she taught for 15 years, was the keynote speaker of WSU’s 28th Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration.
“We all have a dream, don’t we?” she asked the crowd, which gave several standing ovations during her talk.
Davis drew on her experiences in the early 1970s when she spent 18 months in prison awaiting trial for what turned out to be false murder and kidnap charges. During that time, groups in the U.S. and abroad organized a “Free Angela” movement to draw attention to her wrongful imprisonment. In 1972, an all-white jury acquitted her.
“Had it not been for the movement that emerged, I doubt I’d be standing here today,” she said, adding that when it comes to bringing about social change, “nothing happens by itself.”
Everyday people can make sweeping changes, she told the audience, not just prominently-known leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.
As an example, Davis referred to the Freedom Summer of 1964, when busloads of mostly college students descended on Mississippi and other parts of the Deep South where blacks risked being beaten for simply trying to vote. Citizens’ lives were irrevocably changed — and even saved – as a result of that volunteer movement, she said.
“The heroism of ordinary people” led to President Lyndon B. Johnson ultimately signing the Civil Rights Act into law, she explained.
And it was that same sort of heroism that led to the nation’s first black president being elected 44 years later.
“Young people refused to accept that it was impossible to elect someone like Barack Obama,” she said. “The fact that he was elected was a sign that movements work.”