"Free Angela Davis" ....

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

She was 26, teaching philosophy at UCLA. Four hundred miles away, a 17-year-old carried a bag of guns into a courtroom in Marin County, California.

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson took Judge Harold Haley and several others hostage, attempting to free his brother George and two other imprisoned men.

Police opened fire on the getaway van. Jackson, Judge Haley, and two of the prisoners were killed.

The guns Jackson used were registered to Angela Davis.

She hadn't been at the courthouse. She hadn't planned the raid. Within days, she was one of the most wanted fugitives in the country.

Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, in a neighborhood residents nicknamed Dynamite Hill due to repeated bombings targeting Black families who moved in.

By 1970, she'd already fought and won a legal battle with the University of California over her termination for Communist Party membership.

She'd led the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, supporting three Black inmates, including George Jackson, accused of killing a prison guard.

Jonathan Jackson, George's younger brother, was a member of that same committee.

Here's what almost nobody outside the case fully understood in the days that followed: prosecutors charged her with murder and kidnapping despite her not being present, based on California's rule that anyone complicit in a crime's planning could be charged as a principal.

Why would California issue a murder warrant for a professor who wasn't in the building where the killings happened?

The answer rested entirely on ownership of the weapons, and prosecutors would have to prove intent from that alone.

An arrest warrant was issued on August 14, 1970.

Davis went into hiding rather than surrender.

On August 18, she became the third woman ever placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

President Richard Nixon publicly congratulated the FBI on capturing "the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis" once she was found.

She was arrested at a motel in New York City on October 13, 1970, after roughly two months as a fugitive.

She spent 16 months in custody, much of it in solitary confinement, before being granted bail.

A "Free Angela Davis" movement grew internationally, with public support from Aretha Franklin, who offered to personally cover her bail, and musicians including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who recorded a song in her honor.

A Fresno dairy farmer, Rodger McAfee, put up his own farmland as bail collateral.

Davis was released on bail on February 23, 1972.

Her trial began in March 1972, drawing international press attention. She largely represented herself alongside her legal team, arguing the prosecution's case rested on circumstantial evidence.

On June 4, 1972, an all-white jury in San Jose acquitted her on every charge — conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder.

The prosecution never appealed, and the case was closed permanently on the strength of that verdict.

Davis went on to teach at UC Santa Cruz starting in 1991, later holding a named presidential chair in feminist studies before retiring in 2008.

Angela Davis was named one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives for a courtroom shootout she wasn't present for, and was acquitted by a jury less than two years later.

Across more than 50 years since her trial, her case remains one of the most cited examples in American legal history of the distinction between ownership, association, and criminal intent.

Right now, in ongoing debates about guilt by association and the politics of who gets prosecuted, her case is still one people bring up.

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

Kofi Bilal Mahmud Eid AlFitr 1443 A.H.

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