Angela Davis in Auburn

By Stephen Burke

Apublic service announcement currently airing on public radio in central New York publicizes an event featuring Angela Davis, the scholar and political activist, in commemoration of the Juneteenth holiday.

A partisan Ithacan might anticipate the event would be here. Ithaca has a prominent Black community in its downtown Southside neighborhood, anchored by the St. James A.M.E. Zion Church on Cleveland Avenue, established almost 200 years ago, the oldest existing church building in Ithaca, a significant stop on the Underground Railroad in the nineteenth century for Blacks escaping enslavement.

Cornell University in Ithaca has the Africana Center, a leading study and research center in Black history and culture.

In fact, Ms. Davis has spoken multiple times in Ithaca in college settings, at both Cornell and Ithaca College. But her appearance this June will be 40 miles north, in Auburn.

It is a fitting location. Auburn has a deep connection with Black history as the chosen home of Harriet Tubman, the legendary abolitionist and social activist who, having escaped slavery in Maryland at age 27 in 1849, returned south multiple times, facing recapture and death, to lead scores of enslaved people north to freedom.

In 1859 Tubman purchased a home in Auburn from WIlliam Seward, then U.S. senator from New York. Seward was a committed abolitionist who in his own home, near Tubman’s, harbored fugitives from slavery — a felony — despite his position and presidential aspirations. (In 1860 Seward was the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination; he lost in a major upset to Abraham Lincoln.) Tubman lived in Auburn until her death in 1913.

As Tubman was enslaved for her race, and faced imprisonment and death for her work of liberation after her escape, Angela Davis was a target for the power structure of her time for her political beliefs and work as a Black woman.

In 1969, to much publicity, Davis was fired from her teaching position at UCLA for her political affiliations. Subject to death threats, she purchased guns that she said were used by a number of people for her security.

In August, 1970 a California courthouse was seized and hostages taken by men Davis knew with guns she owned, and deaths occurred in a shootout.

Davis said she had no involvement in nor any prior knowledge of the event. But when a judge ordered her arrest she went into hiding. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover placed her on the agency’s Ten Most Wanted list. She fled California and, in a modernday Underground Railroad escape, changed her appearance, hid in friends’ homes, and traveled by night cross-country to New York, where she had previously lived.

Within two months she was arrested in a Howard Johnson’s in New York City. She was unarmed and offered no resistance. President Richard Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.”

Davis was incarcerated for a year and a half pre-trial. At trial she was found innocent of all charges in just 18 hours of deliberation.

Davis says that imprisonment focused her attention on issues of mass incarceration. In her 2003 book “Are Prisons Obsolete?” Davis notes that prison populations increased an astounding ten-fold since the time of her incarceration, and while no prisons were built in California in the 1970s, in the 1980s their number doubled. She speaks of the “racial disproportion” of prison populations and the “criminalization of communities” of people of color and the poor.

Davis adopts the nomenclature of Tubman’s era in speaking of the need for “abolition” of a system she calls a “prison industrial complex” that doesn’t work to stem crime or provide public safety, but acts to “lock away in cages” millions of prisoners, “sources of profit who consume and produce all kinds of commodities, devouring public funds which might otherwise be available for social programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug programs” which might actually reduce crime.

Davis emphasizes that there is “no one single alternative” to prisons, instead this “array of alternatives.” She says her work is to “create new contexts and propose new vocabularies that would encourage broader numbers of people to be more receptive to abolitionist ideas.”