OPINION:
Angela Davis must have been surprised — we certainly know she was angry — when she learned earlier this month that the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute had rescinded its offer of the organization’s Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award.
Since her heyday in the late 1960s/early ’70s as a Black Panther activist, fugitive from justice and toast of salons and terrorist cells worldwide, the now 74-year-old Davis has grown accustomed to something like sacrosanct status in the decades since. A fixture on the progressive-academic lecture circuit, and tenured professor at University of California at Santa Cruz and Rutgers, she sold a portion of her papers and memorabilia last year to Harvard, where Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. pronounced her “one of the major political theorists of the second half of the 20th century.”
Indeed, Ms. Davis had every reason to expect that, when returning to her birthplace to claim this latest accolade, Birmingham would crown her with laurels. But it didn’t quite work out that way. When Southern Jewish Life, which is published in Alabama, pointed out that Ms. Davis is a longtime supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, as well as Palestinian terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians, Birmingham’s Jewish community protested.
It is worth pointing out, at this juncture, that the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, for whom the award is named, was a longtime associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. So the idea that an apologist for terrorism — not to mention the destruction of the Jewish state — should be the recipient of a “human-rights” award bestowed in the name of the King-Shuttlesworth tradition of nonviolent resistance, is more than a little grotesque.
To its credit, the Civil Rights Institute reached the same conclusion, explaining in a carefully worded understatement that Ms. Davis “does not meet all of the criteria on which the award is based.” Whereupon some members of the Institute’s board resigned in protest and Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin complained (in equally significant language) about “protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies.”
Ms. Davis herself was predictably aggrieved. The award had been offered, she declared, because of her “long-term support for Palestine” — and in a characteristically extravagant claim, its revocation was “not primarily an attack against me but rather against the very spirit of the indivisibility of justice.”
Well, the indivisibility of justice aside, the institute (as of this writing) is standing firm, despite hostile coverage — “a boycott drive put Israel on a blacklist. Now Israel has one of its own” (The New York Times) — and Ms. Davis’ own plans to go to Birmingham next month to attend “an alternative event [with] those who believe that the movement for civil rights in this moment must include a robust discussion of all of the injustices that surround us.”
My own reaction to this episode, I concede, is mixed. On the one hand, if the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is sufficiently obtuse to offer a “human-rights” award to someone like Angela Davis, it ought to be allowed to embarrass itself. At the same time, all credit is due to Southern Jewish Life for pointing out the obvious offense in honoring a lifetime advocate for intolerance and violence in the name of civil rights.
For there is considerably more to Angela Davis than “long-term support for Palestine.” Indeed, Ms. Davis tends to be described in the press, in deceptively general terms, as a onetime activist, civil-rights pioneer and feminist icon. And as Jonathan S. Tobin explained recently in National Review, “like so many other elderly radicals,” her longtime membership in the Communist Party “is now seen as a romantic fling with idealism,” granting Ms. Davis “a patina of respectability in which her radical activities are viewed as part of the struggle for equality in the United States.”
In truth, of course, Ms. Davis’ long history of “activism” has been largely in the service of the opposite of equality. She first came to public prominence, in 1970, for her connection with a Black Panther kidnapping/shootout in a California courtroom in which four people were killed. And in subsequent years, as a celebrity fugitive and loyal Communist, Ms. Davis was happy not only to serve the interests of repressive regimes in East Germany, Cuba, Algeria and the Soviet Union, among others, but was consistently hostile to prisoners of conscience in socialist countries — in particular, Soviet Jews.
This probably explains her “long-term support for Palestine” and allegiance to BDS; but why the media memory lapse about a radical supporter of communist dictatorships and enemy of liberty and justice for all? The question answers itself.
• Philip Terzian, former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.”
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