[Vincent Brown] In April, 1970,
a deadly shooting incident unfolded
at the Marin County courthouse in Northern California.
Law enforcement officers traced guns from the crime scene
to their legal owner: an influential activist, author,
and academic named Angela Yvonne Davis.
They issued a warrant for her arrest.
Suspecting the authorities would not treat her fairly,
she fled.
So the FBI put her on their Most Wanted list,
and circulated this poster.
But the Bureau's attempt to use these photographs
to turn her into a public enemy backfired.
Instead, the figure of Angela Davis
became a powerful symbol
of a popular liberation struggle.
What gave this image its power?
How did its meaning change over time?
What does Professor Davis think?
[slate claps]
[upbeat music]
In the mid-1960s, many young people
grew frustrated by the pace of change in America.
Confronted with deep-seated racism,
entrenched poverty, and the escalation of the Vietnam War,
some believed that socialist revolution
and black power offered the best hope for progress.
This development alarmed the director of the FBI,
J. Edgar Hoover, who pursued an aggressive campaign
against groups he regarded as threats to national security.
By the end of the 1960s,
many Black activists had been imprisoned or killed.
This was the turbulent time when Angela Davis
came to public attention
as a close associate
of the revolutionary Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
In 1969, the University of California Board of Regents
fired her from her post teaching philosophy at UCLA,
denouncing her for inflammatory rhetoric
and association with communism.
The next year, the FBI pursued Davis
in connection to the Marin County courthouse shooting
and circulated her photographs across the country.
There's a long history of using photography
to make Black people look like villains.
So do you know how they made you look
like a criminal in those photos?
- It's clear that they were cropped
in such a way as to resemble mugshots.
But my own sensibility
in recognizing mugshots comes from growing up
in the segregated circumstances of Birmingham, Alabama,
and remembering photographs of Black people in the newspaper --
they were almost always, inevitably, mugshots.
- This is an original wanted poster
of Angela Davis from 1970.
Tens of thousands of which were distributed
across the United States.
- [Vincent] "Wanted by the FBI. Angela Yvonne Davis."
It's funny how all this information is- - [Elizabeth] Yeah.
- reducing her to a type, right?
- "Build: slender." - "Race: negro."
- [Elizabeth] Signed by no other than-
- [Vincent] J. Edgar Hoover.
- [Elizabeth] But this is what's important, right?
That she's a criminal, a kidnapper and a murderer,
in the possession of guns, possibly, and armed and dangerous.
- [Vincent] Mm. - It's not like these are her actual mugshots, right?
But it's really playing up the representation
of Black Power figures, and using that
to drum up fear in the American people.
But also link immediately this activism with crime.
- [Vincent] In the best-known photo,
Davis looks directly into the camera with a sense of fierce determination.
But the most prominent feature of the image is her hair.
You know, a lot of people associate the Afro,
the natural hairstyle, with you.
But there are many, many women, and men,
who wore their hair natural at the time.
In fact, my own mother
wore her hair natural during those years.
- I always find it so ironic that the-
the Afro is associated with me,
because I was emulating other Black women
who were wearing their hair natural.
I read those photographs as an attempt
to depict a kind of generic Black woman.
And then it serves the purpose of literally terrorizing
hundreds and hundreds of young Black women,
because the police associated the Afro,
the natural, with radical politics.
I know that enormous numbers of Black women
were actually stopped by the police
during the period during which they were looking for me.
- [Vincent] The Afro was a radical idea,
even in revolutionary Cuba,
where Davis visited several times.
- [speaking Spanish]
[Angela Davis] There were young people who were asking us,
why were we wearing our hair natural?
And we pointed out that it was a political statement.
And one of the people said,
"Oh, so it's like the beards
that the guerrillas wore during the Cuban Revolution."
And we said, yeah, perhaps, and then they said,
"So when the revolution comes, you'll straighten your hair!"
[both laughing]
- That's not what I was expecting.
- [laughing] Yes, exactly.
- [Vincent] In the U.S., the prominence of Angela Davis' hair on the FBI poster was crucial
to the process of criminalizing her and anyone who resembled her.
The message spread widely,
as the poster appeared in newspapers, at government offices,
and even on the Sunday night TV series, "The FBI."
But it was a popular publication that confirmed Davis
as a menace to society.
- This LIFE magazine cover really made the case,
kind of the national case,
and, in many ways, turned Angela Davis
into public enemy number one.
This is now bringing this "fugitive"
into the homes and stores of the American people.
- [Vincent voiceover] Davis received hate mail --
in at least one instance,
from a group of sixth-grade children,
encouraged to write by a teacher.
[reading] "January 7th, 1971. Miss Angela,
why are you turning against the USA?
How can you even consider it?
You're treated correctly, like anyone else in this country.
I'm white, so I know what you are thinking."
- We only have these letters, right? These traces in this box.
But we can imagine
the lesson that the teacher taught them that really, really
hammered it home was that:
Angela Davis is anti-American.
Angela Davis is a threat to America.
Angela Davis is a terrorist.
- And doesn't belong here. - Exactly.
- [Vincent voiceover] Angela Davis eluded the FBI for two months,
before they finally tracked her down to a hotel in New York
and made an arrest in October, 1970.
By this time, her image had begun to take on a new significance --
not as a criminal, but as a hero.
- When she is the target of this FBI manhunt,
you have all of these different communities
within the Black community who then stand up to rally for her.
And so her image is everywhere,
because she doesn't fit neatly into any one box,
but, simultaneously, she represents everything
that Black people are fighting for in that moment.
- Mm. What does the natural mean
to the Black community at this time?
- In the late 1960s, the Black is Beautiful movement
is thriving, especially in a place like California.
And Angela Davis is in line with a lot of these trends.
That Afro, that large looming Afro,
becomes a symbol of freedom, of what's possible, right?
It's the Black imagination really made possible
on the heads of African Americans.
That freedom 'fro was a marker of pride in ways
that it just hadn't been among the masses
of Black people in that time period.
- [Vincent voiceover] While Davis was in jail,
awaiting trial on capital charges of kidnapping and murder,
her supporters saw her as a political prisoner.
They shared her image on posters, pamphlets, and buttons.
It circulated like a meme,
helping spark an unprecedented international campaign
to demand her freedom.
- This is a really clever campaigning poster
from the London Angela Davis Defence Committee.
And they simply take that wanted poster,
they put it within another poster,
and rather than being something that's tracking her down
and hunting her and positioning her as a dangerous person,
it's the Defence Committee.
It's raising awareness of her situation.
And this is her situation.
Here she's a victim, rather than a perpetrator.
The point is her supporters, we're making her visible
so that she couldn't become invisible through incarceration.
- Ah. - At this point she was in prison,
and the intent is to do what happened
to many other Black radicals -- that she would just disappear.
So these images made her visible.
- [Vincent voiceover] Davis was released on bail in February, 1972.
- All power to the people.
- [Vincent voiceover] When her trial began just days later,
it drew worldwide attention.
In court, Davis admitted to owning the guns used in the shooting,
but argued that she had bought them for self-defense,
and they'd been taken without her knowledge.
The jury agreed.
That June, they acquitted her of all charges.
[music]
The image that was intended to make her appear as a criminal
had also helped to set her free.
In her own words, she had been "freed by the people."
After her acquittal,
the image of Angela Davis receded from public view...
until the 1980s and '90s,
when America saw a revival of Black Power iconography,
led by hip-hop groups like Public Enemy
with their call to "fight the power."
So what did Angela Davis mean to you personally?
- By the time I was coming of age in the 1990s,
Angela Davis was the Afro for a lot of us, right?
We knew something generally about Black Panthers
and 1970s protests,
but what loomed large really was her Afro.
It was iconic.
[music starts]
- [Vincent voiceover] This iteration of Angela Davis's image appeared in music videos,
and became a touchstone
when the Afro returned as a symbol of Black political style.
- So even though some of them then saw Angela Davis,
and she appeared in videos as, like,
this iconic woman wearing an Afro,
I think that they were really trying to channel that spirit,
that spirit of freedom -- freedom by any means necessary.
And that's what Angela Davis came to mean for my generation.
- [Vincent voiceover] It's a meaning this image continues to have today.
You'll find it everywhere, from murals, to T-shirts, to GIFs.
As for Professor Davis herself,
she continued her career -- in politics,
in academia, and in activism,
pursuing a lifelong passion to abolish prisons,
and working to transform society
in order to make incarceration unnecessary.
But she continues to be fascinated by the relationship
between her own life and the life of her image.
- You know, it took me a while
to grasp the way in which
the images existed independently
from who I am.
So I came to see that image as having nothing to do with me
and my particular history, but as standing in
for a movement of millions of people
all over the world, who came together
and accomplished something that was deemed
at that time to be impossible.
- [Vincent voiceover] Over the last 50 years,
Angela Davis has profoundly shaped the national dialogue,
and we can trace the impact of her image
from the Black is Beautiful moment of the 1970s,
all the way to the Movement for Black Lives today.
At least some of that impact
derives from the unintended consequences
of that notorious FBI wanted poster.
- I see the FBI poster as a kind of artifact
from another era for me --
an era when many of us truly believed
that revolution was not only possible,
but that we were on the verge of revolutionary change.
You know, I often point out
that we did not win the revolution --
at least not the revolution we thought we were fighting.
But because we organized and demonstrated
and engaged in the kind of intellectual activity
that's necessary to a movement,
that other changes took place.
The world would be very different
had we not been involved in those struggles.
[light music]
[light music continues]