DURHAM -- Angela Davis, who for an earlier generation embodied radical thought put into action, galvanized a mostly younger audience Monday with rebukes against President Bush, conservatives generally and the death penalty.

The capacity crowd in Duke's Page Auditorium repeatedly applauded Davis' call to art, education and activism and to "stand together in a progressive and radical context." Hers was the keynote address for a series of campus observances at Duke of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

In the wide-ranging speech, Davis, 60, invoked King and other activists through the decades for civil and human rights, touching on contributions as well of artists, philosophers and musicians.

If King were alive today, Davis said, he would admonish Bush's hypocrisy in "spreading war and torture and capitalist exploitation" in the name of democracy and freedom.

"They do not defend democracy and freedom but are possibly the greatest threats to democracy and freedom," she said.

Davis is a professor in the history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on Marxist critical theory and feminism.

She became a radical cause célèbre in 1969 when she was removed from a teaching position at UCLA because of her Communist Party affiliation. The next year she was charged with participating in a plot to kidnap a judge in exchange for prison inmate George Jackson, whose case she had championed. Jackson's 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, using guns registered to Davis, burst into a Marin County, Calif., courtroom. The judge, Jonathan Jackson and two prisoners were killed.

After two months on the FBI's most-wanted list, Davis was arrested and, after 18 months in jail awaiting trial, acquitted of any involvement.

Davis ran for U.S. vice president on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984.

Quoting a 1915 observation about German propaganda under Otto von Bismarck that clothed its aggressive expansionism as defense of the "fatherland," Davis paralleled the tactic with Bush's war rhetoric of defending the American homeland, abetted by a "dominant post-9/11 jingoism."

"The project to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East is a thinly veiled plan to make that region safe for capitalism," Davis said.

Davis criticized the U.S. news media as well.

"Why is it so difficult to give attention to more than one event at a time?" she asked, while challenging her audience to look beyond the headlines in such stories as Charles Graner's conviction of abusing prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Rather than accepting that Graner's was an isolated case of a "bad apple," Davis said, people should view the episode in the context of abuses of inmates in American prisons. But American injustices always seem to slip past a short attention span, she said.

"We are encouraged always to forget about gross violations of human rights," Davis said. "But this does not mean the world has forgotten."

Not only do Americans think little about how U.S. policy affects other nations, but they are ill-served by the media in learning about efforts at international cooperation, she said.

Did the audience know about the World Social Forum that, 10 days hence, will bring together tens of thousands of people in Brazil from around the world?

Apart from a single shout, possibly for the mention of Brazil, almost no one seemed to.

"Has it been in the news in Durham?"

The audience murmured negatively.

"Has it been in the school newspaper?"

Loud chuckling.

The forum, according to its Web site, is an "open meeting place" dedicated to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist thinking and debate.

Americans might be surprised by the degree to which people of other countries find it "incomprehensible that the death penalty is still used in this country," Davis said.

"There's a reason it's still around, and that reason has to do with slavery," she said, noting that it is applied disproportionately to black defendants and those convicted of killing whites.

Not that Bush doesn't have his international fellow travelers, she said. She cited the case of Rocco Butiglione, the Italian politician rejected by the European Parliament as minister of justice, freedom and security because he voiced opposition to abortion and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons. Butiglione then suggested that Christians lack freedom in Europe, Davis said.

The audience snickered.

Past civil rights heroes paid homage by Davis included Reps. Shirley Chisholm, who died Jan. 1, and John Conyers, who pushed for a King Day annually since 1968, when King was gunned down, until 1983, when it finally was enacted by Congress.

Also, she recalled James Forman, who died Jan. 10. Forman, former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, "was also, I think, the first to call for reparations [for slavery], in 1969" Davis said, to a smattering of applause. "The amount, he said, should be $500 million, which would be paid by white churches."

And she played a recording of Stevie Wonder's 1980 song "Happy Birthday," dedicated to King.

That brought a lot of people into the campaign" to declare the holiday, Davis said.

Davis also spoke in the Triangle in 1997, at UNC's Black Cultural Center.

Duke senior Kori Jones, who minors in African and African-American studies, said she had been inspired by hearing Davis previously.

"She's one of the most important and integral women in African-American history," Jones said as she waited for Monday's speech to begin.

"She's done a lot of good things for the race and people in general," Jones said. "She's an awesome speaker."

© 2005 The Durham Herald Company

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