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Show MZeiX A 21 Tuesday, October 27, 1970 DESERET NEWS, Transformation From Girl To Radical EDITOR'S NOTE: For Angela Davis the journey to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List and jail began in Birmingham, Ala. En route she left behind a brilliant academic record and the admiration and praise of scholars. What turnings did she take that led to a jail cell? Following is a comprehensive look at the life of Angela Davis and the influences which shaped her. By JULES LOH AP Newsfeatures Writer Youve gat it all, African woman. Youre the most powerful stimulus I could have. So wrote George Jackson, a Hack revolutionary accused of murder, last spring from his cell in Californias Soledad prison to the young woman whi. i he called his tender experience: Angela Davis. At 26. Angela Davis did indeed seem to have it all. She was brilliant. Magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at Brandeis University; a dissertation away from a doctorate at the University of California ; philt, the osophy instructor University of California at Los Angeles. She was attractive. Tall, slender, with chiseled features. While she was studying in Paris men often flirted with her on the street; she paid them no mind. She was articulate. In her classes she rarely consulted notes yet her lectures were cogent and she seldom had to search for the precise word. Asked to 3 evaluate her as a teacher, 87 percent of her students said excellent. She was, relatively speaking, privileged. Her parents, both college graduates, were considered well off for Birmingham, Ala., blacks and lived in one of the more prestigious middle-clas- s black neighborhoods. Stimulus? Angela Davis was that, too. With absolute confidence in the rightness of her judgments she could stir an audience to her own level of intensity for a cause. When she herself became a cause fired from her teaching position for the admitting she was a Communist academic community reacted with a solidarity perhaps unequaled since the days of the loyalty oath. That was a shock to all who knew her, Angela Davis saying she was a Communist. Throughout her school days she had not mixed in politics, had stayed away from student demonstrations. Intellectuals, not activists, were her close friends, Angela Davis had steeped herself in the works of Marx and Hegel but if she took seriously Hegels dictum that Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion she managed to hide it. Angela was aloof, a loner, said her adviser at Brandeis, Murray Sachs. Last January, as suddenly as a volcano, Angela Davis erupted with an out- pouring of passion that elevated her to the rank of heroine among black radicals of the New Left and graying patrons of the Old. s, She not only participated in she led them. She took up the cause of George Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers, spoke at rallies, told demon-straton- street - corner audiences that the sys- tem of capitalism has to be done away with. At length Angela Davis w'as hunted down as one of the FBIs most wanted fugitives, accused of purchasing four guns used in last Augusts Marin County courthouse raid in California that re sulted in the deaths of four persons. What pushed this glamorous offspring of the black bourgeoisie to the outer limits of the political spectrum? No one event, no one teacher, no one persuasive philosophical tract. Combing Angela Davis background for clues one discovers many, but by her own assessment and that of others who knew her intimately several incidents deeply influenced the course of her life. There was that day of horror in Birmingham, a clear fall morning in 1963, when a bomb exploded in the basement of a church and took the lives of four little girls. Angela knew the girls; one was a next-doo- r neighbor. The bombing, said Angela Davis, affected me definitely, in a political sense." , There were her years of tutelage by Herbert Marcuse, philosopher of the New Left, and by Theodore Adorno, the shining light of the Frankfurt school of Marxism. There was the chaining and gagging of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in a Chicago courtroom and the shackling of the defendants in the Soledad prison murder case. Completely outrageous, Angela Davis complained, completely against what this country allegedly stands for. And there were other incidents, other ... influences. Angela Yvonne Davis was bom in Bir- mingham Jan. 26, 1944 in an all-bla- "If I have to lose my life in the struggle, well, then, that's the way it will have to be . . Angela Davis - by a $42,000 renovation of the Federal Trade Commission chairmans office, a House subcommittee has WASHINGTON Astounded ordered a probe into all the plush new furnishings of Nixon administrat- ion bureaucrats. The investigation presumably will include Attorney General John Mitchells Depart-me- n t a 1 kitchen Mr. Anderson where his wife Martha has had expensive food warmers installed, and the steamy confines of Interior Secretary Walter Hickels sauna. But it was the $42,000 FTC refurbishing which outraged Rep. John Dingell, chairman of a House regulatory agencies subcommittee. Dihgell asked the General Accounting Office to peer into all government executive suites. The study will determine the extent 1o which taxpayers' money is being squandered on the lavish personal whims cf government officials, says a confidential staff memorandum prepared by the Dingell subcommittee. The memo deals mainly with Chairman Caspar Weinbergers brief tenure at the FTC, during which he gave American consumers their best representation ever, but got extravagant with the furnishings. He had a reputation, says the memo, of being an extremely frugal and tight-fisteadministrator with regard to tax funds (but) his standards of frugality appear to be somewhat more lax with regard to his own personal d needs. Weinberger had the FTC buy him a desk, a 52,930 conference table, a 51.463 credenza ar.d 51,230 bookcases. The subcommittee memo says the purchases may have violated the law by not being taken from available federal stock S2.8G0 I lists. If Dingell was astonished about the price tag, he was outraged be-- J cause Weinberger took many of the prize ,,$42,000 ! i, Immersed herself In French literature and in her junior year qualified under a Hamilton College program to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and in the South of France at Biarritz. Back at Brandeis, Angela Davis chose as the subject of her honors thesis a study of the works of French novelist Alain Robbe-Grille- t. Why him? His books did not follow the traditional forms of the novel, she discovered, and exemplified, to her, the overwhelming need to learn and understand contemporary society whose structures no longer correspond with old myths. She asked in her thesis: Does literature possess the potential man of realizing the task of and the society, in which he lives? And she answered with a quotation from critic Northrop Frye: Every socWy is the embodiment of a myth, and as the artist is the shaper of myth, there is a sense in which he holds in his hand the thunderbolts that destroy one society and create another. While working on her thesis Angela studied philosophy under Marxist Herbert Marcuse. As she did, her interest seemed to shift from the nuances of French literature to the harsh tenets of radical philosophers. After graduation she went to Germany to study two years under Adorno, Marcuses collaborator, at the Marxist - oriented Institute of Social Research at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 1968 Angela completed work on her masters degree and followed Marcuse to the University of California at San Diego to begm work on her doctorate. She completed all the requirements in a years time, astonishingly, and chose as the subject of her dissertation Th. problem of violence and German idealism. But Angela Davis never found the 7 time to write her dissertation because events began to swirl around her. gave way to activisim. She joined the Communist party. She Club, a Marxist-oriente- d joined the organization of black people. commitment as a group cf black people using Marxist printhats what ciples for social change really impressed me, Angela told a friend from Brandeis, Eileen Foley. And she told The Associated Press later, I feel that the most important part of my life ought to be devoted to the struggle for equality of all peoples, the struggle for economic equality, the struggle for olack liberation. Princeton University and Swarthmore College invited Angela for interviews for a teaching job and Swarthmore made an offer, but Angela decided in July .1969 to accept another offer, from UCLA, because of its urban location and large black community. Almost as soon as she arrived the word went out that she was a Communist, a fact Angela Davis had never denied and which she confirmed for the benefit of the California Board of Regents the following September. As the tumult with the regents raged, her philosophy course became more popular then ever. When the class size grew unwieldy she divided it and taught the same material twice. All her lectures were taped. Eventually she was fired. Though retained as an investigator for the Soledad Brothers, Angela was denied permission to interview the prisoners. That, according to Fay Stender, a white woman attorney who is DO DT IM1AN You may write to school, was Girl Scout troop neighborhood. The South was just awful, Angela all-bla- all-bla- all-bla- Davis told a Northern classmate years later. When my mothers white friends visited we had to hide them so we wouldnt get bombed. After two years at Parker High, she was chosen for a scholarship to Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York under an American Friends Service Committee program which plucked promising black students out of segregated schools and sent them to the North. The Irwin school in Greenwich Village was a far cry from any educational experience Angela had known in Birmingham. Pupils wore jeans, called teachers by their first names, took class trips to places like Walden Pond. It became clear to Angela early on that she was academically far behind her classmates. She had no training in a foreign language, for instance. Her response to the challenge was to choose French as a major subject She excelled. In New York Angela lived at the home of the Rev. William Melish, a white Episcopal minister who, during the McCarthy era, had spent nine days testifying before a congressional committee and, though he denied being a Communist, had lost his ministerial post. According to a classmate, Angela thought extremely highly of the Melishes. Then Angela graduated from Irwin High with distinction and won a scholarship to Brandeis. At Brandeis, Angela pieces, including the $2,800 desk, to his new job budget head at the White House, leaving FTC to purchase still more furniture. When an Commented the memo: agency with limited budget such as the FTC must pay for this furniture out of its own operating expenses, and it is then moved to the executive branch, (this) must be of serious concern to the Congress and to the public. Part of the blame for Weinbergers extravagance rests with Commissioner Paul Rand Dixon, the jovial old walrus who presided over the FTC before Weinberger. Dixon refused to move out of the chairmans office when his term ended. Weinberger, therefore, had to seek other quarters which he claimed needed new furnishings. Reached at his new job, Weinberger said he had delegated to his administrators the furnishing of his FTC office and that he knew no details of the costs. On making off with the furniture, Weinberger said he understood it was customary for incoming budget office deputy directors to bring desks and chairs with them when they came from another government job, since the U.S. Treasury paid either way. Weinberger implied the Dingell probe stemmed from congressional anger over Weinbergers removal of a number of patronage FTC employees. Maybe we didnt appoint the men the Congress wanted, he said philosophically. Dingell himself has scrupulously avoided any interference with FTC personnel problems. Note: Dingells committee may want to take a look at the executive suite at the Federal1 Aviation Administration where the resident bureaucrats recently managed to spend more than $20,000 on refurbishing without buying a stick of new furniture. Asked about the extravagance on logs and repainting, FAA officials at first denied that any such amount had been spent. Pressed, they finally acknowledged it, but insisted the renovation was needed. Insiders have informed this column, however, that much of the work was unnecessary. YOUR HEALTH Hunners Is A Sneaky Type Ulcei BY GEORGE C. THOSTESON, M.D. Dear Dr. Thosteson: Can you give me information about Hunners ulcer? I had never heard of it until that was diagnosed as my trouble. Are these ulcers curable? Is there any danger of their being malignant? What causes them? O.C. These are sneaky things, small ulcers of the bladder which occur as part of an not attack of infection of the bladder that all such infections produce the ulcers, of course. I describe them as sneaky because they are so small that they can escape being found unless the bladder is distended in the course of a cystoscopic examination of the bladder. Then they become visible as tiny bleeding points In the bladder wall. They do not have any special tendency to become malignant, but they are not fun to possess. Principal symptoms are frequency of and distress during urination. The discomfort is worse when the and because the bladder is distended infection, and accompanying swelling of tissues', reduces the capacity of the bladder, distension occurs more often. These ulcers are stubborn beasts. The underlying infection, of course, needs to be overcome. In addition, the ulcers can be treated locally by fuiguration (a form of the electric needle technique) or by introducing medication into the bladder. The ulcers and bladder infections have an unwelcome knack of becoming chronic. Symptoms may wane, then return, and the wise thing to do with this sort of trouble is not to expect a single course of treatment to cure it all. Keep a weather eye out for any recurrence, and start treatment without delay. Box 12 57 Salt lake City, Utah 84110 Subtle Shakedown On Luggage Over Recently we had a friend arrie at the S.L. airport. She gave me her luggage claim tickets. I waited by the conveyor but no luggage. A skycap made a few remarks about what I didnt know about luggage. Then about 20 minutes later he said he might know where it was. He then went into the backroom and there it was stored. En route there were several suggestions that such effort required a fee of eight bits ($1.00). We, obviously, didnt pay for what appeared to be a shakedown. We lodged a complaint wth the airlines but they claimed the luggage came in on an earlier flight. We doubt this. We wonder how many times this subtle shakedown is taking place at the airp'rt? T.S., Orem. . . . Know what? Youre right! This was revealed by investigation by airport officials. Policy is no fees for any additional service to the traveling public. Such sugger lions as made to you are com- pletely out of order. Corrective actions were taken in regard to this particular incident and it will not happen again. You have the thanks of the airpoi. man-- . ager and the airline involved for letting us know so we could let them know. Intel-lectualis- m hospital, attended an a member of an and lived in an Plush Furnishings Spur Solon Probe By JACK ANDERSON .tv Refund Check Mailed On April Self-profess- Communist in Angela Davis shown just offer her arrest New York City. for one of the three, was a contributing factor in the radicalization of Angela Davis. She knew the Constitution, Mrs. Stender said. It seems to me the thing she saw here was the fact that the official theory of the Constitution, the talk about due process, that there is equal justice and protection under the law, is a are beginning to wake up to the fact that we have to talk about radical solution. And just before the Soledad case. The first condition of freedom is the open act of resistance. Physical resistance. Violent resistance. The road toward freedom, the path of liberation, is marked by resistance at every crossroad. lie. Ar.d just after the Soledad case: We have to talk about going into the Angela Daviss own words seem to indicate that the turning point was some streets but this time we have to talk time early this year and that it was a about going with the masses of people, gradual process; she herself said there with the millions of people, and demandwas no precise moment when she adopt- ing our rights. Because if we do not do ed a totally revolutionary stance. this at this point . . . then I think we can A year previous to the Soledad case very well talk about an era of facism Angela Davis had told a group of stucoming into being. Its up to us. Its our dents at San Diego State College : responsibility to prevent this from comAs a Communist I have to seek radiing about Its our responsibility to stand cal change and as I see it capitalism does up and resist and fight right here and not contain the solution of our problems now. The making of a radical was comtoday. Capitalism can provide only a token way of solving problems. People plete. News Spot: Quebec Making Of A Crisis - Most Canadi, MONTREAL (NFS) ans, like most other people in the world, regarded the recent terrorist kidnapings by a tiny band of radicals known as the Front for the Liberation of Quebec with total outrage. Even the most ardent proponents of separatism for the Province of Quebec have preferred to voice their grievances in rhetoric and at the polls rather than with guns and bombs. Unrepresentative as they are, however, the FLQs vicious tactics did bring to a boil an issue that has been simmering in Canada for more than 200 years. sentiments have been Separatist endemic in Canada since its founding. When, through the Treaty of Paris, France ceded its Canadian possessions to Britain in 1763, 70,000 Frenchmen lived in the vast nation. Suspicious then of Anglo-Saxo- n domination, they have tried ever since to retain some semblance of cultural unity. It has been an uphill fight. In 1791, the British tried to mollity French Candians inhabitby establishing Upper Canada s and ed and governed by Lower Canada which, theoretically, was n to be governed by its inhabitants. But even then, the British were loath to let the French have much say. Though French colonists outnumbered British by 15 to 1, the British were granted 16 of the 50 seats in the Lower Canada assembly and kept a firm grip on almost all the offices in the government. down Still, through the years, Canadians of all stripes have managed to coexist in relative harmony. The French have continued to speak French, but Anglo-Saxon- French-Canadia- those who advocated complete separatism for Quebec (where 87 per cent of the Ls classified as population have traditionally boon regarded as a somewhat far-ofringe group. French-speakin- That minority has enjoyed periodic spurts of growth, especially during Ihe two world wars when the found a convenient handle in decrying Canadian participation in British wars. French-Canadia- Terrorism in the name of freedom for a relatively new phenomenon. It began in the early 1960s when the more fervent Quebec nationalists decided that political means were no longer efQuebec is fective. The FLQ was born then, as an outgrowth of the more moderate Rassemble-men- t pour llndependence Nationale, and the first targets for its bombings were Symbolic rather than practical: mailboxes that bore the Royal Coat of Arms, statues and the like. Inadvertently or not, French President Charles de Gaulle gave the FLQ a boost in 1967 when he stood on the balcony of the Montreal City Hall and bellowed, Vive le Quebec libre! (Long live free Quebec.) to a point The bombings continued where they came to be regarded almost as an accepted thorn in the governments side. (The six fatalities were all unintentional.) Bui for the past couple of years, the perpetrators have seemed to grow ever farther from the mainstream of Quebec separatist thought. After all, the new Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, is and as eloquent in French as in English. If he has gone slightly establishno longer calling for quick and ment drastic change as he did a few years ago he has still represented the hope for a fair share of their countrys power. But even Trudeau has been unable to s shake what many half-Fren- French-Canadia- French-Canadian- regard as an unfair dominance of political and economic life by the Anglos. d In Montreal, for instance, Canadians comprise only a sixth of the population of 6 million, yet a Royal commission recently found that they earn more than their French counterparts and held a disproportionate number of the best jobs. are 80 per cent of one complained Quebecs population, but the Angles moderate separatist, have all the money, all the jobs and all the power. English-descende- French-Canadia- 1 1 too!: out a policy for hos- pital benefits with the Executive Fund Life Insurance Co., of Omaha. On July 2, my doctor found I had a chest growlh. I went to the hospital and had au exploratory operation and later on a Aug. 6 second one. The insurance company had declined my claim. I told them to cancel the policy and refund me my money for the unexpired premiums. Can you get this? S.II.S., Sait Lake City. They say no pay since the condition causing the hospitalization had its origin not more than 30 days after the effective issue date. They imply they have medical information on which they base this denial but refuse to reveal it because it's confidential. As to refund of the unearned premium, since your policy was cancelled as of Oct. 1, their refund check of $41.65 was mailed to you on that date. You should have by now. If not let them know. He need a magician for a children's Mrs. II.B.S., Salt Lake City. party. Contact VVilford Hinkson, 4648 Nathan Hes secretary of the Circle, Magacians Association here in Utah. 277-938- Is there anyone in the valley who still has hayrides or a wagon or some type of buggy (hat could carry kids around for an evening of fun? B. P., Kearns. Several riding stables in the Yellow pages on Page 524. Warning: Be sure to check on existence of liability insurance. Jt's BBB Problem Can you give me some information on the Jetma Technical Institute who have salesmen going around the area selling course on the Jet mechanics and so forth? C.M., Bountiful. Well answer you but basically this type of question is a problem for the BBB (and thats where we got the answer) since this is not our forte. We are told this school has been in operation since 1957. It is a combined home study s turbine and residential course in engine maintenance. It has met the requirements of the National Home Study Council, Washington, D.C. and has received accreditation from this council. Just a word of advice to all: Always investigate thoroughly any home study and residential course before signing any contracts. Once again questions like this should be sent to the BBB unless there is a specific problem or complaint jet-ga- ' against them. Sidewalks - Your Problem The sidewalks on both sides of 3900 South between 4th East and Stale St., are much lower than the street and the drains are also higher. Therefore in wet weather they are rivers. In the winter the walks are never plowed. The roads are always clean for the motorists, but what about the sidewalks where people walk? C.R.C., Salt Lake City J The sidewalks here are generally below the grade cf the street. There is presently a complete engineering and reconstruction project going forward on 3900 South from State Street to 700 East.' When completed the situation mentioned will be eliminated. As for the snow on sidewalks, despite repeated admonitions from us and county officials, people still ask. The law says that abutting owners must clean the snow from the sidewalks after each storm. It is not the responsibility of the county highway department. (Editor's Note: We'r wrv the number ol and th volume of mail make it impossible to answer very question. Please no medical or leoal questions. envelopes at Don't send stamps or answers can only be qven in this column. Only questions of general interest will be answered and telephone calls can be accepted only on the phone at the hours prescribed. Give your name not tor publicali address and tetohone number but to help Do lt Man help you - |