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A review by kevin_shepherd
If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance by Angela Y. Davis
5.0
“…we must fight for your life as though it were our own, which it is, and render impossible with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For if they take you in the morning they will be coming for us that night.” -James Baldwin, An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis
Angela Davis was jailed from 1970 to 1972 awaiting trial on charges for which she was eventually acquitted. In this, her first book, she presents a powerful indictment of America’s so-called “correctional custody” institutions and the racist policing of Black citizens which served to keep those institutions at maximum capacity.
This collection of essays, letters, legal arguments and written declarations, authored by the likes of Angela Davis, George Jackson, Margaret Burnham, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Erica Huggins, Jessica Mitford and others, collectively exposed the bigotry and brutality of existent, police-state procedurals.
1971 - Davis, a highly respected college professor with no previous criminal history, alleged that she incurred the wrath of the Nixon/Reagan establishment simply because she was black, intellectual and communist. She was, by the strictest of legal definitions, a political prisoner. Had she been convicted on the bogus charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy she would have most likely received a death sentence.
“You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.” -Huey P. Newton
The assertion here is that the prison-industrial complex, as a whole, has always served to prevent the have-nots from encroaching on the haves. As such, the framing of innocent individuals is a powerful tool. There was (and probably still is) a veritable army of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted human beings wasting away behind bars, a substantial percentage of which are Black. Had Angela Davis not been a high profile and distinguished icon of a movement she might have easily become just another statistic in a deluge of criminal and political injustices.
The testimonials are here. Read and decide for yourself.
Angela Davis was jailed from 1970 to 1972 awaiting trial on charges for which she was eventually acquitted. In this, her first book, she presents a powerful indictment of America’s so-called “correctional custody” institutions and the racist policing of Black citizens which served to keep those institutions at maximum capacity.
This collection of essays, letters, legal arguments and written declarations, authored by the likes of Angela Davis, George Jackson, Margaret Burnham, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Erica Huggins, Jessica Mitford and others, collectively exposed the bigotry and brutality of existent, police-state procedurals.
1971 - Davis, a highly respected college professor with no previous criminal history, alleged that she incurred the wrath of the Nixon/Reagan establishment simply because she was black, intellectual and communist. She was, by the strictest of legal definitions, a political prisoner. Had she been convicted on the bogus charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy she would have most likely received a death sentence.
“You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.” -Huey P. Newton
The assertion here is that the prison-industrial complex, as a whole, has always served to prevent the have-nots from encroaching on the haves. As such, the framing of innocent individuals is a powerful tool. There was (and probably still is) a veritable army of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted human beings wasting away behind bars, a substantial percentage of which are Black. Had Angela Davis not been a high profile and distinguished icon of a movement she might have easily become just another statistic in a deluge of criminal and political injustices.
The testimonials are here. Read and decide for yourself.