Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism
2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/701107
ISSN2153-5086
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeResisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison RadicalismMichael CampMichael Camp Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn July 1972, civil rights attorney Howard Moore Jr. wrote to Atlanta lawyer Donald L. Hollowell to discuss his resounding victory in the legal defense of Angela Davis. Davis had recently been acquitted of a number of serious charges—including kidnapping and murder—related to an August 1970 incident at the Marin County Courthouse in California. “They were hanging out there,” said Moore, ostensibly referring to the hapless forces of the prosecution, “and we just chopped them off.”1 Hollowell had served as Moore’s mentor in Atlanta, and Moore seemed extra proud to tell him of this particular legal triumph, although it was certainly not his first big case. The high-profile Davis defense had followed legal work with a number of other prominent clients, including Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond. But more than just defending Davis as an individual, Moore’s work with the trial also represented an opportunity for him to take part in a broader counterattack against perceived inequities and unfair practices in the American criminal justice system, as Moore firmly believed that Davis was an innocent and wrongfully persecuted victim of racist state overreach. For Moore, Davis’s acquittal therefore doubled as a direct blow against the broader forces of racial prejudice in California and—given President Richard Nixon’s clearly stated desire to see her convicted—across the nation as well.This essay discusses Moore’s career in the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which he quickly achieved prominence in the African American legal community. Examining Moore’s early career provides an opportunity to explore the complex position of African American lawyers in American legal history, especially those who hailed from the Southeast, thereby addressing a significant historiographical gap. African American attorneys had played a pivotal role in the struggle for freedom through much of the twentieth century, and Kenneth Mack’s Representing the Race discussed a number of important figures active from the 1930s to the 1960s, including Thurgood Marshall, Pauli Murray, and Loren Miller. Each of these lawyers contributed to the cause of African American liberation. Left out of Mack’s story, however, were southern African American lawyers, especially in the Deep South, who Mack acknowledged “inhabited a world markedly different from that of their peers” in other regions and required their own specific examinations.2 Maurice Daniels took up this challenge in telling the story of Donald Hollowell, who spearheaded a suit forcing the integration of the University of Georgia and handled many cases dealing with sit-in protests at public accommodations in Atlanta and around the state. In addition to participating in the slow legal winding of desegregation lawsuits like Marshall and Murray, Hollowell defended the students who were more impetuously challenging Jim Crow, risking violent retribution for himself in the process.3 But the next generation of civil rights lawyers faced a different world than Hollowell and his contemporaries and therefore deserve their own analysis.Moore, a protégé of Hollowell, saw his own career come into full bloom just as the Civil Rights Movement in the Southeast was losing momentum. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) expulsion of white members fractured the movement from within, and the Nixonian calls for “law and order”—along with covert government repression—damaged it from the outside. In this context, the center of the black freedom struggle moved to California, where the Black Panther Party’s more militant posture better equipped it to confront punitive law-and-order politics. And in addition to the proliferation of Black Power advocates in the streets of Oakland and Los Angeles, California was also the location of a radical prison movement that criticized the modern American economic and political system. Although opposition to incarceration united the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the Black Power movement of the urban North, California prisoners such as George Jackson launched especially intense and sustained critiques of American society, seeing their incarceration as a microcosm of a broader system that kept black people oppressed and downtrodden.4 While scholars have written much about the activities of prisoners who critiqued capitalism and the American criminal justice system, the attorneys who represented them—attorneys like Moore—also deserve attention. Lawyers such as Moore—along with William Kunstler, Margaret Burnham, Fay Stender, and others—defended their clients from the prejudiced machinery of American justice but also amplified their imprisoned clients’ critiques so that they could reach a broader audience. These attorneys operated within a broader circle of lawyers that also defended other left-wing radicals—including Vietnam War protestors and LGBT activists—and therefore led divergent careers from the previous generation of civil rights lawyers.5Although he grew up in Atlanta and received his legal training in Boston, California provided the most lasting place from which Moore could participate in the African American freedom struggle. Moore began his career dealing with rural African Americans who had been accused of rape and given the death penalty, along with protesters arrested for sit-ins and other trespassing offenses. Disgusted, however, with the slow pace of progress in the South and given a taste of other environments while attending law school in Boston, Moore wanted to leave the South as soon as he could. A trip to sub-Saharan Africa in 1967 awakened nascent feelings of Pan-African nationalism, which found their mature expression on the West Coast of the United States. Although Moore relocated to California in order to serve as lead counsel in Davis’s trial and planned to stay there only temporarily, he ultimately spent the remainder of his career in the Bay Area. White supremacy in California had historically targeted Native Americans and then Asian Americans; the comparatively smaller African American population had received less attention in the state’s racial history. This racial paradigm made day-to-day living more bearable for Moore than he had experienced in the Southeast. Residing in California also allowed Moore entry into a wider world of outspoken African American prisoners and put him in dialogue with prominent critics of the prevailing American racial hierarchy. For Moore, California served as a place where he could participate in a more cutting-edge confrontation with racialized state repression in the United States and assist some of its most persecuted victims. Moore’s journey to the state also represented a fulfillment of his desire to leave behind the backward and intransigent racial mores of his native region and to follow the African American freedom struggle into a new historical era.Law School, SNCC, and Julian BondBorn in Atlanta in 1932, Moore first became interested in law in the summer of 1951, when the NAACP held its national convention in his hometown. “It was really a tremendous occasion,” he said in retrospect. On one night of the convention, he heard Thurgood Marshall speak and was impressed with the famed lawyer’s use of “ordinary words” while communicating complex concepts, which made him easy to identify with. At other times while Marshall was in the city, Moore had seen him diligently working on cases with local lawyer A. T. Walden but also nonchalantly drinking beer in an Auburn Avenue delicatessen. With “that kind of latitude” to make one’s own schedule and live life at one’s own pace, Moore decided that this was the profession he wanted to be in.6Moore attended Atlanta’s Morehouse College and earned a diploma in political science in 1954. After being drafted into the US Army soon after finishing college—which made for an uneventful stint, Moore later recounted—and then working briefly in Cleveland, Moore attended law school at Boston University, where he received his degree in 1960.7 Moore had wanted to learn law in his native Georgia, but the journey to New England proved necessary, as no law school in Georgia would consider a black applicant. At first unable to get a job in the legal profession after completing his training, Moore became a clothing salesman at a department store in Boston. However, when federal judge Charles E. Wyzanski Jr. found himself in search of a new court crier to conduct legal research for him and asked an African American member of the Harvard Club of Boston for a “suitable candidate,” Moore was recommended. Wyzanski sought out Moore and offered him a position, which he held until mid-1962.8Moore left employment with Wyzanski to come back to Atlanta when Donald Hollowell offered him a job at Hollowell and Ward, the most prominent black law firm in the Southeast. Hollowell had defended activists arrested in Atlanta sit-ins in 1960 and had spearheaded the desegregation of the University of Georgia the following year, so his law firm was an ideal place from which to contribute to the black freedom struggle.9 In the early stages of his time back in the Southeast, Moore got involved doing legal work for SNCC in the region. He emphasized that he was most involved with organizational work, not participating in demonstrations, but it was still “a very radicalizing experience for me.” He offered two reasons why he rarely bothered to even attend staff meetings. First, with more than a hint of self-deprecation, Moore noted that “everybody seemed to be so much brighter than I was” and “I didn’t feel I had anything to offer.” Second, Moore felt that the law was inherently “too conservative and that when you reason from a legal point of view, you reason from a conservative one,” thereby holding the movement back. Moore emphatically did not want to be a “restraining influence” on student activists, though he soon found the constant discrimination and violence his clients faced driving him, in terms of his personal politics, further and further leftward.10Despite his reservations about getting too friendly with staff, Moore dove into his legal work with SNCC, which was spearheading voter registration drives across the Deep South. These activities took him to the centers of civil rights activity in the early 1960s. For example, Moore participated in the group’s voter organizing drive in southwest rural Georgia in summer 1962, which included the “Albany Movement” that perhaps represented the grassroots Civil Rights Movement’s first significant rural registration drive.11 The following summer, in 1963, Moore traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi—the headquarters of the state’s White Citizens’ Council—to investigate the situation of several SNCC workers who had been arrested during the last week of June while trying to register African American voters. There he spoke with organizers Robert Moses and James Forman about possible legal strategies to free the imprisoned activists.12 In Forman’s memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Moore receives mention as one of the lawyers who taught activists how to transfer such cases from racist local courts to federal jurisdiction, where they would receive a more sympathetic hearing.13 A year later, in May 1964, Moore corresponded with white activist Michael Schwerner regarding school desegregation legal strategies in Meridian, Mississippi, only weeks before Schwerner’s brutal nighttime murder by members of the Ku Klux Klan, which brought heightened national attention to the freedom struggle in the South.14The violence and intimidation involved with SNCC’s activities took their toll on the young lawyer, especially since he had been away from his native region for several years and had experienced a far more tolerant environment in New England. By the end of 1964, Moore had had enough of the Southeast’s inhumanity and was ready to return to Boston with his young family. He had become “most certain” that the South could not be home for him and his family, and was “drive[n] mad” by the thought that his daughter would grow up with “these red necks.” Though there was an opportunity for Moore to make a “purposeful contribution” to solving the numerous problems of the region if he stayed around Atlanta, this benefit was tempered by the requirement of forging a “self-destroying compromise with an ignoble system.” Staying in the South to work on racial issues necessitated coping with the everyday indignities that went along with daily life there, which Moore seemed unwilling to endure.15However, Atlanta’s burgeoning role as a center of the African American freedom struggle kept Moore there for the time being. The next big development for his career stemmed from his involvement with Julian Bond, who was his brother-in-law, the communications director for SNCC, and a newly elected member of the Georgia House of Representatives. In January 1966, just as Bond was due to assume electoral office, SNCC issued a statement condemning the Vietnam War and encouraging the Americans who were protesting against it. The statement also drew provocative parallels between African Americans and anticolonial Vietnamese, with both groups struggling to resist white oppression.16 When a newsman called Bond at his home to ask him about his response, Bond, as the communications director, was compelled to support it. In response, several members of the Georgia House demanded that he not be seated when it convened the following Monday.17That Saturday night, there was a meeting for newly elected officials at State Senator Leroy Johnson’s Atlanta home. As it turned out, the purpose of the meeting was to convince Bond to make “some kind of statement that could be construed” as an apology. Moore “felt that [he] was in a minority,” as he thought Bond could “make no statement of that type.” Moore believed that Bond had been instrumental in convincing young people to come south, “involving young students in social problems and social issues.” Such a statement would, therefore, “betray his age group and the people who had placed their trust in him.” Moore feared Bond might apologize. “Luckily,” as Moore put it, however, Bond stuck by with original position “and didn’t make any clarifying statements.”18The case of Bond v. Floyd wound its way through the court system, ultimately finding its way before the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the Georgia legislature had contravened Bond’s First Amendment rights. It ordered that Bond be seated in the chamber. Bond’s victory, according to one historian, made him the “most famous state legislator” in the country. As a corollary, it earned Moore a reputation as “a ‘splendid’ go-to lawyer for peaceniks and leftist radicals caught up in the clutches” of the ascendant, sometimes authoritarian right wing.19 Around the same time, Moore also successfully defended Stokely Carmichael against charges of “inciting a riot” stemming from a September 1966 incident in Atlanta in which Carmichael was blamed for the unrest in the Summerhill district that followed a rally against police brutality. In both cases, Moore saw himself as defending his clients against the excesses of entrenched state power.20Visiting AfricaA turning point in the development of Moore’s racial views came in the summer of 1967, when he attended a United Nations seminar on South African racial discrimination. The seminar was held in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and Moore was accompanied by SNCC organizer James Forman. Before arriving in Zambia, though, the two first stopped over in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On July 17, Moore and Forman spoke with the chief justice of Tanzania’s Supreme Court and then met with the ministers of lands, agriculture, and natural resources, the minister of information, and the tactical officer for the Tanzanian Army. Forman presented a SNCC proposal to allow African Americans to become residents of the country and “help build it” anew, but Moore noted that Americans were suspect due to possible connections with the Central Intelligence Agency.21 The next day, the two men met with G. T. Magombe, executive secretary of the Organization for African Unity, a Pan-African organization created in 1963 to lead the countries of the continent out of colonization and into independence. According to Moore, their talk, which was “most confidential,” touched on the anticolonial “liberation struggles” in Mozambique, Angola, Bissau, South Africa, South West Africa, and Rhodesia. After the meeting, Moore and Forman went to a bookshop, where they bought the selected works of Mao, his Little Red Book, and several other books on China and Vietnam. Forman bought three volumes of work by Lenin, and Moore informed his wife that, time permitting, he would “go back and pick up a set of Lenin for us” as well.22The following day, the two of them flew from Dar es Salaam to Ndola, Zambia, where Moore encountered vestiges of colonialism and racial privilege. Although the flight featured two black hostesses and a black steward, when it came time for lunch to be served, one of the hostesses served the white passengers next to Moore and then moved on, skipping over him. Moore rang the bell, and when the hostess came back, she told him that she would look for something in the first-class section and bring him some food “if anything were left.” She returned with a vegetable plate, which Moore refused, and he also rejected her apology. Though Moore fumed at the idea that the whites had been served while he had not, he became even angrier upon landing. He and Forman had to wait an hour to clear customs, and then Moore got into an argument with a white ticket agent who confirmed a white passenger’s through-passage to Lusaka, and put Moore and Forman on standby, even though they possessed confirmed reservations. “Needless to say,” Moore called the man a white m------- f-------, which “frightened the hell out of him.” As he noted, the black Africans were “very timid and dutiful,” unsure of how to deal with the “new and uncertain” experience of formal independence and, in Moore’s opinion, overly deferential to white oppressors.23In a 1970 interview, Moore revealed that he had absorbed these lessons. “Integration,” he opined, “should not be the goal for black people” if whites were still in control afterward. “Black people can’t be liberated and can’t be full human beings unless they have control over the institutions that affect their lives,” said Moore, whether that be airline ticket counters or seats at the highest levels of government.24On August 4, Moore’s experience at the summer seminar in Zambia generated a number of deep, almost mystical questions for him about African Americans and their relationship to the continent of Africa:Who are we? Are we Africans? Are we nomads? If we are Africans, are we not entitled to return to the motherland, Africa, and settle in any country we choose? If we are Africans, held captive in North America, are we not just entitled as the Africans who were never held in slavery in North America and the West Indies entitled to share the riches of Africa equally with those who were more fortunate? If we are Africans, what is our obligation to the motherland? Should we return and commit our skills to the liberation of Africa?25Moore’s burgeoning anger at colonialism was manifested after this trip in his defense of African American objectors to the Vietnam War draft. He defended a number of dissidents, each of whom had different reasons for refusing to serve. Moore’s defense often centered on the idea that local draft boards, composed overwhelmingly of whites, were insufficiently sensitive to the legitimate concerns of African Americans. For example, Charles Cabbage, from Memphis, argued that the Vietnam War was unjust—that African Americans were being treated unfairly and should not be forced to fight in a war to defend such a system—and also expressed opposition to mandatory participation in war in any form.26 Cabbage’s local draft board decided that he was “more of a black power advocate than a Conscientious Objector,” implying that the two positions were mutually exclusive.27 Moore also defended John Edward (X) Lemons, an Atlanta dishwasher who became a Muslim in October 1965.28 Lemons was denied conscientious objector status, not because he issued a blanket refusal to fight but only because he refused to go to war unless his particular sect of Islam was given some land so that could feel that he had something to fight for.29 In each case, Moore argued that white draft boards were unduly constraining the definition of “conscientious objector” in order to exclude these beliefs from fair and legitimate consideration. Embedded in his arguments was the assertion that white-dominated boards were inherently unfit to make decisions about black appellants, which poisoned the process before it had even begun.30Meeting Angela DavisIn December 1970, Moore’s career took another significant turn when Haywood Burns, president of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, got in touch with him on behalf of the recently incarcerated Angela Davis, who was facing serious charges in California stemming from her involvement with the radical Left and outspoken prison inmates. Davis wanted to speak with Moore about the prospect of him serving as part of her defense team.31While completing a doctorate in philosophy under the direction of Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, Davis was appointed in March 1969 to a one-year instructor position in the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with the expectation of a second year if her performance was satisfactory. In July, however, newspaper reports identified her as a member of the Communist Party. In response, the Regents of the University of California discussed whether to invoke a 1949 rule prohibiting university employment of communists and asked lawyers—along with Charles Hitch, the president of the university system—to investigate the feasibility of this action.32 After Davis admitted in September to being a member of the Communist Party (having joined in 1968), the Regents voted to disallow her from teaching in the fall quarter.33In response, members of the UCLA faculty initiated a successful lawsuit to invalidate any action taken under the 1949 rule, restoring Davis’s ability to teach.34 The Regents, however, were not finished with trying to get rid of her. When the Philosophy Department in March recommended Davis’s appointment for another year, and Charles Young, the chancellor of the UCLA campus, concurred in May, the Regents voted to relieve the chancellor of further authority over the appointment. In June, they voted not to reappoint Davis. She responded by filing a suit in federal court, generating widespread anger among anti-communists and subsequently causing her to fear for her personal safety.35In addition to her political affiliation, Davis also drew criticism for her activism on behalf of the Soledad Brothers. On January 13, 1970, after fifteen prisoners were let into the exercise yard at Soledad Prison and began to fight, guards shot and killed three of them, including W. L. Nolen, a “proto-black nationalist” who had previously expressed fears that prison guards were planning to murder him. Three days later, John Mills, a twenty-six-year-old prison guard, was beaten and thrown over a railing to his death. Three prisoners—George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo—were charged with murder on February 23. The case drew interest from the Bay Area Left, many of whom suspected that the three were being set up for the death penalty on poor evidence. Jackson especially was notorious within the California prison system for whipping up resistance among prisoners—getting himself into countless physical altercations with prison guards—along with writing extensive Marxist critiques of contemporary American politics.36Davis suspected nefarious intent in the Soledad Brothers’ case. She initiated correspondence with George Jackson in early 1970, and they quickly established a rapport, given their shared interest in Marxism, and soon began to write to each other using an intimate and even erotic tone. She became one of the leaders of the Soledad Brothers’ defense committee, which included many prominent celebrities and which organized rallies and raised funds for the defense of Jackson, Clutchette, and Drumgo. Faced with the continuing tension of the UCLA situation, she purchased several firearms for her self-defense. Jonathan Jackson, George’s younger brother, adopted a role as Davis’s bodyguard.37 On July 30, Davis and Jonathan Jackson were stopped at the San Ysidro border checkpoint while crossing from Mexico back into the United States. While customs officers searched Davis’s car, a San Diego police officer questioned Davis about the seventeen-year-old Jackson on suspicion that she was transporting a minor across the border; Davis replied that she was in the process of becoming his legal guardian but the proceedings were not complete. The two of them were released.38A week later, on August 7, Jonathan Jackson took drastic action that affected Davis in a profound way. That morning, he invaded a Marin County courtroom and pulled several guns from his trench coat, distributing them to three African American San Quentin prisoners who were there participating in a trial. The four of them took the presiding judge, Harold Haley, and several jurors, hostage, piling into a yellow van that Jackson had rented. San Quentin guards, who had a policy of not allowing prisoners to escape even if it meant killing hostages, opened fired on the van, resulting in the death of the judge and three of the escapees, including Jackson.39 Davis disappeared after the event, as Jonathan Jackson had used her guns in the incident. She stayed out of sight until October 13, when she was found at a hotel in New York City and extradited back to California. California law held planners in a plot just as liable as those who carried it out, and she was charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder, facing the death penalty if convicted. Prosecutors insisted that Jackson’s actions had been part of a plot to exchange the hostages’ lives for the freedom of the Soledad Brothers and claimed that Davis, desperate to free George Jackson, must have been in on the plan.40From the start, Davis denied that she had any advance knowledge of Jonathan Jackson’s plan. In her autobiography, she portrayed herself as having been sickened by the death of a young man who “had been robbed of his childhood by a society that had kept his brother behind bars for almost as long as he could remember.”41 Davis insisted that she was being railroaded to the gas chamber in Governor Ronald Reagan’s California because of her political beliefs, with the governor’s anti-communist and anti–Black Power zealotry clouding the due processes of the legal system. Richard Nixon’s pronouncement of her as a “terrorist” upon her capture further demonstrated to her that the state was determined to convict her regardless of the facts or the evidence against her. As Davis described her first meeting with Moore:On the day I was extradited from New York, I had talked with Howard, who had flown in from Atlanta at my request. It was clear during our first conversation in the New York jail that in trying civil rights cases in the South, he saw his lawyer role as part of a larger effort to defend oppressed people who were fighting for their freedom. When Howard talked about the struggle, there was an intensity about him that convinced me that the most important thing in his life was the liberation of Black people.42Trial ParametersAt her arraignment on January 5, Davis unequivocally declared her innocence. “Far from pointing to my culpability,” she claimed, her presence in the court “implicate[d] the State of California as an agent of political repression,” punishing her for her involvement with the Soledad Brothers’ defense committee. She also demanded that she be allowed to participate in her own defense as co-counsel. “I feel compelled to play an active role in my own defense,” she said, in order to assist both those “involved in the proceedings” and the American public at large to “thoroughly comprehend” the issues at stake in the case. “No one can better represent my political beliefs and activities than I,” she insisted. If the court were to deny the motion, she warned, “it will be aligning itself with the forces of racism and reaction which threaten to push this country into the throes of fascism” as well as solidifying the growing perception that a fair trial in America was impossible.43Moore was not able to relocate to California until April, but when he got there, he took the lead role on a legal team that also included Doris Brin Walker and Leo Branton Jr., both of whom were well known in the circles of incarcerated California activists.44 The defense’s strategy consisted in casting doubt upon the prosecution’s accusations that Davis had known about the August 7 plot. The defense instead insisted that Jonathan Jackson’s actions had taken Davis by surprise just as much as they had the rest of the nation. Indeed, there seemed to be little direct evidence to indicate her involvement, giving her defense team hope. There were, however, many delays in getting to the actual start of the trial, as numerous arguments about where the trial should be held put off its start date.On September 20, Davis’s lawyers asked that her trial be move
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