August 16, 1970

California authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of civil rights activist Angela Davis for her role in an attempted prisoner escape that led to the deaths of four people, including a judge. A Birmingham native, Davis legally owned three guns used in the bloody shootout. The warrant led to a multi-month national hunt for Davis that landed her on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Davis eventually served 16 months in jail, and her long incarceration sparked an international “Free Angela Davis” campaign that included recordings by the Rolling Stones and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In 1972, an all-white jury in Santa Cruz found Davis not guilty of all charges.

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Birmingham native Angela Davis (1944-) is a social activist, author, and faculty member at the University of California-Santa Cruz. During the late 1960s, she joined the Communist Party and was affiliated with the Black Panthers. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of Andrew Thomas Clifton)

Angela Davis (center, no glasses) enters Royce Hall at UCLA for her first philosophy lecture in October 1969. Kendra Alexander (right, with glasses). (Photograph by GeorgeLouis, Wikipedia)

Chairwoman of the Soviet Women’s Committee, Valentina Tereshkova, handing a memento to Angela Davis, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the United States, 1972. (RIA Novosti archive, image #717718, D. Chernov, Wikipedia)

The first secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, Erich Honecker, met with American civil rights activist Angela Davis on November 9, 1972. Davis was invited to the 1973 World Youth Park in the German Democratic Republic capital (East Berlin). (Photograph by Peter Koard, German Federal Archives, Bild-183-L0911-029, Wikipedia)

Angela Davis is a professor at the University of California. Her main areas of scholarly inquiry include racial and gender equality and the abolition of the prison system. Davis ran for the office of U.S. vice president in 1980 and 1984 on the Communist Party ticket. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of Andrew Thomas Clifton)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.