‘Rest of Story’ on KSU/MLK Day Speaker Bears Sharing

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The featured speaker at Sunday’s Kennesaw State University MLK Jr. Day observance sponsored by the African American Student Alliance will be retired college professor and former Black Panther Party associate Angela Davis, who in the late 1960s and early ’70s was idolized by the hard left as a violent revolutionary and boasted a reputation–or notoriety–rivaling those of Che Guevara and Weather Underground figures William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

The AASA is not required to get its speakers approved beforehand by the school administration.

Davis will pocket $20,000 for her talk, according to University Relations spokeswoman Tammy DeMel.

KSU IS ADVERTISING Davis as “an activist in the Civil Rights Movement” who has fought “against oppression for more than 40 years.” The press release on the school’s website mentions briefly that she spent 18 months in jail and was on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list for her alleged role in a California courthouse killing, “a crime for which she was acquitted in 1972.”

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UCLA prof Dr. Davis was fired by the California Board of Regents in 1969 at the behest of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan because of her membership in the Communist Party. She also had accused the Regents of having “killed, brutalized and murdered” demonstrators, and had repeatedly described the police as “pigs,” according to the Regents.

Panther associate Davis also figured in the lead up to a bloody shootout in the Marin, California courthouse on Aug. 7, 1970, involving her sometime bodyguard, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson, for whom she had purchased a shotgun and two other firearms two days before. Jackson’s older brother, George Jackson, was one of the “Soledad Brothers,” a trio of Soledad Prison inmates who had become a leftist cause celebre after murdering a prison guard. Davis was said to be romantically linked with the older Jackson brother.

The younger Jackson barged into the Marin courtroom in which a fellow Black Panther was on trial and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor and three female jurors hostage, using masking tape to attach the sawed-off shotgun to the judge’s neck.

As Jackson, his accomplices and the hostages were driving away from the courthouse, one of the kidnappers shot at police, according to Wikipedia. The judge was shotgunned to death by the kidnappers and the prosecutor was left paralyzed. Jackson and three of his accomplices were killed.

The Weather Underground bombed the Marin courthouse two months later in retaliation for the deaths of Jackson and his accomplices, according to Wikipedia.

Davis fled after being charged with aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder. She was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted List and arrested that October. Like the KSU press release says, she later was tried and found not guilty on all counts. Her trial was reportedly the first at which jury-selection experts were used to try to ensure a favorable jury was empaneled.

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