Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard Some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards Lord Lord, so they cut George Jackson down Lord Lord, they laid him in the ground. —Bob Dylan The buff-colored civic-center modern Santa Clara County Superior
Courthouse, where the trial of Angela Davis is being held, is protected
by a couple of recently erected 12-ft. chain-link fences, with gates
guarded by about a dozen armed deputies. At 6 each morning, quiet,
well-behaved crowds of young blacks, Chicanos and whites begin
gathering at the gates to vie for the 42 courtroom seats reserved for
the public. Angela Davis, her sister Fania Jordan and the defendant's
team of three lawyers arrive shortly before 9, from a secret place
where Miss Davis has been staying since her release on $102,500 bail
Feb. 16. Everyone must pass through a detection device so sensitive
that it picked up the metal in a woman reporter's girdle. Inside the small courtroom the security is also tight, but unobtrusive.
The area in front of Judge Richard E. Arnason's bench is clogged with
tables and people. At one table Prosecutor Albert W. Harris Jr. sits
with an assistant. The rest of the limited space is filled by half a
dozen deputies with walkie-talkies and a bailiff—all armed with
revolvers. In the first rows sit 30 members of the press contingent,
which includes correspondents from the Soviet Union and East Germany,
where Angela Davis is considered a political prisoner. In his opening statement, Prosecutor Harris had to go back over the
events that led to the Davis trial. In January 1970, George Jackson and
two other blacks, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, were charged with
the murder of John Mills, a guard at the state prison in Soledad,
Calif. Jackson had already spent ten years in prison for a $70 robbery;
there he turned into a skillful revolutionary dialectician and a leader
of Soledad's militant black inmates. The 1970 indictments made him a
radical hero, and the three became known as the Soledad Brothers. In August 1970, Jackson's younger brother Jonathan, 17, tried to kidnap
a judge and four others from the Marin County, Calif., courthouse. He
reportedly said that he meant to use his hostages to bargain for
release of the Soledad Brothers. In the shootout that followed, the
judge, young Jackson and two of his accomplices were killed. About a
year later, George Jackson, then 30, was fatally shot at San Quentin
in what prison authorities called an escape attempt. Last week,
ironically, Drumgo, 26, and Clutchette, 29, were acquitted of the
Soledad guard's murder by an all-white jury in San Francisco. Now,
Angela Davis, 28, the former U.C.L.A. philosophy instructor and
proclaimed Communist, was on trial for murder, kidnaping and criminal
conspiracy in supposedly helping Jonathan in the fatal attempt to free
his brother. She did so, said Prosecutor Harris, because of her
“passion for George Jackson that knew no bounds.”
