133. Charisma, Angela Davis, Paris

There you were in 1972, trying to decide whether an injustice had been done to Angela Davis who, unable to make bail, sat in prison waiting to be tried as an accessory (the term for it in most states) to the murder of Judge Harold Haley.  The charge was based on evidence, later confirmed, that she had bought the gun that killed him.

Ordinarily those facts would make it easy for you: the charge was justified (providing the murder weapon would have forced an accessory charge almost anywhere) and due process had been followed in arresting her, imprisoning her, and setting bail (in her case $100,000, well justified by her having already fled).

What complicated your thinking was that many injustices had been done to African-Americans in the United States for a long time and that some in law enforcement, grudging the ground lost in the recent civil rights battles, were using and bending the law to gain some of it back. You had to ask yourself, "Is this justified enforcement or is it another case of racial harassment by the white majority?"  You had to look closely.

But in 1972 there was, especially in academia, something very powerful working against a close look: charisma.  Angela Davis was loaded with it.  So were Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and all the Black Panthers she was associated with.  And those opposing them?  The Marin County prosecutor, Albert Harris?  Charisma zero.  Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, addressing the nation about the case?  Maybe a negative number.  (Hoover put her on the Ten Most Wanted List — only the third time for a woman — and Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of this dangerous terrorist.") 

I think that if you were an aspiring academic and intellectual in 1972 it would have been as hard for you to resist Angela Davis's charisma as it was for your political opposite to resist the momentum of white resentment.  She was a bright student, she had won a scholarship to Brandeis, she spent a year in Paris, she worked for civil rights, she was beautiful, and she had been a target of Governor Ronald Reagan, who requested that she, because she was a communist, be barred from teaching at any university in the State of California.  She was right there with all the good people who had been persecuted as "communists" in the recent McCarthy era. 

In our present charisma-free environment (at least on this score) we who want to stand with the just can go pretty directly to the essential questions.  About Davis, "Was there or was there not good reason to arrest her, imprison her, and set her bail at the given figure?"  About the Communist Party, "Is it expressing dissent or engaging in rebellion — that is, attempting to overthrow the government?"  In the 70s we had to work through so many layers of charisma that we — outside of a few privileged political-science seminars — had a very hard time getting to these questions.

And you know who had the hardest time?  People who had been to Paris, people who actually lived there or who lived there in their imaginations, people who felt its great postwar attraction.  If anybody these days is in doubt about that charisma all they have to do is read Alice Kaplan's new book, Dreaming in French. There it is, in the lives of three women who spent student days in Paris, and were liberated by that experience, as many others were.  It was wonderful, it was exhilarating, and it was a handicap to clear thinking.  For Americans trying to get to the essential questions about cases like Angela Davis's it was another layer, a very heavy layer, of charisma they had to get through.

For the French, and particularly for Paris intellectuals, there was no doubt about the injustice done to Davis.  It was the confidence of the distant look.  Americans were unjust to blacks, Americans were unjust to her.  In the letters of sympathy to her (some of which Kaplan showed on slides Wednesday at the American Library in Paris) Davis is simply "in prison," without qualification.  Another victim of the system.

That's such a bad example to young American academics.  It tells them they can be good, they can stand with the just, without looking closely.  It reinforces that kind of Christianity, stronger in America than in France, that tells them, dangerously, that goodness is measured entirely in the heart.  Take the right general position, adopt the right attitude, and you are relieved of responsibility for particular judgment — which always requires particular inspection.  (No hearts could be in better condition than those incapable of inspection: the children who wrote the letters Kaplan showed us.)

So should our young not go to Paris?  Not feel the liberation Jacqueline Bouvier and Susan Sontag and Angela Davis felt?  By no means.  There are too many provincial constraints (taking America to be a province of France here) they, in order to grow, need to be free of — among the many they shouldn't be free of, constraints needed for growth and understanding.

A smart young person, after feeling the Parisian liberation, will pause for inspection. "Let's see now, what am I liberated from and what not?"  He (or she) will be the heir of the smart young person in the sixties, who, looking at the Viet Nam mess, said, "Let's see now, what authorities have been discredited and what not?"  The smart ones of both times are trying to avoid the dumb mistakes of wild freedom and blind anti-authoritarianism; both have learned to look closely.