Jury isn’t out on Angela Davis

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Washington Times:

Potential jurors reporting for jury duty in the D.C. Superior Court building have of late been passing a photo exhibit celebrating renowned black women in a series of posters, each featuring portraits of trailblazers exemplifying greatness in their respective fields.

Included among the posters, hung for Black History Month on the walls outside the jurors’ lounge, is one in which the D.C. courts — the federally funded judicial branch of the D.C. government — honor eight “Black Women Paving the Way to Greatness in Politics.”

One might quibble with some of the choices, but most of them are women who indeed deserved to be celebrated. They include: Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman and the first black woman who sought to run for president; Carol Moseley Braun, the first black female U.S. senator; former National Security Council adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the first black female to hold both offices; Patricia Roberts Harris, the first black female Cabinet secretary, U.S. ambassador and law school dean; and our current first lady, Michelle Obama.

One of these personifications of “greatness,” however, comes as a shock, especially in the context of a court of law. It is none other than Angela Davis, a black activist who came to prominence in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A. and the radical black group the Black Panther Party. Ms. Davis was such a high profile communist in the latter days of the Cold War that she was awarded the so-called “Lenin Peace Prize,” given to her in a Moscow ceremony by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev himself.

Of course, Ms. Davis, too, was a trailblazer in her own way.

She was the second black woman to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. She earned that distinction as a fugitive wanted on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from her role in a notorious attack on a courtroom in Marin County in California.

On Aug. 7, 1970, a black 17-year-old named Jonathan Jackson, toting a small arsenal of guns, entered the courtroom of Judge Harold Haley, where convict James McClain was facing murder charges in the death of a prison guard. Brandishing a gun, Jackson halted the proceedings and then armed McClain, after which they together armed two other convicts, who’d been called as witnesses in the case. Jackson and the three freed prisoners then took Judge Haley, the prosecutor and three female jurors hostage, bargaining chips in their effort to force the release from prison of older brother George Jackson, an armed robber who also was under indictment on murder charges in the death of another prison guard.

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All stellar examples of the legal system...