The Fugitive

Few young revolutionaries who have come to prominence have accumulated a clearer public record than Angela Davis. Yet when she was charged with murder, the record, as always, left the same tantalizing gap: Who, really, is the woman behind the known facts and the favored, middle-class girlhood?

At week's end she was still a fugitive, wanted by the FBI if unwanted as a teacher of philosophy by the University of California board of regents. The accusation of murder--supplying four guns involved in a fatal, futile breakout from a Marin County, Calif., courtroom three weeks ago*--dismayed her academic colleagues even while her revolutionary friends lionized her anew. Her situation is in stark contrast to her earlier promise.

Girl Scout. Angela Davis, 26, is black and, slogans aside, beautiful. She is an outstanding scholar and teacher as well. Outwardly, the circumstances of her early life seem almost contrivedly good: both her parents were schoolteachers in Birmingham, Ala., where she went through the tenth grade as a straight A student. Her father, B. Frank Davis, now a service-station operator, remembers her as a happy child. "Girl Scout outings were fun to her then," he said last week.

That is not her memory. She recently recalled: "My political involvement stems from my existence in the South. When I was twelve, I helped organize interracial study groups in Birmingham, but they were busted up by the police. For me, a very deep and personal thing was the bombing of the Birmingham church in September 1963, when the four young girls were killed. I knew them. Our families were very close."

As a teenager, she began receiving a series of scholarships. They allowed her to complete high school in New York City and go on to Brandeis University, the Sorbonne and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Those who knew her at Brandeis, from which she graduated with honors after studying French literature, and at the Sorbonne, where she studied literature and philosophy, describe her as brilliant but also introverted to the point of aloofness. They recall little political activity beyond civil rights sit-ins. But she has said that during her college years she came under the philosophical and personal influence of Marxist Herbert Marcuse. It was he who suggested that she switch her focus from literature to philosophy.

Che-Lumumba Club. "Marcuse had the greatest influence on me through his lectures, his books and as a person," she has said. He was supervising her doctoral dissertation on "the concept of force in Kant's political thinking" at the University of California at San Diego. Says Marcuse: "I consider her the best student I ever had in the more than 30 years I have been teaching."

Angela Davis had changed by the time she arrived in San Diego to study under Marcuse. She showed warmth and concern for her friends, but she became increasingly militant. She joined the Black Panthers, letting her attendance at meetings lapse only because she also became a Communist and spent much of her time with the party's all-black Che-Lumumba Club. She took part in the storming of a campus building in San Diego. She was arrested for refusing to leave a police station.

Her rhetoric kept pace with her actions except in the classroom, where, her U.C.L.A. philosophy department colleagues said, her Communism never influenced her excellent lectures. In a speech, she once declared that "the Government has to be overthrown." Like Marcuse, however, she added that a general violent revolution was impossible in the United States. But Marcuse has distinguished between the "institutionalized" violence of society and the "defensive" violence of revolutionary students. Disciple Davis once spoke approvingly of the Che-Lumumba Club's concept that "revolution must be tied to dealing with specific problems now, not a lot of rhetoric about revolution, but real, fundamental problems."

Flight to LA. Her first bout with notoriety occurred last year, when the regents began their long and ultimately successful effort to oust her as an assistant professor of philosophy. Threats and obscene telephone calls made her change her telephone number frequently.

She switched apartments three times. Then she became active in the cause of "the Soledad Three," black convicts accused of murdering a guard at Soledad State Prison in a continuing racial conflict.

Was the armed invasion of a California courtroom, designed to force release of the Soledad Three, a way of "dealing with specific problems now"? Angela Davis carried the answer with her into hiding. Most of her friends presume her innocence, though they are troubled. But the circumstantial evidence kept accumulating last week. Police say she purchased a shotgun two days before it was used to murder Judge Harold J. Haley, as well as three other weapons used in the shootout. A day before the killings, she was reported seen in the yellow truck in which the judge was killed. Three hours after the gunfight, she bought an airplane ticket in nearby San Francisco for a flight to Los Angeles.

Some of her radical supporters, in praising her, seemed to be proudly proclaiming her guilt. Black Panther Leader Huey P. Newton called for others to follow the "courageous example" of the courthouse shootings. At a rally last week in San Francisco, Charles Garry, a white lawyer for the Black Panthers, shouted: "More power to Angela Davis! May she live long in liberty."

* Under California law, a person abetting a murderer before the act is as culpable as the killer himself.

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