Freed Angela

Just five days before she was due to go on trial, Angela Davis finally made it to freedom. After 16 months in prison and seemingly endless petitions for bail in and out of state and federal courts, she was released on $102,500 bail. Earlier she had been thwarted by the California provision that no bond is granted in a capital case in which the proof of guilt is evident or the presumption of guilt great. Then two weeks ago, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional in California. With the case therefore no longer potentially involving capital punishment, her release became possible.

The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis provided $2,500 in cash and the $8,500 bondsman's fee toward Angela's bond; the remainder came from a most remarkable source: Rodger McAfee, 33, a white farmer who put up 405 acres of his family's 1,100-acre cooperative farm near Fresno, Calif., as collateral for the remaining $100,000. McAfee said he had given the deed covering the property to the Communist Party's Northern California section a year ago for eventual bonding purposes. "I'm just a working man who agrees with the philosophy of Angela Davis," McAfee said. Then he left the Palo Alto jail to return home "because I have to milk my cows."

His homecoming was not pleasant. No sooner had word of his deed on Angela's behalf got out than his four school-age sons were expelled from school, ostensibly on the grounds that he no longer lived in the school district, but in fact, admitted the principal, "under tremendous pressure" from the community. He also got such vitriolic phone calls that he went out and bought a rifle.

Superior Court Judge Richard Arnason stipulated in granting bail that Angela neither leave the area nor participate in public rallies without permission of the court. Looking better than she had in months, a smiling Angela told reporters, "This has been a true victory, a people's victory--not only my release but the abolition of capital punishment." Then she went back to preparing for her trial on murder, kidnaping and conspiracy charges for allegedly providing four guns used in the August 1970 Marin County courthouse shootout in which a judge, two convicts and an accomplice were killed.

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Also freed last week was Daniel Berrigan, paroled from a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., after serving 18 months of a three-year sentence for destroying Selective Service records. "I made hundreds of new friends," he said. "It's a Popsicle prison, not like Attica."

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