Angela Davis: “The results of our struggles are measured in decades, in centuries”

The great honoree of this edition of the Festival of l’Humanité, the French Communist Party’s newspaper, American professor and activist Angela Davis attracted hundreds of people to her participation in the event. A communist activist, icon of the fight for civil rights in the United States and member of the Black Panthers group, Davis was received with great enthusiasm in the Ágora debate space of L’Humanité, and also participated in the launch of the book “Mumia: La plume et le poing” (Mumia: the pen and the fist), by Alain Mabanckou, with a preface by her.

The book brings together drawings, images and texts in homage to activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, 70, who was sentenced to death in 1982 for allegedly killing a police officer who assaulted his brother and is currently serving a life sentence in the United States. For two decades, activists from around the world have been campaigning for the release of Abu-Jamal, who is considered a political prisoner and a victim of institutional racism in the United States. In an audio message sent from prison to the participants of the Festival, Abu-Jamal declared: “Thank you, my friends, for lighting up this world with your art.”

In 1973, it was Angela who attended the French Communists’ festival to thank those who had contributed to their liberation. Suggesting to the young people that they should not lose heart in the struggle, Angela said: “the results of our struggles are measured in decades, in centuries.”

The intellectual and activist emphasizes the mental strength of the prisoner, who “even when he was on death row, never stopped getting involved in various fights, including the environment.” Mumia, continues Angela Davis, “is determined to stay alive, he is doing a lot of exercise to stay in shape. On the judicial side, we are less optimistic, despite the appearance of evidence to his warning over time. We showed that the witnesses were corrupted, the prosecutor at the time – as we know today – maneuvered to dismiss the black jurors in the trial.

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Despite injustices such as the imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Angela Davis believes that there have been victories in the fight against racism and in the defense of civil rights in the United States and around the world. “In recent decades, we have been able to demonstrate the institutional nature of racism in our society,” she said. “When I see an image of myself on the T-shirt of a young black college student, I don’t feel like an individual achievement. I see a collective consecration of a movement that is represented in my image.”

For the author of Women, Race and Class (published in 1981), “the anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminist movement” must be distinguished “from the feminist movement that aims only at gender equality, this bourgeois feminism that can also be called the glass ceiling feminist movement (…) Women in Brazil have a formula, they say that when black women advance, everyone advances”.

Asked to comment on her impressions of the Fête du L’Humanité, Davis declared: “This is my third time at the Fête du L’Humanité. And each time I come, I leave a little more revolutionary.”

Edited by Cezar Xavier