Free Angela is a work-in-progress feature-length documentary about Angela Davis and the high stakes crime, political movement, and trial that catapults the 26 year-old newly appointed philosophy professor at the University of California at Los Angeles into a seventies revolutionary political icon. Nearly forty years later, and for the first time, Angela Davis speaks frankly about the actions that branded her as a terrorist and simultaneously spurred a worldwide political movement for her freedom.

About the Director & Producer Shola Lynch

CHISHOLM ’72 – Unbought & Unbossed is Shola Lynch’s directorial debut. To name a few highlights, the documentary premiered at the Sundance Film, aired on PBS’s POV series, and garnered two Independent Spirit Award nominations and a Peabody Award. Lynch is currently developing and fundraising for a feature documentary project about Angela Davis and the events that catapulted her to international notoriety in the seventies.

Lynch learned the craft of documentary making on the job. She worked with Ken Burns and Florentine Films on the Peabody Award-winning Frank Lloyd Wright and the ten-part JAZZ series. She has also worked on the Emmy Award winning Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, an HBO Sports documentary that is part of the Sports in the Twentieth Century series. At Orlando Bagwell’s ROJA Productions, she co-produced a documentary short about the 2000 Census and racial identity that was included in the last hour of the four-part series on race in America, Matters of Race, which aired on PBS in 2003. Lynch has also written and produced pieces for BET, TV One as well as reported a short series on incarceration in America for CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.

As a nationally ranked track athlete in the 800m and 1500m, Lynch pursued her Olympic aspirations with the Lady Long Horns at the University of Texas while completing a Liberal Art Honors BA. Her most important life lesson derives from an athletic career that spanned 15 years of national and internationally competition. “The lesson is not one of being a champion but the payoff of perseverance in the pursuit of a goal,” she says.

Lynch also has a master’s degree in American history from the University of California, Riverside that culminated in a thesis and an exhibition at the California Museum of Photography titled “How Far Have We Come? Past and Present Images of African Americans.”

Currently Lynch lives in Harlem with her husband and children.

More About the Issue

August 14, 1970. The Federal Bureau of Investigations puts out a fugitive warrant for the arrest of Angela Davis.  She is a beautiful, young, black woman, a member of the Communist Party, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles, and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy.  Four days later she is on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners is a feature length documentary thriller, where real lives are at stake, every event is true and the people that live it tell the story. It is the two-year, high stakes drama of how Angela Davis came to be hunted by the government, imprisoned for multiple capital offenses, put on trial, acquitted, and the worldwide movement for her freedom that catapulted her into international fame. Recounting a time when “crimes” are about politics, this is the never before story behind the icon.

In the late sixties presumptions about what “Freedom and Justice for All” actually means are being smashed by angry young people protesting authority about the Vietnam War, the draft, Civil Rights, and Women’s Rights. Countless groups— Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, etc.— feel they can change the world by exercising their democratic rights, but are caught off guard by the force used in the government’s response. The FBI, through its counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO), and police in riot gear are overreacting at protests, such as the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago or Kent Sate in 1970, as well as rounding up activists that lead to a long list of trials and “Freedom Movements” like “Free Huey,” “Free Erica,” “Free the Chicago Seven,” to name a few.

In 1967, having already studied at the Sorbonne in France, Angela Davis is a PhD student in Germany in Philosophy and Critical Theory who decides to return to the United States to finish her dissertation at UC San Diego with her mentor Herbert Marcuse, a German Marxist philosopher and political theorist, but also to be more directly involved with the Liberation Struggle at home. She joins the Che Lumumba Club, the Black Collective of the Communist Party in Los Angeles that works in conjunction with Black Panthers and other “radical groups” for the broader Black Liberation Movement.

In 1969, Angela Davis is hired to start her first teaching position at The University of California at Los Angeles.  Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, learns that taxpayer dollars are paying for a Communist to be on staff at the state institution, and very publicly attempts to get Miss Davis fired. The California Regents and Angela Davis battle in the press, and ultimately the court, about whether she can be fired for her political views.  Angela is followed, harassed, and death threats are sent to the philosophy department almost daily.  She buys guns for protection, and is provided security by Black Panther Party members. 

While Angela is denied teaching work, she doubly applies herself to the Black Liberation Struggle, which is becoming more and more a fight for legal justice. In California, as Davis saw it, the worst victim of “frame-ups” were the Black Panthers. She would help organize and speak at rallies, emphasizing issues of freedom, that would be echoed in James Baldwin’s words during her own incarceration: “If they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

Her legal justice work leads her to the Soledad Brothers’ case and George Jackson, one of the three prisoners accused of causing a riot in the Soledad prison and killing two guards.  She works as a researcher for the lawyers, becomes close to the Jackson family, and a mentor to George’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan Jackson, whose impatience with the pace of justice and the “Free the Soledad Brother’s movement” reaches a boiling point.  George had already served ten years of a “one-year-to-life” sentence for a seventy-dollar robbery. Now being accused of killing a guard in a prison riot, it seems like George will never get out of prison. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, at the Marin County Court on August 7th, 1970, Jonathan Jackson attempts to kidnap a judge, prosecutor, and two jurors to take them hostage. Jonathan walks into the court room stands up taking a .30 carbine rifle out from under his rain coat and announces, “Okay gentleman. I’m taking over now.” It ends badly in a tremendous barrage of gunfire and blood shed. Jonathan’s guns are registered in Angela Davis’ name.  She is implicated for kidnapping and murder as a conspirator.

Nixon won the presidency in 1968, and again in 1972, on a platform to represent and protect the “silent majority” of Americans. Capturing and prosecuting Angela Davis was one small part of his fight to quell radical activity and crime. At the same time Davis was a communist, a comrade, and Nixon had a keen awareness of the “cat and mouse” game with the Soviet Union and China, our Cold War enemies. Davis was probably not central to the Nixon cabinet’s thinking but nothing could derail his upcoming trips to China (1971) and the Soviet Union (1972). These tensions at home and abroad combined with the events surrounding Angela Davis’ political work and affiliations, crime, and trial rocketed her to international fame.  FREE ANGELA tells this story.

Nearly forty years later, and although today she is best known as a fashion icon whose face adorns t-shirts all over, there are still many unanswered questions about the circumstances surrounding her crime, incarceration, and legacy as a political prisoner and symbol of black power. To the FBI, Angela Davis was a criminal and terrorist. To the prosecution, she was a woman in love who conspires to kidnap and kill in order to save her man, which meant she had to face the consequences—the death penalty. To her family and defense team, she was a righteous woman and a political activist being framed by the US government. To half the world, she was an enemy of democracy. To the other, she was a martyr in the fight for class and race justice. We seek to tell the story, but also to unearth some answers. In the process we will gain a better understanding of the past but also the present.

As the FREE ANGELA title infers the theme of “justice” is still extremely current today. Angela Davis has been a passionate prisoners’ rights activist since the seventies. The documentary, and Angela’s own work today, asks us to examine our relationship with a prison industrial complex and justice system that is conservatively estimated to touch the lives of 35 – 40 million Americans (inmates, spouses, parents, children, siblings, friends, lawyers, guards, prison workers, etc.). According to the U.S. Department of Justice, over 2 million Americans are currently behind bars, which is far more than any other democracy. While close to half are black men, what has remained invisible to the public is that since 1980 the female inmate population has increased 500%, and black women are the fastest growing segment.

Secondly, the story compels us to keep asking the most pertinent moral question in our post 9/11 world:  What is the balance between civil liberties and national security, between patriotic protests and Patriot Acts? And, what is our individual responsibility to maintaining this balance? Like many young people in the sixties, Angela Davis put her body and life on the line in the fight for social justice. What would you have done? What will you do?