...And they all ask one main question,
which is, "Why is Angela Davis communist?"
It is a very hard question to answer,
mainly because I don't feel I've been taught the true meaning of communism.
This is one of my reasons for writing you at the time.
- Hold it right there. That is Angela Davis, economist.
Actually, I think I answered that before
when we were talking about what a revolutionary is.
- Many times with the term communist,
because I think it's been used by so many different
aspects of our society to put down
rather than to let people
try to understand.
Everybody shuns away from it.
It's like it's a disease or something like that.
I just, you know, what I'm trying to get through is that the brother,
here, in that letter, is raising a question,
and, therefore, in his question, it seems
that he's trying to say that there are some people
who are plagued by that, and they let that get in the way.
They don't want to know Angela Davis as a person. Even if they do,
that prevents them from coming to know Angela Davis as a person.
Well, you see, now, that might be true for,
say, the vast majority of white people. But one of the things which really impressed
me, when I was on the streets and fighting
for my job at UCLA, was that whenever I
spoke to Black people, and whenever I spoke to the Black community,
very few people had hang-ups about communism. I can remember
many times walking down the street
and having someone stop me and say,
"Are you Angela Davis?" and
I would say yes, and they would express their solidarity,
and say, well, all the sisters and brothers would say
even though, I don't really know what
communism is all about, just as the brother here said,
then we know that there must be something good about
it because otherwise the man wouldn't be coming down on you so hard.
So I think that the resistance
to understanding what communism is all
about doesn't exist nearly
as much in the Black community as it does in the country as a whole.
This letter here is an indication of that. What he is saying is that
although he realizes that this
country has kept away from him and
many of our sisters and brothers the knowledge
of what communism is, he wants to know about it.
And I'm sure that that's, when he says that
that's one of the main questions that's asked.
I doubt whether there's a,
in the Black community at least,
whether there's huge contours of hostility. It's just a desire, curiosity
to know.
What I generally say,
and I answered the brother and tried to explain in a few words why I was a communist.,
and I said, essentially,
the same thing that I said when I told you
why I was a revolutionary: Because
I have a very strong
love for oppressed people, for
my people. I want to see them free,
and I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free.
And I realize that the only way that
we can do this is by
moving towards
a revolutionary society where
the needs, and the interests, and the wishes
of all people can be respected.
