“Armed and Dangerous”: The Criminalization of Angela Davis and the Cold War Myth of America’s Innocence

Abstract:This essay explores the arrest, imprisonment, and trial of Angela Davis as the most politically charged legal defense case of the détente era of the Cold War that drew international attention over a nearly two-year period (1970–72). It demonstrates that the life of this young black female intellectual in post-civil rights America became inseparable from securing (or contesting) the dominant narrative of U.S. democratic superiority. Davis, her family, and legal team insisted that racism and politics motivated the criminal charges against her and that a transnational movement was imperative to ensuring her safety as a black woman communist in the American justice system. U.S. leaders and mainstream journalists dismissed the veracity of such claims, ridiculed Davis’s fears for her safety, and asserted that political trials and racism existed only “over there” in the communist universe. They racialized Davis as a “black militant,” invoking traditional sexist–racist tropes of black women as emotionally unstable, sexual sirens, in order to reassure the American public of the righteousness of U.S. democracy and of Davis’s concomitant guilt. After an all-white jury acquitted Davis of all criminal charges, the mainstream press hailed the acquittal as evidence not of Davis’s innocence but as proof that she was wrong about America. Davis persisted in contesting on a world stage America’s Cold War claims of democratic moral superiority and traveled to the Soviet Union to thank leaders for helping spearhead the international campaign that she credited for saving her life.