The Davis frame-up, trial, and acquittal is well known and does not warrant a detailed examination. However, what came after – the birth of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) in May 1973 – is less well known. In fact, it has been largely ignored by historians.
For months after the acquittal Davis, Charlene Mitchell – a fellow Communist, and executive director of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis – and other CPUSA members, discussed Davis’ frame-up, defense, trial, acquittal, and its impact.
In a December 1972 report to the CPUSA’s Central Committee, Mitchell outlined her experience as leader of the international campaign to free Davis. She told her comrades, “The major lesson we learned was that the legal and mass defense of political prisoners is an inseparable entity; that you cannot free a political prisoner in the courtroom alone, and you cannot, without a good, political legal defense in the courtroom, make a mass defense,” or create a mass movement. Importantly, she added, “we must discuss the role our Party can play” in forming a national defense organization, the genesis of which would come from the roughly 200 local Free Angela Davis Committees. Mitchell outlined a proposal for building a national defense organization, arguing “that it is very possible for us to be the leadership” of such an organization “and for that leadership to be completely accepted.”
Communists had been in the leadership of the struggle for African American equality since at least the early- to mid-1930s with defense of the Scottsboro Nine and the emergence of the National Negro Congress, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and later the Council on African Affairs, and the Civil Rights Congress. The NAARPR continued this tradition.
The call for the founding conference of what became the NAARPR proclaimed: “[F]orces of racism and repression can be defeated. We know that victory can be won.” The campaign to free Davis was the evidence. “We can free political prisoners. We can free victims of racist and political repression. We can stop the increase of police aggression and the unbridled terrorism which pervades the prisons.”
The call continued, “we can only succeed in turning the tide of repression through a united, nationally coordinated effort…The repression of this period is calculated, organized and systematic.” Like racist attacks today, such as the Buffalo shooting, the call added: “In its center is the seed of fascism, which, if allowed to sprout, would strangle us all. To successfully confront and bring a halt to this systematic, nationally organized repression, we need a national apparatus to organize our resistance.”