ANGELA DAVIS: The Making of a Revolutionary

The dedication leaves no doubt where Parker stands -- ""To my wife who is not a revolutionary and our daughter who shows no signs of becoming a revolutionary."" Put that in your Afro, Angela, and frizz it. Parker, self-identified member of the ""black silent majority,"" surveys the rise of racial militancy, charging that spokesmen like Carmichael and ""ex-convict"" Cleaver are nothing more than ego-tripping blowhards created and egged on by the liberal press, sinister propagandists who play upon ""the natural dissatisfaction within the Negro community for their own devious purposes"" and who turn innocents like ""the bright young honor student"" Angela Davis into radical mouthpieces aiming at ""destroying American society."" There were also more specific influences -- an Episcopal minister with ""far-left views,"" wicked Greenwich Village, Brandeis (""The school that gave Angela Davis a scholarship was no ordinary educational institution""), New Left guru Marcuse who ""laboriously taught her very well,"" and of course later ""convict"" George Jackson whose political acumen was ""as unlearned and uninformed as might be expected of a young man who spent most of his life in jail."" Parker does not rant, he grunts: Professors who are Communists cannot be accorded academic freedom because ""membership implies a commitment to practice educational fraud""; the Presbyterian Church's contribution to Angela's defense fund signaled ""a misunderstanding of the nature of the Christian commitment""; those active in the ""Free Angela"" movement were not concerned with defending her but bringing about ""a revolution in America."" Regina Nadelson's Who Is Angela Davis? (p. 845) left the question dangling; Parker, who never even asks, leaves both Miss Davis and the reader boggling.