Saw Angela Davis yesterday.

So, I went to go hear Angela Davis speak last night. The hall was so crowded that I couldn't get in, but I stood out in the vestibule with a lot of other people, mostly local blacks and old white campus fringe elements, who couldn't get in and we watched through the door.

In the introduction, the introducer was like, "Back in [some year] governor Ronald Reagan vowed that Angela Davis would never teach in the California state university system again," and when she began her next sentence, "Professor Davis is now tenured at UC - Santa Cruz...", the crowd started spontaneously applauding, and this old thin white woman near me with long grey hair and a beret and crazy eyes held her hand to her mouth and shouted out, "And Ronald Reagan is dead!"

During the speech itself, in listing out the struggles of the world - racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, global warming - Angela Davis threw in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence right after talking about the struggles of indigenous peoples everywhere.

Like a third of the way into the speech, too, she talked about the nation's growing prison population and how felons are deprived of the right to vote, which affects one out of every ten black men, and then she did a mini historical retrospect where she talked about how in post-Civil War Mississippi your vote got taken away for miscegenation (a black crime) but not murder (a white crime), and then how taking away votes from felons was nothing new, since even back at the beginning of the country when you had to be a white male to vote and thus only 6% of the population could, there was a law passed to take away the vote from felons, back in 1776. "That's right," she was like, "The vote being taken away from people is a fundamental part of our nation's history, beginning back in seventeen - seventy - six," and as she said the last numbers real slowly, this black woman over on the other side of the vestibule held her hands to her mouth and yelled to up front and was like, "Lay it out, girl!"

Angela Davis also hit home on the point that the victories we want and what we're getting are two different things, and to think that all of MLK Jr's dreams were fulfilled in the Voting Rights Act, though it's significant, is to fool ourselves and betray his dream.