The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis

Activist-scholar Angela Y. Davis was one of the most potent radical political symbols of the '70s, her defiantly clenched fist raised high over her reddish-brown, full-blown Afro. Her "celebrity" was launched when she was put on trial in 1972 in San Jose, California, for murder and kidnapping, charges on which she was later acquitted. This second edition of Bettina Aptheker's gut-wrenching chronicle of the Davis trial is a fact-filled boon to a younger generation imbued with the era's mythologies. With a strange cast of characters, including then-governor Ronald Reagan, Aptheker reveals heroes, villains, and brilliant legal work.

"Winning the freedom of Angela Davis was a singular achievement," she writes. "Three conditions were decisive: the intervention of world opinion, the unanimity of the Black community ... and the organizational coherence of the U.S. Communist Party." But also, as the portrait in The Morning Breaks makes plain, Angela Davis's amazing resilience. --Eugene Holley Jr.