GUEST COLUMN: Angela Davis wrong choice for Southeast MLK event

Angela Davis is scheduled to speak at the annual tribute dinner to the honorable Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Southeast Missouri State University on Jan. 29. I must ask: Of all great potential speakers, why Davis?

I believe wholeheartedly in the First Amendment and free speech in America. I understand that many ideas are sometimes offensive and even highly controversial. Shutting speakers down, especially on college campuses, based on the speakers’ personal views, is wrong and should be condemned at all levels. I don’t believe in today’s “Woke Cancel Culture.” I advocate for a battlefield of ideas. That’s why I’d like everyone to know just exactly who Angela Davis is, and why I feel she is a poor choice to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Angela Davis is a 75-year-old activist/professor from Birmingham, Alabama. She has been cast as a “civil rights icon,” yet the movement of the Martin Luther King era (for which she is speaking in honor) transpired when she was in her teens and still in high school. Davis spent the early 1960s studying abroad with radical leftists such as Herbert Marcuse, then afterward, devoted herself to the Communist Party. She was profoundly involved with the Black Panthers, a militant group whose first-line victims were fellow African Americans and a direct contradiction to Martin Luther King’s “pilgrimage to nonviolence.”

In 1970, Davis was charged with three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, for her alleged role in the Marin County California Courthouse Takeover. With the aim to free three members of the Black Panthers Party, the action resulted in the deaths of four people. She was later acquitted, then proceeded to go on tour in Marxist/Leninist countries, receiving honors, awards and prizes for her commitment to the party. She was twice the U.S. Communist Party’s candidate for vice president, and, in 1991, left the party to join the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

During the Vietnam War, Davis was actively advancing the communist agenda in the U.S. All while America’s fighting men and women were making the ultimate sacrifice to free the people of South Vietnam from the totalitarian communist regime of Ho Chi Minh. Then they came home and suffered taunts, verbal abuse and ridicule for their service by individuals from Davis’ Marxist ilk. I will add that she has never apologized for the terrible torture American prisoners of war had to endure in camps such as the Hanoi Hilton, Alcatraz and Briarpatch at the hands of her communist comrades.

To this day, Davis holds an anti-Israel stance. She advocates for boycotts, divestment, sanctions — or better known as the BDS campaign — affecting scores of Israelis and their allies, to challenge the movement, viewing it as anti-Semitic and an external threat to the nationhood of Israel. She has also espoused support for terrorists Rasmea Odeh and Marwan Barghouti, both of whom have been convicted of murdering Israeli civilians. In a statement, Davis said, “I support Palestinian political prisoners just as I support current political prisoners in the Basque Country, in Catalunya, in India, and in other parts of the world. I have indeed expressed opposition to policies and practices of the state of Israel, as I express similar opposition to U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to other discriminatory U.S. policies.”

I see Angela Davis’ speaking engagement as nothing more than a recruitment drive for young socialists. She has masterfully cloaked her modern egalitarian ideologies in the honorable Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent achievements, to ingratiate herself and push her Marxist beliefs. Despite how I personally feel about her shrouded motives and ignoble past, I advocate for Southeast Missouri State University to not rescind her invitation, if for no other reason than to deny her political martyrdom. As well as to shine a spotlight on such old and failed ideas of collectivism, so they might be brought forth for the public to view in their truest light.

Will Perry is a small business owner, Navy veteran and candidate for the 148th District in the Missouri General Assembly. He resides in Scott City.