Angela Davis Entertained Tyrants and Border Guards Before Pitzer’s Class of 2026

Angela Davis meeting East German dictator Erich Honecker in 1972. (Credit: Peter Koard)

Pitzer College is widely understood to be the most uniformly left-wing of the Claremont consortium. This morning, they announced a commencement speaker who celebrated border guards and shook hands with dictators. 

On Tuesday, an email to Pitzer community members announced that Angela Davis, Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would serve as the commencement speaker for its class of 2026. Davis previously served as Pitzer’s commencement speaker in 2012.

The choice pays undue honor to a figure with a record of apologizing for violence in the United States and despotism abroad.

In a 1969 speech, Davis told assembled Black Panthers that “sisters and brothers in Connecticut are still in jail.” Davis’s reminder was on behalf of several Black Panthers arrested for torturing and murdering 19-year-old Alex Rackley after suspecting him of espionage.

In 1970, Davis purchased the weapons used in the takeover of a Marin County courthouse and murder of its judge. The incident ended with four deaths and Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. 

Under California law at the time, Davis was charged directly with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy instead of being an accessory to the crimes. She was acquitted of these charges, though she had procured the perpetrator’s firearms. 

Following her acquittal, Davis engaged in a global tour that turned her into a political celebrity in the communist world, meeting Marxist-Leninist leaders from Cuba to Czechoslovakia. She paid particular attention to East Germany, where she jubilantly met with dictator Erich Honecker. Honecker was responsible for a “shoot-to-kill” policy for those attempting to flee his regime through the Berlin Wall, resulting in hundreds of deaths, and oversaw torture-filled political prisons.

After years of denouncing the United States as authoritarian, Davis posed in front of the Berlin Wall and chatted with its guards. She left a wreath at the grave of a guard who had been killed while trying to prevent a family from fleeing across the wall to the West. Davis even told state media that “we mourn the deaths of the border guards who sacrificed their lives for the protection of their socialist homeland,” words widely distributed in propaganda pamphlets.

Had Davis done this at the United States-Mexico border in 2026, she would likely be rendered persona non grata for most Pitzer students. Indeed, she is a vocal opponent of a border wall between the United States and Mexico. 

Angela Davis has long advocated for prison abolition, even writing a book titled Are Prisons Obsolete? in 2003. Yet, in 1972, she declined when Czech democratic socialist Jiří Pelikán called on her to denounce the imprisonment of political dissidents in the communist Eastern Bloc. 

Davis’s confidant Charlene Mitchell responded to Pelikán in a statement to The Times on Davis’s behalf. Mitchell claimed that those incarcerated in Eastern Europe were only there for “undermining the government” and clarified that Davis did not lend support to those taking the “retrograde step” of fleeing communist nations for capitalist ones.

The Reverend Jim Jones ruled the Jonestown commune in Guyana for his People's Temple, a totalitarian cult. In 1977, Davis broadcast a message to Jonestown to say that “we are with you” against “a conspiracy.” She even wrote to the White House on Jones’ behalf, calling him “a humanitarian.” Six months later, his spiral into insanity left over 900 dead.

Angela Davis went on to accept the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize in 1979 and serve as the Communist Party USA’s nominee for vice president in 1980 and 1984. The CPUSA was a recognized financial and political front for Soviet influence.

Davis has not offered a word to recant her support for a rogues’ gallery of 20th century human rights abusers. Instead, she has co-signed statements blaming NATO expansion for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continued to champion Cuba’s blood-soaked communist regime. 

Opposition to American border policies and support for prison abolition are positions anyone has a right to hold, including students and staff of Pitzer College. Davis has not, however, applied either principle consistently. 

Pitzer has defined itself by its progressive values. Angela Davis’s career has been distinguished by inconsistent adherence to her own left-wing beliefs. Pitzer’s decision to celebrate its graduates with such a fickle advocate of its professed worldview reflects poorly on the College’s moral consistency.