The Brothers and Angela

Sometimes I think this whole world

is one big prison yard Some of us are prisoners, the rest

of us are guards Lord Lord, so they cut George

Jackson down Lord Lord, they laid him in the

ground.

--Bob Dylan

The buff-colored civic-center modern Santa Clara County Superior Courthouse, where the trial of Angela Davis is being held, is protected by a couple of recently erected 12-ft. chain-link fences, with gates guarded by about a dozen armed deputies. At 6 each morning, quiet, well-behaved crowds of young blacks, Chicanos and whites begin gathering at the gates to vie for the 42 courtroom seats reserved for the public. Angela Davis, her sister Fania Jordan and the defendant's team of three lawyers arrive shortly before 9, from a secret place where Miss Davis has been staying since her release on $102,500 bail Feb. 16. Everyone must pass through a detection device so sensitive that it picked up the metal in a woman reporter's girdle.

Inside the small courtroom the security is also tight, but unobtrusive. The area in front of Judge Richard E. Arnason's bench is clogged with tables and people. At one table Prosecutor Albert W. Harris Jr. sits with an assistant. The rest of the limited space is filled by half a dozen deputies with walkie-talkies and a bailiff--all armed with revolvers. In the first rows sit 30 members of the press contingent, which includes correspondents from the Soviet Union and East Germany, where Angela Davis is considered a political prisoner.

In his opening statement, Prosecutor Harris had to go back over the events that led to the Davis trial. In January 1970, George Jackson and two other blacks, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, were charged with the murder of John Mills, a guard at the state prison in Soledad, Calif. Jackson had already spent ten years in prison for a $70 robbery; there he turned into a skillful revolutionary dialectician and a leader of Soledad's militant black inmates. The 1970 indictments made him a radical hero, and the three became known as the Soledad Brothers.

In August 1970, Jackson's younger brother Jonathan, 17, tried to kidnap a judge and four others from the Marin County, Calif., courthouse. He reportedly said that he meant to use his hostages to bargain for release of the Soledad Brothers. In the shootout that followed, the judge, young Jackson and two of his accomplices were killed. About a year later, George Jackson, then 30, was fatally shot at San Quentin in what prison authorities called an escape attempt. Last week, ironically, Drumgo, 26, and Clutchette, 29, were acquitted of the Soledad guard's murder by an all-white jury in San Francisco. Now, Angela Davis, 28, the former U.C.L.A. philosophy instructor and proclaimed Communist, was on trial for murder, kidnaping and criminal conspiracy in supposedly helping Jonathan in the fatal attempt to free his brother. She did so, said Prosecutor Harris, because of her "passion for George Jackson that knew no bounds."

To support his contention, Harris said that he will present in evidence letters found in her Los Angeles apartment, and others which she had sent to Jackson but which were intercepted. He also said that she and Jackson were observed in "a close passionate and physical involvement" during her one brief visit with him at San Quentin--it was the only time they ever met--and that she even considered herself married to Jackson. In his impassive, businesslike monotone, Harris promised the jurors evidence that the weapons used in Jonathan's aborted kidnaping had been purchased by Defendant Davis, and that she was seen in a van that Jonathan Jackson had rented the day before the courthouse Shootout.

Tall and slim, Angela Davis stood easily at a lectern facing the jury box. She insisted on making her own opening statement. At one point during her one-hour and 20-minute address she called the state's case "a network of false assumptions." She admitted to "a deep affection" for George Jackson, but insisted that her love for him was no different from the love she felt for the remaining Soledad Brothers and for all "oppressed brothers and sisters." She attacked the prosecutor's hypothesis about her motive as "taking advantage of a woman, because in this society women are supposed to be ruled by passion--clearly evidence of male chauvinism."

Dynamite Hill. She admitted owning the guns found at the scene of the shootout. In the "Dynamite Hill" section of Birmingham, Ala., where she grew up, she explained, most families kept guns for protection against racist attacks. She insisted that the weapons were bought legally after she started getting a spate of extremist threats. Said she: "I was convinced with good reason that I needed some sort of protection if I wanted to live out my years."

Just how Angela Davis lives out her years is the question her jurors must decide. Resolving this last link in the chain of events begun by George Jackson will be all the more difficult for them because everything hangs on the interpretation of ambiguous evidence.

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