If They Come in the Morning

First published in 1971, this anthology of essays, letters, poems, legal arguments, and political statements was edited by Angela Y. Davis, Bettina Aptheker, and members of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. Written while Davis was imprisoned and facing capital charges, the collection argues that the U.S. prison and judicial systems function as instruments of racial and class oppression, and it calls for a broad united front to resist what the contributors characterize as an accelerating fascist tendency in American political life.

Julian Bond's foreword situates the book within a long history of racist incarceration, linking the cases of Davis, Ruchell Magee, and the Soledad Brothers to centuries of repression. Bond identifies them as part of an expanding "army of the wronged" (xiii) but insists they represent only the visible tip of a vast problem, since countless others are railroaded into prisons without defense.

In the preface, Davis and Aptheker argue that the state's increasing reliance on repression reflects not strength but a profound social crisis. They analyze fascism not as a sudden coup but as a "protracted social process" (xvii) that must be resisted in its earliest stages, and they call for a United Front joining national liberation movements and working people to challenge the state's authority and return imprisoned activists to their communities.

James Baldwin's open letter to Davis, written from Europe, frames the collection's moral stakes. He reflects on a generational shift in Black political consciousness, arguing that younger activists have "assessed and absorbed their history" (20) and freed themselves from the internalized self-hatred that slavery instilled. Baldwin contends that white Americans' refusal to relinquish the psychological refuge of whiteness enables government violence both abroad and at home, and he closes with the warning that gives the book its title: "if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night" (23).

Davis's lead essay, "Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation," establishes the collection's theoretical framework. She traces a history of resistance from the Underground Railroad through the post-Civil War Black Codes, Marcus Garvey's Declaration of Rights, and the civil rights sit-ins, arguing that Black survival has always depended on forging channels of resistance both within and outside the law. She defines the political prisoner as one whose words or deeds embody protest against the established order, illustrating the concept with figures ranging from Nat Turner and John Brown to the labor organizer Joe Hill and the Italian American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, all of whom were executed after trials that masked political motives behind criminal charges. Davis argues that the state deliberately obscures the political character of such prisoners, citing the New York Panther 21 trial, in which the court rejected the label "political" yet entered Black Panther Party literature as evidence of criminal intent. She analyzes the prison as an instrument of class domination, contending that crime is an inevitable product of unequal wealth distribution and that police occupation of Black communities, a judicial system in which 85 percent of defendants are pressured into guilty pleas, and the systematic use of frame-ups all funnel Black people into incarceration. She warns that fascism is "cancerous in nature" (42) and will spread if not resisted in its incipient stages.

In "Lessons: From Attica to Soledad," Davis analyzes the 1971 Attica prison revolt in New York as an expression of new collective political consciousness among prisoners. She argues that the state's violent response, in which scores of captives and hostages were killed, was not an aberration but part of a pattern including the shootings at Jackson State and Kent State and the massacre at My Lai.

Bettina Aptheker's essay on the social functions of U.S. prisons critiques the assumption that the social order is fundamentally just. She marshals statistics showing that 52 percent of jail inmates had not been convicted but could not afford bail, while 30 to 50 percent of prisoners were Black and Brown despite comprising roughly 15 percent of the population. She proposes a broadened concept of the political prisoner encompassing four categories: those framed for political leadership, those who committed acts of civil disobedience, non-political victims of class and racial oppression, and those who developed political consciousness during imprisonment.

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, contributes an essay arguing that prisons can never achieve victory over prisoners because ideas cannot be confined. The Folsom Prisoners Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform, produced during a November 1970 work stoppage at Folsom Prison in California, presents 29 demands including legal representation at parole hearings, an end to indeterminate sentences, the right to form labor unions, and prosecution of guards for brutality. The prisoners characterize California's institutions as "fascist concentration camps of modern America" (68).

Davis's survey of political prisoner cases documents the systematic assault on the Black Panther Party, including over 1,000 arrests and 19 killings in two and a half years, and profiles cases across communities: Ahmed Evans, a Black community organizer sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Cleveland; Lolita Lebron, a Puerto Rican independence fighter imprisoned since 1954; Reies Tijerina, leader of the Chicano land grant movement; and Marie Hill, a Black teenager sentenced to death at age 15 in North Carolina based solely on a coerced confession with no physical evidence.

The sections on Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, and Ericka Huggins, a Party organizer, document their murder and conspiracy charges in New Haven, Connecticut. Court testimony revealed that the victim, Panther member Alex Rackley, was killed by a self-admitted police agent. After a six-month trial ended in a hung jury, the judge dismissed all charges, ruling that prejudicial publicity made a fair trial impossible. Huggins's poems from prison express longing for freedom and solidarity, while a taped message from both Seale and Huggins calls for demonstrations and public education about political prisoners.

The section on the Soledad Brothers, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and George Jackson, centers on the January 1970 killing of three Black prisoners by a guard at Soledad Prison in California, the grand jury's ruling of justifiable homicide without permitting Black witnesses to testify, and the subsequent charging of the three activists with a white guard's retaliatory killing. Davis's appeal argues the brothers were targeted not for the guard's death but for their success in heightening political consciousness throughout California's prison system. George Jackson's essay calls for a nonsectarian united front, identifying white racism as the primary obstacle to left unity.

The section on Ruchell Magee traces his path from first arrest at age 16 in Louisiana through a 1963 life sentence in California and his self-education in law using a legal dictionary and the U.S. Constitution. On August 7, 1970, while in court as a witness, Magee joined an armed escape attempt at the Marin County courthouse initiated by Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson's younger brother. Guards opened fire despite the presence of hostages, killing Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, William Christmas, and the presiding judge, and severely wounding Magee. In his letters to Davis, Magee contends that the August 7 action aimed not to free the Soledad Brothers but to expose murder and illegal enslavement within the California system.

Davis's political biography traces her formation from childhood on "Dynamite Hill" in Birmingham, Alabama, where she knew the four girls killed in the 1963 church bombing, through her studies under philosopher Herbert Marcuse and her appointment as a philosophy professor at UCLA, where her open declaration of Communist Party membership drew the hostility of Governor Ronald Reagan. After the August 7 events, four guns she had lawfully purchased were linked to the action, and she was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy despite no evidence she knew of the plan. The legal section presents arguments by chief counsel Howard Moore Jr. that the state's case rested entirely on lawful gun purchases and that conspiracy charges allowed conviction based on what Moore calls "mental hearsay" (211), while both Davis and Magee argue for the right to self-representation.

The final section documents the rapid growth of over 200 local defense committees by February 1971, organized primarily in the Black community through door-to-door canvassing, church meetings, and union outreach. Statements of solidarity arrive from labor unions, the African National Congress Women's Secretariat, European intellectuals, and figures including Coretta Scott King, who warns that if Davis's Blackness, gender, and politics are being judged rather than the actual charges, all Americans will lose their liberties. The collection closes with Davis and Magee's trials still pending, their cause taken up by a mass movement spanning continents.