[Vincent Brown] In April, 1970, a deadly shooting incident unfolded at the Marin County courthouse in Northern California.

Law enforcement officers traced guns from the crime scene to their legal owner: an influential activist, author, and academic named Angela Yvonne Davis.

They issued a warrant for her arrest.

Suspecting the authorities would not treat her fairly, she fled.

So the FBI put her on their Most Wanted list, and circulated this poster.

But the Bureau's attempt to use these photographs to turn her into a public enemy backfired.

Instead, the figure of Angela Davis became a powerful symbol of a popular liberation struggle.

What gave this image its power?

How did its meaning change over time?

What does Professor Davis think?

[slate claps] [upbeat music] In the mid-1960s, many young people grew frustrated by the pace of change in America.

Confronted with deep-seated racism, entrenched poverty, and the escalation of the Vietnam War, some believed that socialist revolution and Black Power offered the best hope for progress.

This development alarmed the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who pursued an aggressive campaign against groups he regarded as threats to national security.

By the end of the 1960s, many Black activists had been imprisoned or killed.

This was the turbulent time when Angela Davis came to public attention, as a close associate of the revolutionary Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

In 1969, the University of California Board of Regents fired her from her post teaching philosophy at UCLA, denouncing her for inflammatory rhetoric and association with communism.

The next year, the FBI pursued Davis in connection to the Marin County courthouse shooting and circulated her photographs across the country.

There's a long history of using photography to make Black people look like villains.

So do you know how they made you look like a criminal in those photos?

- It's clear that they were cropped in such a way as to resemble mugshots.

But my own sensibility in recognizing mugshots comes from growing up in the segregated circumstances of Birmingham, Alabama, and remembering photographs of Black people in the newspaper -- they were almost always, inevitably, mugshots.

- This is an original wanted poster of Angela Davis from 1970.

Tens of thousands of which were distributed across the United States.

- [Vincent] "Wanted by the FBI.

Angela Yvonne Davis."

It's funny how all this information is- - [Elizabeth] Yeah.

- reducing her to a type, right?

- "Build: slender."

- "Race: negro."

- [Elizabeth] Signed by no other than- - [Vincent] J. Edgar Hoover.

- [Elizabeth] But this is what's important, right?

That she's a criminal, a kidnapper and a murderer, in the possession of guns, possibly, and armed and dangerous.

- [Vincent] Mm.

- It's not like these are her actual mugshots, right?

But it's really playing up the representation of Black Power figures, and using that to drum up fear in the American people.

But also link immediately this activism with crime.

- [Vincent] In the best-known photo, Davis looks directly into the camera with a sense of fierce determination.

But the most prominent feature of the image is her hair.

You know, a lot of people associate the Afro, the natural hairstyle, with you.

But there were many, many women, and men, who wore their hair natural at the time -- in fact, my own mother wore her hair natural during those years.

- I always find it so ironic that the- the Afro is associated with me, because I was emulating other Black women who were wearing their hair natural.

I read those photographs as an attempt to depict a kind of generic Black woman.

And then it serves the purpose of literally terrorizing hundreds and hundreds of young Black women, because the police associated the Afro, the natural, with radical politics.

I know that enormous numbers of Black women were actually stopped by the police during the period during which they were looking for me.

- [Vincent] The Afro was a radical idea, even in revolutionary Cuba, where Davis visited several times.

- [speaking Spanish] [Angela Davis] There were young people who were asking us, why were we wearing our hair natural?

And we pointed out that it was a political statement.

And one of the people said, "Oh, so it's like the beards that the guerrillas wore during the Cuban Revolution."

And we said, yeah, perhaps, and then they said, "So when the revolution comes, you'll straighten your hair!"

[both laughing] - That's not what I was expecting.

- [laughing] Yes, exactly.

- [Vincent] In the U.S., the prominence of Angela Davis' hair on the FBI poster was crucial to the process of criminalizing her and anyone who resembled her.

The message spread widely, as the poster appeared in newspapers, at government offices, and even on the Sunday night TV series, "The FBI."

But it was a popular publication that confirmed Davis as a menace to society.

- This LIFE magazine cover really made the case, kind of the national case, and, in many ways, turned Angela Davis into public enemy number one.

This is now bringing this "fugitive" into the homes and stores of the American people.

- [Vincent] Davis received hate mail -- In at least one instance, from a group of sixth-grade children, encouraged to write by a teacher.

[reading] "January 7th, 1971.

Miss Angela, why are you turning against the USA?

How can you even consider it?

You're treated correctly, like anyone else in this country.

I'm white, so I know what you are thinking."

- We only have these letters, right?

These traces in this box.

But we can imagine the lesson that the teacher taught them that really, really hammered it home was that: Angela Davis is anti-American.

Angela Davis is a threat to America.

Angela Davis is a terrorist.

- And doesn't belong here.

- Exactly.

- [Vincent] Angela Davis eluded the FBI for two months, before they finally tracked her down to a hotel in New York and made an arrest in October, 1970.

By this time, her image had begun to take on a new significance -- not as a criminal, but as a hero.

- When she is the target of this FBI manhunt, you have all of these different communities within the Black community who then stand up to rally for her.

And so her image is everywhere, because she doesn't fit neatly into any one box, but, simultaneously, she represents everything that Black people are fighting for in that moment.

- Mm.

What does the natural mean to the Black community at this time?

- In the late 1960s, the Black is Beautiful movement is thriving, especially in a place like California.

And Angela Davis is in line with a lot of these trends.

That Afro, that large looming Afro, becomes a symbol of freedom, of what's possible, right?

It's the Black imagination really made possible on the heads of African Americans.

That freedom 'fro was a marker of pride in ways that it just hadn't been among the masses of Black people in that time period.

- [Vincent] While Davis was in jail, awaiting trial on capital charges of kidnapping and murder, her supporters saw her as a political prisoner.

They shared her image on posters, pamphlets, and buttons.

It circulated like a meme, helping spark an unprecedented international campaign to demand her freedom.

- This is a really clever campaigning poster from the London Angela Davis Defence Committee.

And they simply take that wanted poster, they put it within another poster, and rather than being something that's tracking her down and hunting her and positioning her as a dangerous person, it's the Defence Committee.

It's raising awareness of her situation.

And this is her situation.

Here she's a victim, rather than a perpetrator.

The point is, her supporters were making her visible so that she couldn't become invisible through incarceration.

- Ah.

- At this point she was in prison, and the intent is to do what happened to many other Black radicals -- that she would just disappear.

So these images made her visible.

- [Vincent] Davis was released on bail in February, 1972.

- All power to the people.

- When her trial began just days later, it drew worldwide attention.

In court, Davis admitted to owning the guns used in the shooting, but argued that she had bought them for self-defense, and they'd been taken without her knowledge.

The jury agreed.

That June, they acquitted her of all charges.

[music] The image that was intended to make her appear as a criminal had also helped to set her free.

In her own words, she had been "freed by the people."

After her acquittal, the image of Angela Davis receded from public view... until the 1980s and '90s, when America saw a revival of Black Power iconography, led by hip-hop groups like Public Enemy with their call to "fight the power."

So what did Angela Davis mean to you personally?

- By the time I was coming of age in the 1990s, Angela Davis was the Afro for a lot of us, right?

We knew something generally about Black Panthers and 1970s protests, but what loomed large really was her Afro.

It was iconic.

[music starts] - [Vincent] This iteration of Angela Davis's image appeared in music videos, and became a touchstone when the Afro returned as a symbol of Black political style.

- So even though some of them then saw Angela Davis, and she appeared in videos as, like, this iconic woman wearing an Afro, I think that they were really trying to channel that spirit, that spirit of freedom -- freedom by any means necessary.

And that's what Angela Davis came to mean for my generation.

- [Vincent] It's a meaning this image continues to have today.

You'll find it everywhere, from murals, to T-shirts, to GIFs.

As for Professor Davis herself, she continued her career -- in politics, in academia, and in activism, pursuing a lifelong passion to abolish prisons, and working to transform society in order to make incarceration unnecessary.

But she continues to be fascinated by the relationship between her own life and the life of her image.

- You know, it took me a while to grasp the way in which the images existed independently from who I am.

So I came to see that image as having nothing to do with me and my particular history, but as standing in for a movement of millions of people all over the world, who came together and accomplished something that was deemed at that time to be impossible.

- [Vincent] Over the last 50 years, Angela Davis has profoundly shaped the national dialogue, and we can trace the impact of her image from the Black is Beautiful moment of the 1970s, all the way to the Movement for Black Lives today.

At least some of that impact derives from the unintended consequences of that notorious FBI wanted poster.

- I see the FBI poster as a kind of artifact from another era for me -- an era when many of us truly believed that revolution was not only possible, but that we were on the verge of revolutionary change.

You know, I often point out that we did not win the revolution -- at least not the revolution we thought we were fighting.

But because we organized and demonstrated and engaged in the kind of intellectual activity that's necessary to a movement, that other changes took place.

The world would be very different had we not been involved in those struggles.

[light music] [light music continues]