Summary

In 1963, university student Angela Davis is stunned by the deaths of four girls who were killed in a Church bombing in her hometown of Birmingham. These murders "signified the massive resistance to the civil rights movement and the naked ugliness of American racism" (383). After President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, his successor "buried any lingering global fears that civil rights legislation had died with Kennedy" (383). In 1964, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. watch the debate over the Civil Rights Bill in Washington. A month later, Malcom X announced his plan to go "before the United Nations to charge the United States with violating the human rights of African Americans" (384). Before doing so, Malcolm X made a trip to Mecca which "changed him" (384). He comes to the conclusion that "a blanket indictment of all white people is as...