They Hunted Her for 16 Months—Then the Jury Said “Not Guilty”

On January 26, 1944, in a Birmingham, Alabama, neighborhood where houses had been bombed often enough that residents called it Dynamite Hill, a schoolteacher’s daughter was born into a family that had already buried the illusion of safety.

Her name was Angela Davis.

By 1970, she was 26 years old and teaching philosophy at UCLA. A year earlier, the University of California Board of Regents had fired her over her membership in the Communist Party. A court ordered her reinstated, and she continued teaching.

On August 7, 1970, a 17-year-old named Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in San Rafael, California, carrying guns purchased the day before. He was attempting to exchange hostages for his older brother, George, who was being held at San Quentin Prison. The guns were registered to Davis. In the gunfire that followed, Judge Harold Haley, Jonathan Jackson, and two inmates were killed. Davis had not been in the building.

Eleven days later, the FBI placed her name on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, making her only the third woman ever to appear on it. She went underground, moving between safe houses and changing her appearance for nearly two months before agents found her in a New York City motel on October 13, 1970.

That was the beginning of the sentence, not the end of it.

She spent the next sixteen months in custody, including time in solitary confinement until her legal team won a federal order ending the isolation. The cell itself did not move, but the public response outside it grew rapidly. By February 1971, more than 200 local committees across the United States and 67 more in other countries had organized campaigns calling for her release. John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded a song titled “Angela,” while Aretha Franklin publicly offered to post Davis’s bail herself.

Here is what most people miss: when the moment came, Franklin was out of the country, and the person who actually helped provide the bail money was a dairy farmer from Caruthers, California, named Rodger McAfee. He pledged acres of his family’s cooperative farm as collateral to help cover the $102,500 bail. McAfee had met Davis only once, at an antiwar rally years earlier.

On February 23, 1972, five days before her trial was scheduled to begin, Davis walked out of jail on bail.

Her defense team had already won a change of venue, moving the trial to Santa Clara County. For four months, a courtroom in San Jose heard arguments over whether owning guns later used in a crime made Davis responsible for what happened. The jury that would decide her fate was entirely white.

On June 4, 1972, after thirteen hours of deliberation spread across three days, the jury returned its verdict: not guilty on every charge. Owning the weapons, they concluded, was not enough to prove that Davis had planned or participated in the killings.

Davis did not step away from public life after her acquittal. In 1991, she joined the faculty at UC Santa Cruz as a professor in the History of Consciousness program. In the mid-1990s, she was named to a University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies, a remarkable turn given her earlier conflict with the UC system. The same Board of Regents that had once dismissed her was now part of the institution employing her at its highest academic level.

She continued teaching and publishing until her retirement in 2008, after seventeen years on the Santa Cruz faculty.

The case never fully disappeared from public memory, even after the verdict closed it in court. It has continued to appear in discussions about guilt by association, the limits of circumstantial evidence, and the question of how much responsibility can be assigned to someone who was not present when a crime occurred.

Rodger McAfee’s cooperative farm outside Fresno continued operating for years after 1972, run by the same family that had briefly put its acreage on the line for a woman they had met only once. Davis herself went on to write numerous books, many of them exploring questions surrounding justice, imprisonment, race, gender, and political power.

If you have ever watched a system decide who deserves the presumption of innocence before all the facts were known, you already understand something of what Davis carried through those sixteen months.

Her UC Santa Cruz faculty page lists her as Distinguished Professor Emerita. The courthouse in San Jose where the jury delivered its verdict still stands, while the farmland McAfee once pledged remains part of the agricultural landscape outside Fresno.

The story that began with a young woman being hunted across the country ultimately became something much larger: a case remembered not only for the accusations against her, but for the questions it raised about justice, evidence, and the meaning of being presumed innocent.