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The keynote speaker of Central Michigan University's Black History Month celebrations on Wednesday night called for the immediate impeachment of President George W. Bush and the abolishment of the Department of Homeland Security.

During an impassioned speech in which she invoked the names and legacies of Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks, Angela Y. Davis spoke to a packed audience in Warriner Hall's Plachta Auditorium about racism, sexism and the way we have come to accept injustice as part of our social landscape.

At the close of her speech, Davis offered two goals for the assembled students, faculty and community members. "George Bush has several more years in office. He should not be allowed to finish his term. He should be impeached,“ Davis said to an enthusiastically responsive audience.

"If Bill Clinton can be impeached over Monica Lewinsky, then Bush can certainly be impeached over the lies he told about weapons of mass destruction and the ways rights of people in this country have been continually eroded.“ Davis, who is a former Black Panther and former Communist Party member turned author and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, rose to the national spotlight in 1969 when she was removed from a teaching position in the department of philosophy at UCLA for her social activism.

She also was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List in 1970, but was later acquitted. Earlier in her speech, Davis took several other shots at the president, calling him at one point "a sociopath.“ Although she quickly retracted that half-hearted statement, she went on to say that Bush is a person who "doesn''t seem to have feelings about anything.“

Once past the invectives, Davis focused her talk on Black History Month celebrations and the recent deaths of Coretta Scott King, the wife of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks, two icons of the civil rights movements. "This is a period when many veterans of the civil rights movement are passing,“ Davis said. "Radical activism, or our sense of it, may not survive our remaking of history during this period of right-wing ascendancy.”

“Dancing from a look at the proposed new federal budget, which guts domestic programs in favor of military and homeland security spending, to her opposition to the death penalty to psychic repression, Davis urged audience members to think critically about what happens in their lives. "It's important to remember how we reacted to those images, “Davis said, referring to photographs and videos of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "There were reports of murders and rapes. And I think most of us believed it. The attribution of criminality to black people and even Hispanics is so deep in our collective psyche that even black people fell for it. The things we take for granted are often the most damaging.“

She digressed for a short time into a pulpit speech against the death penalty, calling it an obstacle to true democracy. Using the Dec. 13^th execution of Stanley "Tookie“ Williams at San Quentin as a launching pad, Davis said that every other major democracy in the world has abolished the death penalty and that even South Africa abolished it following the death of Apartheid. "I just don''t understand why we aren''t out in the streets demanding the abolishment of the death penalty,“ Davis said. "We have been conditioned to assume that this is the way things should be. The death penalty is a major opposition to the development of democracy in the U.S.“

Calling for an end to injustice and establishment of a just health care system, Davis concluded her speech with a quote from MLK, "It is time for all of us to become drum majors for justice.“

IAN PATRICK GRAY is a staff writer for The Morning Sun. Read more of his articles at http://www.themorningsun.com . IAN PATRICK GRAY can be contacted This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Article used with permission from Rick Mills, Editor: Morning Sun.

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