Howdy, Pilgrim

by
Angela Davis on ”Finding Your Roots” (John F. Gately/YouTube)

Angela Davis bought the guns used in a courthouse raid that murdered a judge, and she later served as Gus Hall’s running mate on the Communist Party presidential ticket. But the former member of the FBI’s Most Wanted list also hails from, much to her displeasure, a patrician lineage.

“Did you ever in your wildest dreams think you descended from the people who laid the foundations for this country?” Henry Louis Gates asks the professor on his PBS show Finding Your Roots. Davis laughs in disbelief and repeats, “Never.”

Gates informs her that William Brewster, the only college graduate among the pilgrims and the likely author of the Mayflower Compact, came before her in her family line.

Speaking of lines, remember the one about how we didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, but Plymouth Rock landed on us? Well, it’s not exactly true in the case of Angela Davis. 

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Daniel J. Flynn
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, serves as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution for the 2024-2025 academic year. His books include Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004). In 2025, he releases his magnum opus, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. He splits time between city Massachusetts and cabin Vermont.  
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