Angela Yvonne Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis 1944-, African-American political activist, b. Birmingham, Ala. She taught philosophy (1969-70) at the Univ. of California, Los Angeles, until she was finally denied reappointment because of her membership in the Communist party and her advocacy of radical black causes. In Aug., 1970, she went into hiding after a gun legally registered to her was used in an attempted courtroom escape in which a judge and three others were killed. Apprehended two months later, she was tried on charges of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping (1972). After months in prison, she was released on bail and later acquitted. She has since taught at San Francisco State Univ. (1979-91) and the Univ. of California at Santa Cruz (1992-). Davis was the American Communist party's vice-presidential candidate in 1980 and 1984.

Bibliography: See her Women, Race, and Class (1982), autobiography (1988), and Women, Culture, and Politics (1989).

Davis, Angela Yvonne (1944– ) US political activist. Davis has been an eloquent advocate for both African-American and women's civil rights since the 1960s. She was also a communist, a political stance which lost her a job as a philosophy lecturer at UCLA. In 1970, in a notorious incident, a judge was kidnapped and murdered with guns registered in Davis' name. Charged with conspiracy, murder and kidnap, she was acquitted in a sensational trial.

Giovanni, Nikki (Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr.) (1943–), born in Tennessee, educated at Fisk (B.A., 1967), is best known for her poetry, the early work often militantly black and socially conscious, the later, more personal and mellow. It has been published in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Black Judgement (1968), Re: Creation (1970), Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis (1970), My House (1972), The Women and the Men (1975), and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978). Recent collections are Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996), Love Poems (1997), Blues for All the Changes (1999), Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (2002), and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1998 (2003). Her poems for younger readers gained attention with the early volumes Spin a Soft Black Song (1971) and Ego Tripping (1973). She is the author of volumes transcribing conversations with writers including James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Margaret Walker, and her essay collections, with themes ranging from the autobiographical to social and literary criticism, include Gemini (1971) and Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988).