Davis, Angela

January 26, 1944

Political activist Angela Yvonne Davis lived in a section of Birmingham, Alabama, known as "Dynamite Hill" because of the violent attacks by white night riders intent on maintaining the residential demarcation line between blacks and whites. Both of her parents were educators, worked actively for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and taught their children not to accept the socially segregated society that existed at the time. She attended Brandeis University, where she was influenced by the teachings of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. After graduating in 1961, she spent two years in Europe, where she was exposed to student political radicals. Her own radicalism, however, came into focus with the murder in 1963 of four young black Sunday school children in a Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing. In California, where she went to pursue graduate study with Marcuse (who was now at the University of California at San Diego), Davis began working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party, of which she became a member in 1968.

Hired in 1969 by UCLA to teach philosophy, Davis not long after was fired by the board of regents and then-governor Ronald Reagan because of her Communist Party affiliation. Ultimately, her case went to the Supreme Court, which overturned the dismissal. By that time, however, Davis herself was in hiding as a result of an incident at the Soledad state prison. In August 1970 George Jackson, a prisoner and member of the Black Panthers, assisted by his brother Jonathan, attempted to escape using smuggled guns. Both brothers were killed and some of the guns were traced to Davis. Fearful for her safety and distrustful of the judicial system, Davis went underground. For two months she was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list before being apprehended and incarcerated. She remained in jail for sixteen months before being tried for murder and conspiracy. In June 1972 she was acquitted of all charges against her.

Davis resumed her academic career at San Francisco State University and again became politically active, running as the Communist Party candidate for vice president in 1980 and 1984. In 1991 she joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, as professor of the history of consciousness. She left the Communist Party in 1991 but remained politically active. In 1995 she was a prominent feminist critic of the Million Man March. She is the author of several books, including If They Come in the Morning (1971), Women, Race, and Class (1983), Women, Culture, and Politics (1989), and Blues Legends and Black Feminism (1998). In 2003, Davis took a searing look at the prison system in her work, Are Prisons Obsolete? Her autobiography, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, originally published in 1974, was reissued in 1988.

See also Black Panther Party for Self Defense; Communist Party of the United States

Bibliography

Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

Lanker, Brian. I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989.

christine a. lunardini (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005