Dr Angela Y Davis - Infinite Women

Born: 26 January 1944, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

The following was written by Chloe Deng for iFeminist and is republished with permission.

Angela Yvonne Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, United States. She grew up with her parents and three siblings in a middle-class neighborhood known as “Dynamite Hill.” White civilians, in her neighborhood, opposed the integration of Black people so strongly that they bombed several Black-owned homes in attempts to drive them out, thus warranting the neighborhood’s nickname.

Growing up, Davis participated in Sunday school, church youth group, and the Girl Scouts. She was constantly surrounded by activists and leaders who challenged the social norms and demanded justice. When she was fifteen years old, she and her fellow Girl Scouts picketed in Birmingham to protest racial segregation. Davis’s mother, Sallye, was an elementary school teacher and a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Sallye was an avid scholar whose desire for education Davis inherited. By the time Angela was a high school junior, she was accepted to the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker institution that connected Southern Black students with integrated schools in the North.

Davis began attending Brandeis University on scholarship in 1961, as one of the only three Black students in her class. There, she met Herbert Marcuse, a political theorist most notably associated with the Frankfurt School of Marxism, during a rally regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis. She became his student and later reflected, “Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary.” Under Marcuse, she became progressively involved in far-left politics and became a Marxist feminist, an advocate against the ways women are exploited through capitalism and private ownership of property. It was in college that Davis discovered more communist contacts and attended communist-sponsored events such as the 1962 World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland. Although the convention promoted democracy and denounced imperialism and war, the Federal Bureau of Investigation detained and extensively interviewed Davis after her return to the United States. The ordeal did not stop her from joining the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-Black chapter of the Communist Party in America, during her years as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego.

She was studying French abroad at the Sorbonne when she received news of the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing initiated by the Ku Klux Klan, an American terrorist group of white supremacists. Davis had been friends with the four girls who died and mourned their deaths deeply. She was also abroad in Germany when she learned about the establishment of the Black Panthers Party. She was briefly introduced to Black activists Stokely Carmichael and Michael X (not to be confused with Malcolm X) during a trip to England. Although she respected her colleagues’ fight for civil justice, she did not fully agree with their Black nationalist ideals and was disappointed by their rejection of communism for the reason that it was a “white man’s thing.”

By the time she was twenty-five years old, she was known as a “radical” activist, feminist, Black Panther affiliate, and member of the Communist Party. She received several teaching offers from schools, including Princeton and Swarthmore, but she finally chose the University of California, Los Angeles. Unbeknownst to her, the University of California Board of Regents passed a policy against hiring communists in 1949. Just months after she began teaching, the UC Board fired Davis under pressure from then-Governor Ronald Reagan. Davis fought a legal case to win back her post and succeeded. Nine months later, she was fired once more for using “inflammatory language” in speeches, notably and repeatedly referring to the police as “pigs.” Again, she was given back her position after the American Association of University Professors rebuked the UC Board of Regents and taught until her contract expired in 1970.

Despite the public legal battle, Davis is most remembered for her involvement with the Soledad Brothers, which led to her arrest and trial. She was an outspoken supporter of three Black Soledad Prison inmates accused of killing a prison guard after a second guard killed several Black inmates. Like many others, she believed the Brothers, who were not related by blood, were scapegoats of criminal justice politics. During a court session in October 1970, the biological brother of inmate George Jackson seized control of the courtroom and took several hostages in an attempt to free the Brothers. Police fired into the getaway vehicle, killing the judge and Soledad Brothers while injuring hostages. The crime investigation discovered that Jackson had used firearms purchased by Davis two days prior to the court session. Evidence that she had corresponded with one of the inmates was also uncovered. Subsequently, she was charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder. Davis became the third woman to be listed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List. By the time she was found in September, she had already fled across the country. President Richard Nixon praised the investigation team for its “capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.”

In January 1971, she appeared at the same Marin County Superior Court in yet another highly televised occasion. “I am innocent of all charges which have been leveled against me by the state of California,” Angela Davis declared to the nation. She had spent the past months in solitary confinement in a women’s detention center until her attorneys transferred her out of isolation. John Abt, a former counsel of the Communist Party, was the first lawyer to represent her. Meanwhile, civilians across the country demanded for her release. Committees both nationally and internationally organized to protest her incarceration. Musicians chimed in with political songs referencing Davis: The Rolling Stones’s “Sweet Black Angel”; Bob Dylan’s “George Jackson”; Todd Cochran’s “Free Angela (Thoughts… and all I’ve got to say)”; and John Lennon’s “Angela.” Ultimately, in June 1972, she was acquitted of all charges. Davis and her supporters accused Reagan and Nixon’s administration of suppressing antiracist and anticapitalist movements. Ever since, Davis has vigorously defended Black, female, and lower-class people from exploitation, racial discrimination, and wrongful incarceration.

Today, she is the author of several books concerning feminism, class struggles, Black rights, poverty, and prison reform. She has received honorary doctorates from Moscow State University and the University of Leipzig, as well as an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She was named Time magazine’s honorary 1971 Woman of the Year and was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in 2019. She continues to lecture ethnic, feminist, and Black studies for various colleges and is a Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, an organization committed to abolishing the prison industrial complex. Additionally, she works with international groups such as Sisters Inside, an Australian-based group aiding imprisoned women. Throughout her life, she has supported underrepresented groups when no one else would. She believed in social reform for the equality of civilians from every race, gender, religion, economic background, and political ideology. The title of her newest book reflects both her purpose and passion: Abolition. Feminism. Now.

The following is republished from the National Archives. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Angela Yvonne Davis is a prominent political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as the leader of Communist Party USA in the 1960s and had close ties to the Black Panther Party. She has advocated for the abolishment of prisons and the prison-industrial complex. She is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught in the History of Consciousness Department and is the former director of the Feminist Studies Department.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where she attended elementary and middle school. Her mother Sallye Bell Davis worked for the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which had ties to the Communist Party. She attended the Elisabeth Irwin High School, a progressive high school in New York City. Later she received a scholarship to Brandeis University, where she studied one year in France and graduated with honors and a degree in French in 1965. She continued her education at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, where she studied philosophy, and the University of California-San Diego, where she earned a Master’s degree. She went on to earn a Ph.D. at Humboldt University in Germany. In 1969 she was hired to teach philosophy at the University of California-Los Angeles. The University of California Board of Regents, at the direction of Governor Ronald Reagan, dismissed Davis because she belonged to the Communist Party. Although a court ruling blocked the firing, the Board fired her again in 1970, this time for using “inflammatory language.” Governor Reagan declared that Davis would never teach in the University of California system again. Davis’s vocal support for the Black Panther Party was another reason for her persecution by Governor Reagan and the FBI.

Angela Davis is well known for a notable arrest and trial in 1970. In January 1970 George Jackson, an inmate at Soledad Prison in California, and two other prisoners were charged with killing a prison guard. During the trial, Jackson’s 17-year old brother Jonathan Jackson took over a Marin County courtroom where he armed the black defendants and took the judge, prosecutor, and three female jurors hostage. By the end of the whole ordeal, the judge, Jonathan Jackson, and the armed defendants were killed while the prosecutor and one of the jurors were injured. Davis was accused of purchasing the guns used in commission of the crimes so she was charged with “aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder.”

Davis fled prosecution. Four days after the initial warrant was issued, J. Edgar Hoover listed Angela Davis on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List. She was on the run for two months before being apprehended in New York City. Thousands of activists around the world organized in her defense and demanded her release. After being incarcerated for sixteen months, Davis was tried and on June 4, 1972 she was found not guilty by an all-white jury.

After her trial, Davis visited various Communist nations, including Cuba, the USSR, and East Germany. Upon returning to the United States, she resumed her teaching career, holding positions at several universities and colleges in California, including the Claremont Colleges, San Francisco State University, and the University of California-Santa Cruz, where she taught from 1991 to 2008. In addition to her teaching career, she has written a dozen books and has continued to lead the fight against racism, patriarchal oppression, war, incarceration, and the death penalty. Davis left the Communist Party in 1991 and established the Committees for Correspondence of Democracy and Socialism. In the early 1980s she was married to photographer Hilton Braithwaite. In 1998 she talked about her lesbian identity in an article in OUT magazine.