Angela Davis (b.1944,) in full Angela Yvonne Davis, is a militant American black political activist, philosopher, academic, author, and communist. She gained an international reputation during her imprisonment and trial on conspiracy charges in 1970–72. Her arrest led to a prominent ‘Free Angela Davis’ campaign.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis was educated at the Sorbonne, Paris, and Brandeis University, Massachusetts. Soon after graduation, she started taking part in radical protest and civil rights movements. Davis earned a master’s degree from the University of California-San Diego, in 1968 and a doctorate in philosophy from Humboldt University in East Berlin in 1972.
In the late 1960s, Davis became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, and, in 1968, she joined the Communist Party. Her activist activities with the Black Panthers led her to support black political prisoners. She was arrested on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and the murder of Judge Harold Haley in 1970, but was acquitted of all charges after a ten-month trial.
Due to Davis’s political opinions, the California Board of Regents in 1970 refused to renew her appointment as lecturer in philosophy, despite an excellent teaching record. In 1991, she became a professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz serving until retirement in 2008.
Among Davis’s many books are Women, Race and Class (1981,) If They Came in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971,) Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974,) Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003,) Abolition Democracy (2005,) and The Meaning of Freedom (2012.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Angela Davis
Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work
—Angela Davis
Topics: Racism
To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women
—Angela Davis
Topics: Society
The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one’s contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.
—Angela Davis
Topics: Politicians, Politics
Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor –because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them… because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.
—Angela Davis
Topics: Birth
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
—Angela Davis
Topics: Art, Artists
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
—Angela Davis
Topics: Liberty
Radical simply means “grasping things at the root.”
—Angela Davis
Topics: Fanaticism
Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
—Angela Davis
Topics: Revolution
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