02/03/2024
Angela Davis, an American political activist, philosopher, academic, and author, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 26, 1944. Angela was exposed to both racism and activism at an early age. Birmingham was one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Angela’s neighborhood was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill” because the Ku Klux Klan often attacked the homes of Black residents with bombs.
As a high school junior, Angela participated in a program that paired Black students from the South with white families in the North. The goal was to integrate northern schools and connect more white Northerners to the Southern Black experience. Angela lived with a family in Greenwich Village, New York City. The school she attended was very progressive and reinforced the values instilled in Angela by her parents. She joined the school’s communist youth group.
Angela earned a scholarship to study French Literature at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. After graduation, she studied in Germany and completed a PhD in philosophy. Angela Davis became a master scholar who studied at the Sorbonne. She joined the U.S. Communist Party and was jailed for charges related to a prison outbreak, though ultimately cleared. Known for books like Women, Race & Class, she has worked as a professor and activist who advocates gender equity, prison reform and alliances across color lines.
After spending time traveling and lecturing, Davis returned to teaching. She was a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught courses on the history of consciousness, retiring in 2008. Davis has continued to lecture at many prestigious universities, discussing issues regarding race, the criminal justice system and women’s rights.
In addition to being a co-founder of Critical Resistance, an organization that aims to end the prison industrial complex, Davis is the author of several books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race, and Class (1980), Women, Culture and Politics(1989), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Abolition Democracy (2005), and The Meaning of Freedom (2012).
