Angela Davis: Professor, Democratic Socialist, Prison Abolitionist

Posted on 06. Aug, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Scholarly Celebrations

Angela Davis, the daughter of an automobile mechanic and a school teacher, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 26th January, 1944. The area where the family lived became known as Dynamite Hill because of the large number of African American homes bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. Her mother was a civil rights campaigner and had been active in the NAACP before the organization was outlawed in Birmingham.

Davis attended segregated schools in Birmingham before moving to New York with her mother who had decided to study for a M.A. at New York University. Davis attended a progressive school in Greenwich Village where several of the teachers had been blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. There, Davis became acquainted with socialism and Communism and was recruited by the Communist youth group, Advance. She also met children of the leaders of the Communist Party, including her lifelong friend, Bettina Aptheker.

In 1961 Davis went to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts to study French. Her course included a year at the Sorbonne in Paris. Soon after arriving back in the United States she was reminded of the civil rights struggle that was taking place in Birmingham when four girls that she knew were killed in the Baptist Church Bombing in September, 1963.

After graduating from Brandeis University she spent two years at the faculty of philosophy at Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt, West Germany before studying under Herbert Marcuse at the University of California. Davis was greatly influenced by Marcuse, especially his idea that it was the duty of the individual to rebel against the system.

In 1967 Davis joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. The following year she became involved with the American Communist Party.

Davis began working as a lecturer of philosophy at the University of California in Los Angeles. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1970 informed her employers, the California Board of Regents, that Davis was a member of the American Communist Party, they terminated her contract.

Davis was active in the campaign to improve prison conditions. She became particularly interested in the case of George Jackson and W. L. Nolen, two African Americans who had established a chapter of the Black Panthers in California’s Soledad Prison. While in California’s Soledad Prison Jackson and W. L. Nolen, established a chapter of the Black Panthers. On 13th January 1970, Nolan and two other black prisoners was killed by a prison guard. A few days later the Monterey County Grand Jury ruled that the guard had committed “justifiable homicide.”

When a guard was later found murdered, Jackson and two other prisoners, John Cluchette and Fleeta Drumgo, were indicted for his murder. It was claimed that Jackson had sought revenge for the killing of his friend, W. L. Nolan.

On 7th August, 1970, George Jackson’s seventeen year old brother, Jonathan, burst into a Marin County courtroom with a machine-gun and after taking Judge Harold Haley as a hostage, demanded that George Jackson, John Cluchette and Fleeta Drumgo, be released from prison. Jonathan Jackson was shot and killed while he was driving away from the courthouse.

Over the next few months Jackson published two books, Letters from Prison and Soledad Brother. On 21st August, 1971, George Jackson was gunned down in the prison yard at San Quentin. He was carrying a 9mm automatic pistol and officials argued he was trying to escape from prison. It was also claimed that the gun had been smuggled into the prison by Davis.

This is when Angela Davis first achieved nationwide notoriety. Davis went on the run and the Federal Bureau of Investigation named her as one of its “most wanted criminals”. Davis fled underground and was the subject of an intense manhunt. She was eventually captured two months later, arrested, tried, and acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. S However, because of her militant activities, Ronald Reagan, the Governor of California, vowed that Davis would never be allowed to teach in any of the state-supported universities.

Davis worked as a lecturer of African American studies at Claremont College (1975-77) before becoming a lecturer in women’s and ethnic studies at San Francisco State University. In 1979 Davis visited the Soviet Union where she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize and made a honorary professor at Moscow State University. In 1980 and 1984 Davis was the Communist Party’s vice-presidential candidate.

Books published by Davis include If They Come in the Morning:Voices of Resistance (1971), Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race, & Class (1981) and Women, Culture & Politics (1989). See carousel above for more books and MP3s of speeches.

Davis is a graduate studies professor emeritus of history of consciousness at the University of California and presidential chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She retired in the spring of 2008 and now works for racial, gender equality, gay rights, and prison abolition. Davis is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally, and the founder of the grassroots prison-industrial complex-abolition organization Critical Resistance.

Like most scholars, Angela Davis uses her experience and her knowledge to work for the greater good! Hear/watch Angela Davis speak and learn some interesting facts about the Prison Industrial Complex. Her forty years of experience certainly shows.

More Related posts:

1. Dr. Larry E. Davis: Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh
2. bell hooks: Professor and Author
3. Angela Glover Blackwell: Founder & CEO of PolicyLink
4. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research
5. Dr. Carol D. Lee: Professor @ Northwestern

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