Angela Davis

ACTIVIST, PHILOSOPHER, AND WRITER

A radical communist and defender of violent rebellion during her youth, Davis eventually became a respected advocate for civil rights and reform of the criminal justice system. She also is a successful teacher, writer, and speaker.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Gay and lesbian issues; Social issues; Women’s rights

Early Life

Born in 1944, Angela Yvonne Davis was the oldest of four children and was raised in a middle-class family in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother was an elementary school teacher, and her father was a college-educated mechanic who owned and operated a service station. The family lived in a predominantly white neighborhood called Dynamite Hill after black-owned homes were bombed. She attended a segregated elementary school, where she was an excellent student. At the age of fourteen, she was awarded a scholarship by the American Friends Service Committee, allowing her to attend the progressive Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, New York. While there, she stayed in the home of a white Episcopal priest, the ReverendWilliam Melish, a staunch supporter of civil rights and a friend of left-wing radicals. During this period, Davis became attracted to the theories of Karl Marx, and she joined a communist youth organization, Advance.

Davis was awarded a full scholarship to attend Brandeis University in Massachusetts, which had only a handful of black students. Majoring in French literature, Davis lived in the French House, where only French was spoken. While studying at the Sorbonne in Paris during her junior year, she was saddened and enraged to learn of the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls whom she knew. Also in Paris, Davis formed close friendships with Algerian students who were actively engaged in the struggle for Algerian independence. Returning to Brandeis for her senior year, she came under the influence of Herbert Marcuse, a leading theorist of the“New Left” movement, and she changed her major to philosophy. After graduating with high honors, Davis spent the next two years studying in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Marxist-oriented Institute of Social Research.

Returning to the United States, Davis continued her graduate studies in philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. In addition to her academic work, she became increasingly involved in radical political activities. In 1968, she joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an African American branch of the U.S. Communist Party. Although she never joined the Black Panther Party, she cooperated with the Panthers in demonstrations and community-based programs. In 1969, Davis received her master’s degree from the University of California at San Diego, and she also completed all the requirements for a Ph.D. except a dissertation. A few years later, Humboldt University in East Germany awarded her a doctorate for a dissertation devoted to Immanuel Kant’s views on violence in the French Revolution. No information was ever published about her dissertation.

Life’s Work

In early 1969, Davis obtained a position for the fall semester as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Before the semester began, however, the UCLA regents learned of her Communist Party membership and canceled her appointment. California governor Ronald Reagan strongly endorsed the dismissal, but large crowds of students and faculty members protested. Davis filed a legal grievance and won reinstatement. That fall, more than two thousand students attended her first lecture.

In addition to teaching her classes, Davis continued her political activities, particularly protests on behalf of three African American prisoners accused of murdering a guard at California’s Soledad Prison. Persuaded that the three were political prisoners, she developed a special interest in inmate George Jackson, whose popular book Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970) interpreted the imprisonment of minorities from a radical Marxist perspective. Davis agreed with his ideology and admired his defiant stand; she and Jackson soon were exchanging romantic correspondence. In the spring of 1970, when the UCLA regents found out about her prominent support for the Soledad prisoners, they fired her a second time, alleging “unprofessional conduct.” Davis also received numerous death threats. She purchased a large quantity of guns and ammunition, which she allowed Black Panthers and other associates to use for target practice.

Davis developed a close friendship with Jackson’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan Jackson, and she sometimes used him as a bodyguard. On August 7, 1970, the young man entered the Marin County courthouse with several firearms (all belonging to Davis) and attempted to escape with three black prisoners and five hostages, including the judge. Outside the courthouse, a bloody gunfight resulted in the deaths of Jackson, the judge, and two of the prisoners. Jackson apparently had hoped to exchange the hostages for his older brother. In her autobiography, Davis described her “blind rage” and how she pledged to “avenge Jon’s death—through struggle, political struggle.”

As soon as Davis learned that her firearms were used in the incident, she fled the state, presumably because she believed that the justice system would treat her unfairly. Listed as one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) ten most wanted fugitives, she evaded the authorities for about two months before being captured in New York City. While she was awaiting trial in August 1971, George Jackson attempted to escape from prison. Jackson, three prison guards, and two white inmates were killed in the resulting shootout. Davis wrote a statement for the press, declaring that Jackson had been murdered by “fascist bullets” and that she had lost “a comrade and revolutionary leader” and “an irretrievable love.” She further declared that her “rage at the system responsible for his murder” renewed her “determination to fight for the cause George died defending.”

When Davis’s trial began on February 18, 1972, it attracted tremendous worldwide publicity. The prosecution’s case was based primarily on four factors: her flight, her ownership of the weapons, her romantic correspondence with George Jackson, and the testimony of witnesses who claimed to have seen her with Jonathan Jackson in the days before the shootout. Some of her close friends, however, testified that she was in their homes at the time. The defense’s main argument was that a person of Davis’s intelligence would not have participated in such an unrealistic and badly organized scheme. On June 4, 1972, the all-white jury found her not guilty of all charges. Later that month, Davis spoke to twenty thousand cheering supporters at a victory celebration at Madison Square Garden in New York. She then took a tour of Cuba, where she worked in the sugar fields and was celebrated with a massive rally. The next year, she was an honored guest at an East German youth festival.

During her subsequent academic career, Davis held prestigious teaching positions at a variety of American universities. From 1979 to 1991, she taught at the Ethnic Studies Department at San Francisco State University and at the San Francisco Art Institute. From 1995 to 1997, she held the Presidential Chair in the history of consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Although critics frequently questioned her academic qualifications, most administrators, faculty, and students defended her competence and dedication to teaching. She also became a very popular lecturer on university campuses.

In addition to teaching and speaking, Davis continued to devote much time and effort to a variety of political causes. In 1973, she was the founding cochair of the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression. In 1979, the Soviet Union recognized her contributions with the Lenin Peace Prize. In the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984, the U.S. Communist Party nominated her as its candidate for vice president. With the fall of European communism in the late 1980s, Davis gradually abandoned the Leninist ideology in favor of a more liberal form of democratic socialism. In 1991, her opposition to the attempted overthrow of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev caused her to leave the U.S. Community Party, and she helped to found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. The same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she later served as director. In 1997, she confirmed rumors that she was a lesbian in Out magazine. In 1998, she founded Critical Resistance, which was dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment and the prison system. Although she continued to assert that true liberation would require the establishment of socialism, she nevertheless supported the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008, and she declared that his election presented the opportunity for grassroots activism to move the country in a more progressive direction. Also in 2008, Davis retired from the University of California.

In 2014, Davis served as a regents' lecturer at UCLA. Two years later, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in Healing and Social Justice from the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 2020, she served as the Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecturer in the history department at Pomona College. The same year, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influencial people in the world.

Davis has published a number of short books, articles, and pamphlets that express her opposition to racism, capitalism, and the criminal justice system. Her essay “Reflections on the Black Women’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” which appeared in The Black Scholar in 1971, is frequently credited with having initiated the field of black women’s studies. Her revealing Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) is a valuable source for understanding the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), Davis argues that female blues singers were proponents of “a working-class black feminism.” Her other publications include Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1992), Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (1996), and Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (1999). Later books include Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (2012), and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015).

Significance

During the early 1970s, Davis became an icon for the New Left. During her sensational trial of 1972, she was idealized by left-wing radicals and vilified by conservatives and moderates. Following her acquittal, she gained recognition as a teacher and speaker. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, she had come to be generally viewed as a respected human-rights advocate, and her work with Critical Resistance helped to call attention to abuses within the criminal justice system.

Bibliography

"Angela Davis." National Museum of African American History and Culture, nmaahc.si.edu/angela-davis. Accessed 25 Apr. 2025.

Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. International Publishers, 1975.

Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. Random House, 1974.

Davis, Angela. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Edited by Joy James, Blackwell, 2006.

Davis, Angela. "The Prison Industrial Complex." The Feminist Philosophy Reader, edited by Alison Bailey and Chris J. Cuomo, McGraw-Hill, 2008.

George, Nelson. "Angela Davis." The New York Times, 19 Oct. 2020, nmaahc.si.edu/angela-davis. Accessed 25 Apr. 2025.

Lewis, Jone Johnson. "Biography of Angela Davis, Political Activist and Academic." ThoughtCo., 8 Nov. 2020, www.thoughtco.com/angela-davis-biography-3528285. Accessed 25 Apr. 2025.

Liberatore, Paul. The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin Massacre. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996.

Major, Reginald. Justice in the Round: The Trial of Angela Davis. The Third Press, 1973.

Parker, J. A. Angela Davis: The Making of a Revolutionary. Arlington House, 1973.