Date of birth: January 26, 1944 (1944-01-26) (age 65) Place of birth: Birmingham, Alabama, USA Movement: Civil Rights Movement, Marxism, Feminism, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, prison-industrial complex abolition, Frankfurt Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund Major organizations: Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, Critical Resistance, Black Panther Party for Self Defense Alma mater: Humboldt University of Berlin (GDR), University of California San Diego, University of Frankfurt (magna cum laude), Brandeis University Influences Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Huey P. Newton, Jean-Paul Sartre
Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American political activist and university professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Davis was also a notable activist during the Civil Rights Movement and a prominent member and political candidate of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Since leaving the CPUSA, she continues to identify herself as a democratic socialist and is currently a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
Later career
Angela Davis as honorary guest of an Eastern German Youth Festival in 1973Davis ran for Vice President on the Communist ticket in 1980 and 1984 along with Gus Hall. She has continued a career of activism, and has written several books. A principal focus of her current activism is the state of prisons within the United States. She considers herself an abolitionist, not a "prison reformer," and refers to the United States prison system as the "prison-industrial complex." She argues for abolition of contemporary systems of punishment (the U.S. prison), struggling against the structures of class, race, and gender underlying the mass incarceration of blacks and Latino/as in the U.S. Davis suggests focusing social efforts on education and building engaged communities to solve the various social problems now handled through state punishment.[4]
Davis was one of the primary founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex.
She has lectured at San Francisco State University, Stanford University, Bryn Mawr College and other schools.[4] She is currently the Presidential Chair and Professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and director of the Feminist Studies department.[4] She states that in her teaching, which is mostly at the graduate level, she concentrates more on posing questions which encourage development of critical thinking than on imparting knowledge.[4] In 1997, she came out as a lesbian in Out magazine. [11]
Davis spoke out against the 1995 Million Man March, arguing that the exclusion of women from this event necessarily promoted male chauvinism and that the organizers, including Louis Farrakhan, preferred women to take subordinate roles in society. In response to the March, and together with Kimberlé Crenshaw and others, she formed the African American Agenda 2000, a small alliance of Black feminists.
Davis is no longer a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), leaving to help found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, which broke from the CPUSA due to the latter body's support of the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 and the communist parties of the Warsaw Pact.[12] She remains on the Advisory Board of the Committees.[13] Davis points to Cuba as an example of a country which successfully addresses social and economic problems. In her view democracy and socialism are more compatible than democracy and capitalism.[4]
Davis at the University of Alberta, March 28, 2006.In recent years, Angela Davis has spoken out against the death penalty. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, she participated in a 2004 panel concerning Kevin Cooper. She also spoke in defense of Stanley "Tookie" Williams on another panel in 2005. Davis remains a prominent figure in the struggle against the death penalty in California.
She was the commencement speaker at Grinnell College in May 2007. On October 27, 2007, Davis was the keynote speaker at the fifth annual Practical Activism Conference at UC Santa Cruz. [14]
On February 8, 2008, she spoke on the campus of Howard University on behalf of the invitation of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc., Alpha Chapter. On February 24, 2008, she was featured as the closing keynote speaker for the 2008 Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference. On April 14, 2008, she spoke at the College of Charleston as a guest of the Women's and Gender Studies Program. On January 23, 2009, she was the keynote speaker at the Martin Luther King Commemorative Celebration on the campus of Louisiana State University. On April 16, 2009, she was the keynote speaker at the University of Virginia Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies symposium on The Problem of Punishment: Race, Inequity, and Justice