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    • Angela Davis

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    IMDb

    American political activist, scholar, and author

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    Table of Contents

    Occupation

    autobiographer

    feminist

    human rights activist

    philosopher

    political prisoner

    politician

    professor

    university teacher

    women's rights activist

    writer

    About the Angela Davis

    Angela Yvonne Davisis an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USAand a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

    Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt, where she became increasingly engaged in far-left politics. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

    In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA’s governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies–including conspiracy to murder–she was held in jail for over a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972.

    During the 1980s, Davis was twice the Communist Party’s candidate for vice president. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke away from the CPUSA to help establish the CCDS. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008.

    Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize and induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Due to accusations that she advocates political violence and due to her support of the Soviet Union, she has been a controversial figure. In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 “Woman of the Year” in Time magazine’s “100 Women of the Year” edition. In 2020, she was included on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Angela Yvonne Davis is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

    Angela Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was also twice the Communist Party’s candidate for vice president in the 1980s.

    Angela Davis was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. She was also involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

    Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She studied at Brandeis University, the University of Frankfurt, and the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the University of Berlin.

    In 1969, Angela Davis was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). However, UCLA’s governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language.

    In 1970, guns belonging to Angela Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. She was prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, and was held in jail for over a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972.

    Angela Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize and induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 ‘Woman of the Year’ in Time magazine’s ‘100 Women of the Year’ edition and was included on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

    28 Quotes by Angela Davis

    1. 1.

      What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    2. 2.

      I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    3. 3.

      Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery – did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    4. 4.

      Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    5. 5.

      Radical simply means “grasping things at the root.”

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    6. 6.

      Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    7. 7.

      To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    8. 8.

      But at the same time you can’t assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    9. 9.

      That’s true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    10. 10.

      Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    11. 11.

      I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    12. 12.

      And I guess what I would say is that we can’t think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can’t necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    13. 13.

      We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    14. 14.

      It’s true that it’s within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it’s not going to solve the problems.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    15. 15.

      We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    16. 16.

      Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    17. 17.

      The campaign against the death penalty has been – while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    18. 18.

      Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it’s perhaps far more terrible than it’s ever been.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    19. 19.

      Well of course there’s been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don’t have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    20. 20.

      First of all, I didn’t suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    21. 21.

      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

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    22. 22.

      What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    23. 23.

      You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I’m attempting to do right now.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    24. 24.

      I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    25. 25.

      When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he’s referring to.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    26. 26.

      I’m involved in the work around prison rights in general.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    27. 27.

      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

      American political activist, scholar, and author

    28. 28.

      As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.

      Angela Davis

      American political activist, scholar, and author