Prisoner/Activist Profile: Angela Y. Davis
December 31, 2002 - 3:08pm
Article by Rebecca Neel
Angela Y. Davis is a lifelong activist and a respected intellectual and educator. She is also a former prisoner, accused and then acquitted of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, who has committed much of her life to exposing and building opposition to injustices in our criminal justice system.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Angela Davis began her life at a time of great racial tension and unrest. Her parents, both teachers and members of the NAACP, educated Davis from a young age about the struggles Black people faced in the U.S. South. Davis was confronted with racism at an early age when her neighborhood’s racial makeup changed, and the black families who moved in encountered hostility from white neighbors, including a series of house bombings. The bombings became so frequent the neighborhood earned the nickname, “Dynamite Hill”.
While in high school, Davis became interested in socialism and joined a youth group of the Communist Party U.S.A. After high school, Davis continued to pursue her interests in communism and socialism at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and at the University of Paris in France.
In Paris, Davis saw stories of the extreme racism in Birmingham, Alabama running in French newspapers. She learned that white supremacists had bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four girls. The horrific incident moved many people to join the growing civil rights movement. For Davis, the church bombing was a personal tragedy; the girls had been friends of her family. Davis finished her BA at Brandeis, and went to Frankfurt, Germany for further study in philosophy. She returned after two years to take part in the growing movements for change in the U.S. and finish her degree at the University of California at San Diego. Here she helped to form the Black Student Union at UCSD and organized walk-outs, sit-ins, rallies, and fund raisers.
In 1968 Davis become a member of the Communist Party, and she soon after traveled to Cuba to see communism first-hand. Her radical leanings eventually got her fired from her first teaching position at UCLA. Then-Governor Ronald Reagan vowed that she would never teach in the California University system again.
Davis’s involvement in prisoner’s rights began when a prisoner named Hekima contacted her for help in his upcoming trial. This contact began Davis’s determined, long-term commitment to prisoners’ rights.
In 1970 Davis helped organize the “Soledad Brother’s Defense Committee,” that educated the public about the famous case of George Jackson and the “Soledad Brothers,” and prison conditions in general. Davis devoted herself to this cause for several months until a horrible, life-changing incident sent her undergound.
In August, a revolt occurred in a Marin County courtroom leaving a judge, two prisoners and a seventeen-year old civilian dead. The guns used were registered in Davis’s name and, although she was nowhere near the courthouse during the revolt, a warrant was put out for her arrest on charges of Murder, Kidnapping and Conspiracy. She became the third woman to make the FBI’s ten most wanted list. As she traveled across the country underground, sympathetic homes put up signs reading, “Davis, sister, you are welcome in this house”.
Davis was apprehended by the FBI in October. After several months in a Women’s jail in New York, Davis was transferred to Marin County, where she awaited trial for over a year. The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis emerged, though she insisted it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. After sixteen months, Davis was freed by an all-white jury’s acquittal. Shortly after leaving prison, Davis published a collection of essays called If They Come in The Morning: Voices of Resistance. At the encouragement of friends, she wrote her life story, which became Angela Davis: An Autobiography. Davis’s Women, Race and Class, first published in 1981, has become a feminist classic. In 1980 she ran for Vice President on the Communist Party ticket against Ronald Reagan. Today, Davis is a member of the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In 1997 Davis helped organize one of the first large conferences on the “Prison-Industrial Complex.” The conference, called “Critical Resistance,” brought together over 3,500 activists, former and current prisoners, academics, labor leaders, religious leaders, and others – all of them interested in “challenging the idea that incarceration is the panacea for all our social ills.” That 1998 conference led to the creation of a national organization dedicated to building the prison reform/prisoners’ rights movement all over the country.
In a recent PBS interview Davis remarked:
“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.... I know that I’m still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I’m trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.”
Davis has, throughout her life, turned oppression into organization and injustice into momentum, moving us toward positive change.
