Political Prisoners

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.

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 8, 1897. In her lifetime, she grew to be a pioneering activist, lifelong and adamant pacifist, devout Catholic, and a powerful advocate for the poor and those in prison. Many regard her as a saint, and her influence is still felt today.

Leonard Peltier is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Lakota Nations currently imprisoned in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. He has been in prison for 24 years for a crime for which there is no substantive evidence. Leonard Peltier was born 56 years ago, one of 14 children on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota.

Born in 1918 in South Africa’s Transkei, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, son of the principal counselor of a local chief, was to spend 28 years in prison and emerge to become the first democratically elected president of South Africa. Groomed for high office, Rolihlahla instead chose to become a lawyer and to participate in the struggle for the rights of his nation and people. Expelled from college with his friend Oliver Tambo for participating in a protest boycott in 1940, Mandela completed his education by correspondence.