• Genre: Spoken Word
• Active: '90s
• Instrument: Vocals, Performer, Main Performer
• Representative Album: "Prison Industrial Complex"

Biography

Of necessity focusing on her minor involvement in the recording industry, this discussion of Angela Davis obviously glosses over many important details concerning her important philosophical and political contributions to American society. If it was pop music that was at stake, cynics would probably suggest her greatest asset would be the absolutely brilliant Afro hairstyle she sported at the height of her notoriety in the '70s. Davis' appearances on recordings, however, are not surprisingly linked to her political agenda, described in one biography as "racial and gender equity and prison abolition." She recorded an album of her own for the radical Alternative Tentacles label and has also contributed to protest song projects such as Still Dancing on John Wayne's Head, a vividly titled effort from the Fire This Time collective ensemble.

The crowd that equates rock & roll with getting in serious trouble may want to note Davis' unique presence as one of the few black American females with recording credits to show up on the FBI's "Most Wanted List." Davis was only charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide -- making the legal problems of someone such as Keith Richards seem a trifle. Of course, she was acquitted entirely some 18 months after charting with the FBI. Davis can also claim to figure into classic rock songwriting as a source of subject matter -- although certainly well shy of the frequency of a jilted lover. Direct as well as indirect references to Davis can be found in the works of what many pundits assume to be the ultimate triumvirate of classic rock: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. John Lennon and Yoko Ono's song "Angela" is all about her. The Rolling Stones also have an Angela Davis song -- no, not "Angie," it is "Sweet Black Angel" -- with lyrics chronicling her gnarly tiffs with the legal system. Dylan wrote a song about George Jackson, whose brother Jonathan Jackson supposedly helped himself to some guns from Davis' house. She has written close to a dozen books, including an autobiography published in 1974. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide

A scholar, activist, and professed Communist, Angela Davis (born 1944) became a leading advocate of civil rights for blacks in the United States.

In August 1970 Angela Yvonne Davis was catapulted into the national spotlight when she was put on the list of the ten most wanted criminals in the United States. An armed black man, Jonathan Jackson, entered the Marin County, California, Civic Center on August 7, 1970, with a weapon owned by Davis and attempted, along with three San Quentin prisoners, to take hostages. Jackson's intention was to hold the hostages until several inmates of Soledad Prison, including Jackson's brother, George, were released. During the attempt three of the assailants and the presiding judge were killed and three others wounded. A warrant was issued for Davis's arrest. She fled, eluding the police until October 1970. After a total of 16 months in prison in New York - where she was apprehended - and in California, Davis's trial began.

The prosecutor alleged that Davis engineered the plan to kidnap the judge and jurors because of her love for George Jackson. The prosecution presented witnesses who testified that they had seen Davis with Jonathan Jackson in the days preceding the August 7 incident. Davis and her defense attorneys argued that Davis was a political activist concerned with prison reforms and the oppression of the poor in general and was not moved to a crime of passion because of her feeling for Jackson. The all-white jury, composed of eight women and four men, acquitted Davis on all counts in June 1972.

Davis, a self-avowed Communist, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944. Both her parents were college educated. Her mother was a teacher and her father, after teaching for a short time, went into business for himself. The Davises moved into an all-white neighborhood when Angela was very young. Racial antipathy was fomenting in the city and the Davises knew that they were not welcome in the neighborhood. The homes of several black families who moved in after the Davises were bombed, although the Davises' home was not.

Angela Davis encountered segregation in almost every area of her life. In housing, school, stores, church, and social life, the ubiquitous "white only" or "colored only" signs, both visible and invisible, were always there. Because Davis had the opportunity to travel to New York during many of her summer vacations her awareness of the difference in racial attitudes and social classes in the South and the North was heightened. Even as a teenager, Davis later wrote, she developed a desire to alleviate the plight of the black and the poor.

Because of superior achievement during her high school years Davis got the opportunity to study at Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York City. There she was regularly exposed to both socialist and communist philosophies and began to develop an interest in these subjects. She was especially interested in mass movements designed to overthrow political domination by elites. Davis's scholastic achievements earned her a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of the few blacks on campus. At the university Davis studied French literature but continued to be interested in philosophy. She studied in France during her junior year. While there, she learned of the September 1963 bombing of a church in her hometown, Birmingham, that resulted in the death of four black girls. She knew three of them.

During her senior year at Brandeis, Davis studied philosophy with Herbert Marcuse, who later became her graduate adviser. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis in 1965, Davis applied for a scholarship to study philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. After two years she returned to the United States to study for her doctorate with Marcuse, who was then teaching at the University of California at San Diego. While in graduate school she became politically active with groups such as the Black Panthers, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Ron Karenga's US-Organization. In 1968 she became a member of the Communist Party and joined one of its local organs, the Che-Lumumba Club.

As a requirement for her doctorate Davis had to teach for one year and was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her appointment was challenged because she had indicated on her application that she was a Communist. There was a regulation that Communists were not allowed to teach in California state universities. Consequently, the governing body of the university, the Board of Regents, and the governor, Ronald Reagan, attempted to fire Davis. She waged a court battle against her dismissal and won. Later, however, in June 1970, she was fired for her political activity.

After she was acquitted of the charges stemming from the August 7, 1970 incident, she taught black philosophy and women's studies at San Francisco State College. In 1980 and 1984 she ran on the Communist Party ticket for vice president of the United States. By 1983 she was working with the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression and had been awarded an honorary doctorate from Lenin University.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Davis taught courses at several universities, and in 1997 continued to teach at the University of California at Santa Cruz. At the university she acted as presidential chair of a minority women's studies department. She has stated that she hopes young people will continue to seek new solutions. In Essence she said, "History is important, but it also can stifle young people's ability to think in new ways and to present ideas that may sound implausible now but that really may help us develop radical strategies for moving into the next century."

Further Reading

Much has been written about Angela Davis. She is coauthor of a volume entitled If They Come in the Morning (1971) and the author of Angela Davis, An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race and Class (1983), and Women, Culture & Politics (1989). The transcript of the Marin County court case (#52613) is available on microfilm. Several other books discuss the same case. Some of these are Charles R. Ashman, The People vs. Angela Davis (1972); Regina Nadelson, Who is Angela Davis? (1972); J. A. Parker, Angela Davis, the Making of a Revolutionary (1973); and Bettina Aptheker, The Morning Breaks (1975).

activist; educator; writer

Personal Information

Born Angela Yvonne Davis, January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, AL; daughter of B. Frank (a teacher and businessman) and Sallye E. (a teacher) Davis.
Education: Attended the Sorbonne, University of Paris, 1963-64; Brandeis University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1965; graduate study at University of Frankfurt (Germany), 1965-67; University of California, San Diego, M.A., 1968, doctoral study, 1968-69.
Politics: Communist.
Memberships: Communist Party of the U.S.A. (member of Central Committee), National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (founder and co-chairperson), National Political Congress of Black Women (national board member), National Black Women's Health Project (national board member), Phi Beta Kappa.

Career

University of California, Los Angeles, assistant professor of philosophy, 1969-70; activist and author of books on civil rights, women's issues, and global policy, 1970--. Communist Party candidate for vice-president of the United States, 1980 and 1984. Professor at San Francisco State University, 1979-91, and University of California at Santa Cruz, 1992--.

Life's Work

Political activist, writer, and public speaker Angela Davis has never wavered in her quest for women's rights and the eradication of poverty and oppression. The energetic Davis became embroiled in controversy in California at the end of the 1960s and emerged as an international symbol of a proud, defiant African American woman under political siege. Davis was fired from a prestigious professorship because she was a Communist and later was jailed for sixteen months for crimes she did not commit. For a time in the early 1970s she was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "Ten Most Wanted List," a distinction that brought her worldwide recognition as a victim of political repression. As Melba Beals put it in People, "In the idol-seeking rebellion of the American '60s, Angela Davis became a lightning rod almost in spite of herself." Subsequent decades have found Davis to be an impassioned worker for the causes of nationalized health care, civil rights, and nuclear disarmament.

"Angela is one of the most well-known women in the United States--and one of the busiest," wrote Cheryll Y. Greene in Essence magazine. "She is active in five organizations, among them the Communist Party [of the] U.S.A., in which she is the major Black figure and plays a leading role.... She travels extensively both in the United States and abroad, lecturing to diverse audiences, from college students to white male union members. In 1980 and 1984 she ran for vice-president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket."

Davis admitted in Essence that she is "always amazed" that she is invited to give so many speeches even now, decades after young people demonstrated on her behalf with "Free Angela" placards. "I know I wouldn't have sought this kind of public life--if it had been something that I could have chosen," she said. "I didn't choose to be where I am now. I didn't choose to be the target of the repression at that time. It just happened that way. It was, in a sense, a historical accident that I was the one. But I feel that I should accept that role for what it can accomplish for all of us." She added: "I try never to take myself for granted as somebody who should be out there speaking. Rather, I'm doing it only because I feel there's something important that needs to be conveyed."

Angela Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, one of four children of B. Frank and Sallye E. Davis. Her parents were both schoolteachers, but her father left the profession and bought his own gas station. The family lived in a segregated neighborhood, and Davis attended segregated public schools. As a youngster she had ample opportunity to observe the effects of racism on the lives of her neighbors and friends.

While she was still a young girl, Davis began to attend civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham with her mother. The white majority responded to the demonstrations with clandestine hostility. So many homes in Davis's neighborhood were bombed by marauding white supremacists that the area became known as "Dynamite Hill." Attempts by Davis and some of her friends to conduct interracial study groups were disbanded by police. The racially motivated violence and the unfair laws governing blacks' behavior in public places helped to instill in Davis a sense of social purpose, as well as a deep resentment of the white power structure.

Davis's mother spent summers working toward a master's degree at New York University. Often Davis spent the summers in Manhattan too, and after her sophomore year of high school in Birmingham she earned a scholarship to attend Elizabeth Irwin High, a private school in Greenwich Village. A straight-A student at home in Birmingham, Davis had to struggle to achieve the same grades in New York. She added summer courses to her schedule and repeated some of her hardest classes. In 1961 she graduated and accepted a scholarship to Brandeis University.

At Brandeis, Davis majored in French literature. She spent one school year abroad studying at the Sorbonne. There she met students from Algeria and other African nations who had grown up under colonial rule. Their stories of discriminatory conditions in their homelands deepened her commitment to radical social change. She was further inflamed when news reached her of a bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four children she had known. Davis returned to Brandeis in search of some political philosophy that could mandate changes in the treatment of blacks--not only in America, but on the international level.

Her search brought her to the classroom of Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist professor of philosophy. Marcuse directed Davis to the tenets of socialism and communism. In her autobiography, Angela Davis, the activist wrote: "The Communist Manifesto [by nineteenth-century German philosopher and political economist Karl Marx] hit me like a bolt of lightning. I read it avidly, finding in it answers to many of the seemingly unanswerable dilemmas which had plagued me.... I began to see the problems of Black people within the context of a large working-class movement.... What struck me so emphatically was the idea that once the emancipation of the proletariat became a reality, the foundation was laid for the emancipation of all oppressed groups in society."

Davis graduated from Brandeis with top honors in 1965 and attended graduate school at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. She continued her studies of philosophy there, mastering the German language as well as the theories of knowledge set forth by German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Although her professors were impressed with her scholarship, they could not persuade her to stay in Germany as the social situation deteriorated in America. In 1967 Davis returned to the United States to finish work on her master's degree at the University of California, San Diego.

In California Davis finished her master's degree and began work toward her doctorate. She also joined a number of activist groups, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers. Her most important affiliation came in June of 1968, when she formally joined the Communist Party and became involved with the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black Communist collective in Los Angeles. As a member of Che-Lumumba, she helped to organize militant demonstrations and protests designed to focus public attention on the plight of minorities. And thus her troubles began.

The University of California at Los Angeles had hired Davis as an assistant professor of philosophy in 1969. She taught four courses: "Dialectical Materialism," "Kant," "Existentialism," and "Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature." Quickly she became a popular teacher on the UCLA campus, but an ex-FBI informer leaked the news that Davis was a member of the Communist party. The information made the newspapers, and UCLA's board of regents--which included then-governor Ronald Reagan--dismissed her from her post. The situation bore an uncanny resemblance to the deplorable "Red Scare" in the 1950s. Fellow faculty members and even the university president overwhelmingly condemned the regents' action as illegal and an infringement on academic freedom. Davis was reinstated by court order, but when her contract expired the following year she was dismissed again.

By that time Davis had become actively involved in the cause of the Soledad Brothers, a group of inmates at California's Soledad Prison who were treated especially harshly because they had tried to organize a Marxist group among the prisoners. Davis led demonstrations and gave speeches calling for parole of the young black prisoners. When one of the prisoners was shot by a guard in an incident ruled "justifiable homicide" by the warden, Davis grew even more strident in her demands. Her public exhortations drew anonymous threats by telephone and by mail, so she purchased several weapons and stored them in the headquarters of the Che-Lumumba Club.

On August 7, 1970, a teen-aged sibling of one of the Soledad Brothers used the firearms Davis had purchased to stage a dramatic prisoner rescue and hostage-taking attempt at California's Marin County Courthouse. The attempt was foiled in a barrage of gunfire that killed a county judge. Quickly the firearms were traced to Davis, and she fled into hiding. The FBI responded by placing her on the "Ten Most Wanted List" and undertaking a massive search for her. Two months later they found her in New York City and extradited her to California, where she was held in prison for over a year.

Once a tireless crusader for the incarcerated, Davis soon found herself behind bars, a victim and--in many minds--a political prisoner. "That period was pivotal for me in many respects," Davis told Essence. "I came to understand much more concretely many of the realities of the Black struggle of that period." Davis's case became an international issue, especially in the Soviet Union, and demonstrations on her behalf were held on both sides of the Atlantic. "Free Angela" picket signs and lapel pins became a catchword for the mistreatment of blacks by an overzealous federal law enforcement system.

Davis was taken to trial on charges of kidnapping, conspiracy, and murder in the spring of 1972. Her defense was able to prove that she did not help to plan or execute the incident at the Marin County Courthouse, and a jury of eleven whites and one Mexican American acquitted her of all charges. Finally free, Davis embarked on a national lecture tour and visited the Soviet Union, where she was accorded a hero's welcome. As the 1970s progressed, she became a well-known lecturer and writer who demanded a total reassessment of attitudes about the black family, an overhaul of repressive prison systems, and a black-white coalition for the formation of a socialized state.

The Communist Party of the United States has benefitted from Davis's talents for decades. Her presence in the party helped to change the African American perception of communism and bolster black membership. In 1980 and again in 1984 the party nominated her as its vice-presidential candidate. Progressive magazine contributor Julius Lester has commented that, with Davis, "one is left with the impression of a woman who lives as she thinks it necessary to live and not as she would like to, if she allowed herself to have desires. She seems to be a woman of enormous self-discipline and control, who willed herself to a total political identity. Her will is so strong that, at times, it is frightening."

The years have not dimmed Davis's ardor for her causes, nor have they softened her philosophy. As a teacher at such colleges as San Francisco State University and the University of California at Santa Cruz, she has developed courses on women's issues from a global perspective. Her ideas on the subject are presented in two collections of essays, Women, Race & Class and Women, Culture & Politics. Davis told Essence: "Something happened during the period of my persecution by the government and the FBI and others. When I was underground, enormous numbers of Black women were arrested and harassed. I came to realize the government feared the political potential of Black women--and that that was a manifestation of a larger plan to push us away from political involvement." Davis said that knowledge helped to empower her and other black women as well. "A new collective consciousness was emerging. I think that during that very compressed historical moment we managed to formulate many of the issues that were of concern to us. And to formulate responses to the propagandistic assault, which are still valid 20 years later. That is what is so fascinating to me, to recognize that 20 years have gone by, yet many of the ideas raised during that period have not become historically obsolete."

A self-avowed "soldier of freedom," Davis is encouraged by a strain of militancy she sees in young Americans. She calls for multicultural coalitions and global strategies to achieve equality for all peoples. "It is no longer possible for various groups to live and function and struggle in isolation," she told Ebony. "While we may specifically be involved in our own particular struggles, our vision has to be that we understand how our own issues relate to the issues of others. My consciousness has grown so that when I speak and write, I make a point of discussing the need for understanding how Native Americans, Latinos, and other people of color are marginalized in this society."

As the 1990s progressed, Angela Davis remained on the front line, fighting for women's rights, for a global peace plan including nuclear disarmament, for enhanced opportunities for workers, and especially for affordable health care for all American women. "Black women have no choice but to force the government to take responsibility for all its citizens," she told Essence. "The budget cutting of the Reagan administration that abolished many programs vital to the poor must be restored. Ultimately, the economic system will have to be changed. I don't think that under this system we will ever achieve economic power or equality. Some Black people, yes. But the majority still suffer now more than ever before." Also in Essence, Davis concluded on behalf of women of color everywhere: "It's about time, the decade of the nineties--as we prepare for a new century--to claim our voice and to demand that our community give us the respect that we have given it for as many decades and centuries as we have been present on this continent."

Works

Writings

• (With others) If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, Third Press, 1971, reprinted, Okpaku Communications, 1992..
• Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Random House, 1974, reprinted, International Publications, 1988.
• Women, Race & Class, Random House, 1983.
• Women, Culture & Politics, Random House, 1989.

Further Reading

Books

• Ashman, Charles R., The People vs. Angela Davis, Pinnacle Books, 1972.
• Davis, Angela, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, International Publications, 1988.
• Davis, Angela, and others, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, Okpaku Communications, 1992.
• Smith, Nelda J., From Where I Sat, Vantage, 1973.

Periodicals

• Ebony, July 1990, p. 56.
• Emerge, April 1991, cover story.
• Essence, August 1986, p. 62; January 1988, p. 67; June 1989, p. 24; May 1990, p. 92.
• New Statesman, August 14, 1987, p. 16.
• Newsweek, June 5, 1972, p. 40.
• Parade, November 29, 1992, p. 2.
• People, January 23, 1978, p. 22.
• Progressive, February 1975.
• Sepia, December 1970, p. 9.
• Time, October 17, 1969, p. 64.
• Additional information on Angela Davis is available from the sound recording Angela Davis Speaks, Folkways, 1974; the Oceana microfilm of The Angela Davis Trial, 1974; and the student-produced documentary Portrait of a Revolutionary.

— Anne Janette Johnson

For more information on Angela Yvonne Davis, visit Britannica.com.

1944–, African-American political activist, b. Birmingham, Ala. She taught philosophy (1969–70) at the Univ. of California, Los Angeles, until she was finally denied reappointment because of her membership in the Communist party and her advocacy of radical black causes. In Aug., 1970, she went into hiding after a gun legally registered to her was used in an attempted courtroom escape in which a judge and three others were killed. Apprehended two months later, she was tried on charges of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping (1972). After months in prison, she was released on bail and later acquitted. She has since taught at San Francisco State Univ. (1979–91) and the Univ. of California at Santa Cruz (1992–). Davis was the American Communist party's vice-presidential candidate in 1980 and 1984.

Bibliography

See her Women, Race, and Class (1982), autobiography (1988), and Women, Culture, and Politics (1989).

(b. 1944)

1974	Autobiography. The black activist reviews her childhood, family, education, and political development, including her 1972 trial for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy charges.
1982	Women, Race, and Class. Davis's essay collection explores the connections between the black liberation and the women's rights movements.

Angela Yvonne Davis, political activist, author, professor, and Communist party member, was an international symbol of the black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 26, 1944, the eldest of four children. Her family was relatively well-off among the blacks in the city. Her father and mother were teachers in the Birmingham school system, and her father later purchased and operated a service station.

When Davis was four years old, the family moved out of the Birmingham projects and bought a large wooden house in a nearby neighborhood. Other black families soon followed. Incensed white neighbors drew a dividing line between the white and black sections and began trying to drive the black families out by bombing their homes. The area soon was nicknamed Dynamite Hill. Davis's mother had in college been involved in antiracism movements that had brought her into contact with sympathetic whites. She and Davis's father tried to teach their daughter that this hostility between blacks and whites was not preordained.

All of Birmingham was segregated during Davis's childhood. She attended blacks-only schools and theaters and was relegated to the back of city buses and the back door of shops, which rankled her. On one occasion, as teenagers, Davis and her sister Fania entered a Birmingham shoe store and pretended to be non-English-speaking French visitors. After receiving deferential treatment by the salesmen and other customers, Davis announced in English that black people only had to pretend to be from another country to be treated like dignitaries.

Davis later wrote that although the black schools she attended were much poorer than the white schools in Birmingham, her studies of black historical and contemporary figures such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman helped her develop a strong positive identification with black history.

The civil rights movement was beginning to touch Birmingham at the time Davis entered high school. Her parents were members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In her junior year of high school, Davis decided to leave what she considered to be the provincialism of Birmingham. She applied for an early entrance program at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, and an experimental program developed by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) through which black students from the South could attend integrated high schools in the North. Although Davis was admitted to Fisk— which she viewed as a stepping-stone to medical school, where she could pursue a childhood dream of becoming a pediatrician—she chose the AFSC program. At fifteen, she boarded a train for New York City. There, she lived with a white family headed by an Episcopalian minister who had been forced from his church after speaking out against Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-Communist witch-hunts. Davis attended Elisabeth Irwin High School, located on the edge of Greenwich Village. The school originally had been a public school experiment in progressive education; when funding was cut off, the teachers turned it into a private school. Here, Davis learned about socialism and avidly studied the Communist Manifesto. She also joined a Marxist-Leninist youth organization called Advance, which had ties to the Communist party.

In September 1961, Davis entered Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts, on a full scholarship. One of only three black first-year students, she felt alienated and alone. The following summer, eager to meet revolutionary young people from other countries, Davis attended a gathering of Communist youth from around the world in Helsinki. Here, she was particularly struck by the cultural presentations put on by the Cuban delegation. She also found that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had stationed agents and informers throughout the festival. Upon her return to the United States, Davis was met by an investigator from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who questioned her about her participation in a Communist event.

Meeting people from around the world convinced Davis of the importance of tearing down cultural barriers like language, and she decided to major in French at Brandeis. She was accepted in the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program, and studied contemporary French literature at the Sorbonne, in Paris. Upon her return to Brandeis, Davis, who had always had an interest in philosophy, studied with the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The following year, she received a scholarship to study philosophy in Frankfurt, where she focused on the works of the Germans Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and Karl Marx.

During the two years Davis spent in Germany, the black liberation and black power movements were emerging in the United States. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had been formed in Oakland to protect the black community from police brutality. In the summer of 1967, Davis decided to return home to join these movements.

Back in Los Angeles, Davis worked with various academic and community organizations to build a coalition to address issues of concern to the black community. Among these groups was the Black Panther Political Party (unrelated to Huey Newton and Bobby Seale's Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). During this period, Davis was heavily criticized by black male activists for doing what they considered to be men's work. Women should not assume leadership roles, they claimed, but should educate children and should support men so that they could direct the struggle for black liberation. Davis was to encounter this attitude in many of her political activities.

By 1968, Davis had decided to join a collective organization in order to achieve her goal of organizing people for political action. She first considered joining the Communist party. But because she related more to Marxist groups, she decided instead to join the Black Panther Political Party, which later became the Los Angeles branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was soon embroiled in internal disputes. After her longtime friend Franklin Kenard was expelled from his leadership position in the group because of his Communist party membership, Davis resigned from the organization. In July 1968, she joined the Che-Lumumba Club, the black cell of the Communist party in Los Angeles.

In 1969 Davis was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. In July 1969, Davis joined a delegation of Communist party members who had been invited to spend a month in Cuba. There, she worked in coffee and sugarcane fields, and visited schools, hospitals, and historical sites. Davis remarked that everywhere she went in Cuba, she was immensely impressed with the gains that had been made against racism. She saw blacks in leadership positions throughout the country, and she concluded that only under a socialist system such as that established by Cuban leader Fidel Castro could the fight against racism have been so successful.

When she returned to the United States, she discovered that several newspaper articles had been published detailing her membership in the Communist party and accusing her of activities such as gunrunning for the Black Panther party. Governor Ronald Reagan, of California, invoked a regulation in the handbook of the regents of the University of California that prohibited the hiring of Communists. Davis responded by affirming her membership in the Communist party, and she began to receive hate mail and threatening phone calls. After she obtained an injunction prohibiting the regents from firing her, the threats multiplied. Soon, she was receiving so many bomb threats that the campus police stopped checking her car for explosives, forcing her to learn the procedure for doing so herself. By the end of the year, the courts had ruled that the regulation prohibiting the hiring of Communists was unconstitutional. However, in June 1970, the regents announced that Davis would not be rehired the following year, on the grounds that her political speeches outside the classroom were unbefitting a university professor.

During this time, Davis became involved with the movement to free three black inmates of Soledad Prison in California: George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo. The men, known as the Soledad Brothers, had been indicted for the murder of a prison guard. The guard had been pushed over a prison railing when he inadvertently stumbled into a rebellion among black prisoners caused by the killing of three black prisoners by another prison guard. Although Jackson, Clutchette, and Drumgo claimed there was no evidence that they had killed the guard, they were charged with his murder. Davis began corresponding with Jackson and soon developed a personal relationship with him. She attended all the court hearings relating to the Soledad Brothers' indictment, along with many other supporters, including Jackson's younger brother, Jonathon Jackson, who was committed to freeing his brother and the other inmates. On August 7, 1970, using guns registered to Davis, Jonathon attempted to free his brother in a shoot-out at the Marin County Courthouse. Four people were killed, including Jonathon and superior court judge Harold Haley.

Davis was charged with kidnapping; conspiracy; and murder, which was punishable in California by death. She fled, traveling in disguise from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Miami, and finally back to New York. In October 1970, she was arrested by the FBI, which had placed her on its most wanted list. In December, after two months in jail, Davis was extradited to California, where she spent the next fourteen months in jail. She later said that this period was pivotal to her understanding of the black political struggle in the United States. Having worked to organize people in communities and on campuses against political repression, Davis now found herself a victim of that repression. In August 1971, while incarcerated in the Marin County Jail, she was devastated to learn that George Jackson had been killed by a guard in San Quentin Prison, allegedly while trying to escape.

In February 1972, Davis was released on bail following the California Supreme Court's decision to abolish the death penalty (People v. Anderson, 6 Cal. 3d 628, 100 Cal. Rptr. 152, 493 P.2d 880). Previously, bail had not been available to persons accused of crimes punishable by death. Her trial began a few days later, and lasted until early June 1972, when a jury acquitted her of all charges.

After her acquittal, Davis resumed her teaching career, at San Francisco State University. She continued her affiliation with the Communist party, receiving the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 1979 and running for vice president of the United States on the Communist party ticket in 1980 and 1984. She is a founder and cochair of the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. She is on the national board of the National Political Congress of Black Women and on the board of the Atlanta-based National Black Women's Health Project. She has authored five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Culture, and Politics (1989), and Women, Race, and Class (1983). In 1980, she married Hilton Braithwaite, a photographer and faculty colleague at San Francisco State. The marriage ended in divorce several years later.

In 1991, Davis began teaching an interdisciplinary graduate program titled "The History of Consciousness," at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1995 she found herself again surrounded by controversy when she was awarded a prestigious University of California President's Chair by university president Jack Peltason. The appointment provides $75,000 over several years to develop new ethnic studies courses. Some state lawmakers were outraged over the award and unsuccessfully demanded that Peltason rescind the appointment. Davis said she planned to use the stipend to create programs dealing with the criminalization and incarceration of women and with issues concerning women of color.

CROSS-REFERENCES: Carmichael, Stokely; Cleaver, Eldridge.

Quotes:

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

"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."

"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation."

"Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor --because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them."

"Radical simply means grasping things at the root."

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