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Angela Davis
By Alex Burns
Born on January 26, 1944, inBirmingham, Alabama, radical black activist, author and academic Angela Davis received a B.A. from BrandeisUniversity in 1965. She later studied as a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, under the Marxist professor and One Dimensional Man'(1964) author Herbert Marcuse.
Davis joined the Communist Party in 1968 and suffered discrimination like many blacks during the late 1960s for her personal political beliefs and commitment to revolutionary ideals. Despite her qualifications and excellent teaching record, the California Board of Regents refused to renew her appointment as a philosophy lecturer in 1970.
Davis worked to free the Soledad (Prison) Brothers, African-American prisoners held in California during the late 1960s. She befriended George Jackson, one of the prisoners. On August 7, 1970, during an abortive escape and kidnap attempt from MarinCounty's Hall of Justice, the trial judge and three people were killed, including Jackson's brother Jonathan. Although not at the crime scene, Davis was implicated when police claimed that the guns used had been registered in her name.
Davis fled underground and was consequently listed on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted Criminals list, sparking one of the most intensive manhunts in recent American history. Californian Governor Ronald Reagan publicly vowed that Davis would never teach in that state again. She was captured in New York City in August 1970, but was freed eighteen months later and cleared of all charges in 1972 by an all white jury. During this period an international Free Angela Davis movement had grown, and Davis used the momentum to found the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which remains active today.
Angela Davis
Photo: Andre Philippe Baudry Knops
Davis resumed teaching at San FranciscoStateUniversity after the fiasco, and has subsequently lectured in all 50 US states, as well as internationally throughout Europe, Africa, the Carribean, Russia and the Pacific. Her acclaimed books exploring the institutionalization of racial politics include If They Come In The Morning (1971), Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race & Class (1981), Women, Race and Politics (1989), Blues Legacies & Black Feminism (1999) and The Angela Y Davis Reader (1999).
Currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, Davis now focuses on exposing racism that is endemic to the US prison system (which she calls the Punishment Industry in deference to unmonitored corporate cult-ure and increasingly totalitarian privatization schemes), and exploring new ways to de-construct oppression and race hatred. Controversy and her radical past still haunts her: in 1994 Republicans objected to her appointment to a presidential chair at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is currently a professor in the History of Consciousness Department.
Her revolutionary politics and academic writings provide a link from 1960s groups like the Black Panthers to contemporary cases including Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal. Ultimately Davis represents a revitalizing force in New Left politics (she was at the forefront of Gulf War protests in the United States that were censored by the mainstream media) and individual life-affirming cultural studies (particularly blues and hip-hop music). She remains a powerful role-model for the Black Consciousness movement, and a reminder of how dictatorial the Police State can suddenly become towards minorities if it is not vigilantly monitored by free patriots.
