Angela Yvonne Davis

DAVIS, ANGELA YVONNE

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 doors 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 Eng-
lish that black people only had to pretend to be
from another country to be treated like digni-
taries.
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 begin-
ning to touch Birmingham at the time Davis
entered high school. Her parents were members
of the National Association for the Advance-
ment 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 age 15, 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, Finland. 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, Germany, 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 SELFDEFENSE
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 African American 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 14 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. Davis is also a
founder and cochair of the National Alliance
against Racist and Political Repression, and 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 several books,
including Angela Davis: An Autobiography
(1974),Women, Race, and Class (1983), Women,
Culture, and Politics (1989), and Blues Legacies
and Black Feminism (1998). 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 1994, 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 held the position
until 1997.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Davis was
still speaking out against and writing about the
plight of persons she considered to be political
prisoners, such as Indian activist Leonard Pelletier
and ex-Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal,
both convicted of killing law enforcement officers.
She has continued to call for the decriminalization
of prostitution on the basis that it
would greatly reduce the number of women in
prison. And she has lectured on what she calls
the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), positing
that imprisonment has become the most common
answer to societal problems and that corporations
are profiting from prison labor
thereby weakening the chances of prison reform.
In 1997, Davis helped found Critical Resistance,
an organization that seeks to build an international
movement dedicated to dismantling the
PIC.
Since the late 1970s, Davis has lectured
throughout the United States and in countries in
Africa, Europe, and Asia. She also remains a prolific
author, producing numerous articles and
essays. In 2003, in addition to writing and traveling
for speaking engagements, Davis continued
her work as tenured professor at the
University of California at Santa Cruz.
FURTHER READINGS
Davis, Angela. 1974. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New
York: International Publishers.
James, Joy, ed. 1998. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell.
“The Two Nations of Black America: Interview with Angela
Davis.” 1998. PBS: Frontline. Available online at (accessed June 30, 2003).
CROSS-REFERENCES
Carmichael, Stokely; Cleaver, LeRoy Eldridge; Communism.