Angela Davis

At 80 years old, Angela Davis has this physical status:

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author.

She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Davis, a Marxist, served as a member of the Communist Party in the United States until 1991, when she joined the Correspondence Committees for Democracy and Socialism.

She is the author of more than ten books on education, feminism, and the US prison system. Davis, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, studied French at Brandeis University and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, West Germany.

Davis, who was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt School of Marxism, became more interested in far-left politics as a student under Herbert Marcuse, a prominent figure in the Frankfurt School of Marxism.

She earned a doctorate at the University of California, San Diego, before heading to East Germany, where she obtained a doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Early life

Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 26, 1944. Her family lived in "Dynamite Hill" neighborhood, which was characterized by house bombings in the 1950s as an effort to intimidate and throw out middle-class black people who had moved there. Davis spent time on her uncle's farm and with her colleagues in New York City. Ben and Reginald's two brothers, as well as Fania, are among her siblings. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ben played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions.

Davis attended Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated black elementary school, and Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham, later. During this period, Davis' mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was both a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an agency that was influenced by the Communist Party aimed at creating African Americans in the South. Davis was surrounded by communist strategists and scholars, who heavily influenced her intellectual growth. Louis E. Burnham, Davis' daughter Margaret Burnham, was Davis' cousin from childhood, as well as her co-counsel during Davis' 1971 murder and kidnapping convictions.

Davis was active as an infant in her church youth group and attended Sunday school on a weekly basis. She owes a large part of her political involvement to her time with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She also competed in the Girl Scouts 1959 national roundup in Colorado. She marched and pickedeted in Birmingham as a Girl Scout to protest racial discrimination.

Davis had been accepted by the American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) program, which had placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North by her junior year of high school. Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village was her choice. Advance, a communist youth group, recruited her.

Education

Davis was granted a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her class. She first encountered Herbert Marcuse, a professor at the Frankfurt School, at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and became his student. "Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an explorer, and a revolutionary," Davis said in a television interview in 2007. She worked part-time to raise enough funds to travel to France and Switzerland, as well as Helsinki's eighth World Festival of Youth and Students. She returned home in 1963 to a Federal Bureau of Investigation interview about her participation at the communist-sponsored festival.

Davis decided to specialize in French and continued her intensive study of philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre during her second year at Brandeis. She was accepted by the Hamilton College Junior Year in France's Program. Classes were first held in Biarritz and later at Sorbonne. She and other students in Paris lived with a French family. She was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, which was committed by Ku Klux members, in which four black girls were killed. She wept when she became intimately familiar with the victims.

Davis discovered that philosophy was her primary area of concern as she pursued her degree in French. Marcuse was particularly interested in his thoughts. She sat in on his course as she returned to Brandeis. Marcuse was approachable and helpful, she wrote in her autobiography. She began planning to study philosophy at the University of Frankfurt for graduate study in philosophy. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1965.

She lived in Germany first with a German family and then with a group of students in a loft in an old factory. After visiting East Berlin for the annual May Day celebration, she found that the East German government was dealing with fascism's remaining effects better than were the West Germans. Many of her roommates were active in the radical Socialist German Student Union (SDS), and Davis was involved in several SDS protests. On her return to the United States, events such as the founding of the Black Panther Party and the conversion of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to an all-black group drew her attention.

Marcuse had accepted a teaching position at the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed him there for two years. Davis traveled to London to attend a conference titled "The Dialectics of Liberation" by the Dialectics of Liberation. The Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael and British Michael X were among the black participants at the conference. Davis, who was inspired by Carmichael's rhetoric, was apparently dissatisfied with her coworkers' black nationalist views and their rejection of communism as a "white man's thing."

She joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black Communist Party USA group devoted to revolutionaries Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, both of Cuba and Congo.

Davis earned a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1968. At Humboldt University in East Berlin, she obtained a doctorate in philosophy.

Personal life

Davis was married to Hilton Braithwaite from 1980 to 1983. In an interview with Out magazine in 1997, she came out as a lesbian. Davis was living openly with her partner, academic Gina Dent, a fellow humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz, by 2020. They have called for the abolition of police and jails, as well as black liberation and Palestinian solidarity.

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Later academic career

Davis was a lecturer at the Claremont Black Studies Center at the Claremont Colleges in 1975. Her class was limited to 26 students out of the more than 5,000 on campus, and she was forced to teach in secrecy because alumni benefactors didn't want her to doctrinate the general student population with communist thought. College trustees made plans to minimize her presence on campus by limiting her seminars to Friday evenings and Saturdays "when campus life is low." Her classes changed from one classroom to another, and the students were obedient to secrecy. During Davis' brief time teaching at the colleges, a substantial portion of the secrecy remained. Davis would be the Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecturer for Pomona College's history department in 2020, welcoming her back after 45 years.

Davis taught a women's studies course at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978 and was a San Francisco State University ethnic studies professor from 1980 to 1984. She taught History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers University from 1991 to 2008. Since then, she has been a respected professor emerita.

Davis, a distinguished visiting professor at Syracuse University in spring 1992 to October 2010, and he was the Randolph Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Vassar College in 1995.

Davis returned to UCLA in 2014 as a regents' lecturer. She delivered a public lecture on May 8 in Royce Hall, where she had given her first lecture 45 years ago.

During the 49th annual commencement ceremony in San Francisco, Davis was honoured by the California Institute of Integral Studies in Healing and Social Justice.

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