Angela Davis
From Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis is a racial and social justice activist and educator in the 1970s. She is a 77-year-old master scholar who works for the poor and oppressed for their equal rights and a better place in society. She was a former professor of UCLA and a member of the Black Panthers.
Reading Materials
Angela Davis: An Autobiography
Summary: Angela Y. Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements. Fifty years after its original publication, the author revisits her life’s story in print.
The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues
Summary: What is the meaning of freedom? Angela Y. Davis’ life and work have been dedicated to examining this fundamental question and to ending all forms of oppression that deny people their political, cultural, and sexual freedom. In this collection of twelve searing, previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States.
Summary: Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Summary: In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.
Summary: A collection of her speeches and writings which address the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.
Summary: With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
Summary: Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions.
Media
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2012)
Summary: Chronicles the life of young college professor Angela Davis, and how her social activism implicates her in a botched kidnapping attempt that ends with a shootout, four dead, and her name on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list.
The Black Power Mixtape 1967 – 1975
Summary: The Black Power Mixtape 1967 – 1975 mobilizes a treasure trove of 16mm material shot by Swedish journalists who came to the US drawn by stories of urban unrest and revolution. Gaining access to many of the leaders of the Black Power Movement, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver among them, the filmmakers captured them in intimate moments and remarkably unguarded interviews. Thirty years later, this lush collection was found languishing in the basement of Swedish Television.