January 26 - Celebrating Angela Davis

nPosted on January 26, 2019

Key Points

Angela Davis has worked on feminist and civil rights and prison reform. And she has studied and worked as a scholar and professor in areas including social consciousness, popular music, and Marxism.

nThis professor / activist / author was controversial when I was growing up because she was briefly part of the Black Panther Party and for a long time was part of the Communist Party. She also faced conspiracy to murder charges – BUT she was acquitted (found innocent) of all charges.

nDavis’s fascinating life helped shape her ideas:

nDavis was born on this date in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, and white bigots who bombed the houses of middle class black families in an attempt to frighten them and drive them out of the city (or state?) made some of them into fervent activists.

nDavis’s involvement with the Girls Scouts helped channel her anger at discrimination into peaceful protests.

nA Quaker (“Friends”) program that placed black students from the South into integrated schools in the North helped shape her life as she started to attend high school in New York City.

nDuring her college career in Massachusetts, Davis attended a rally and met a German-American philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, and became one of his students.

nShe traveled to Europe – France, Switzerland, Finland – and attended a World Festival of Youth and Students; later, she declared a major in French and did her junior year in France, which involved living with a French family. When she decided that she wanted to do graduate work in philosophy, in Germany, she ended up living with a German family. Later she lived with an international group of students. She visited East Berlin and ended up comparing post-war Germany from both the East and West. I think it is a rare and wonderful thing to have lived and studied in so many different places!

nBecause Professor Marcuse moved to a position at UC San Diego, Davis ended up moving to California and getting her masters from UCSD before completing a doctorate in East Berlin. She became an assistant professor at UCLA at age 25.

nA lot of Angela Davis’s life was consumed with anti-Communist fears as well as the racism and sexism that affects every black woman in the U.S. Of course, Davis made mistakes – don’t we all? – but making her out to be a dangerous terrorist, and putting her on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List, was part of the racist / sexist / anti-Communist reality of the time (and, sadly, of this time as well!).