Angela Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), running for Vice President in the 1980 and 1984 elections under that party. She is also a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She has been active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, she was held in jail for more than a year, before being acquitted of all charges in 1972. While in prison, she was often considered a political prisoner.

In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke away from the CPUSA to help establish the CCDS. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex.

Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize (since 2025 she is its last living recipient) and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Due to accusations that she advocates political violence and due to her support of the Soviet Union, she has been a controversial figure. In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" edition. In 2020, she was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2025, Davis was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of Cambridge.

Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was christened at her father's Episcopal church. Her family lived in the "Dynamite Hill" neighborhood, which was marked in the 1950s by the bombings of houses in an attempt to intimidate and drive out middle-class black people who had moved there. Davis occasionally spent time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City. Her siblings include two brothers, Ben and Reginald, and a sister, Fania. Ben played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Davis attended Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated black elementary school, and later, Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham. During this time, Davis's mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization influenced by the Communist Party aimed at building alliances among African Americans in the South. Davis grew up surrounded by communist organizers and thinkers, who significantly influenced her intellectual development. Among them was the Southern Negro Youth Congress official Louis E. Burnham, whose daughter Margaret Burnham was Davis's friend from childhood, as well as her co-counsel during Davis's 1971 trial for murder and kidnapping.

Davis was involved in her church youth group as a child and attended Sunday school regularly. She attributes much of her political involvement to her involvement with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She also participated in the Girl Scouts 1959 national roundup in Colorado. As a Girl Scout, she marched and picketed to protest racial segregation in Birmingham.

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

Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her class. She encountered the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and became his student. In a 2007 television interview, Davis said: "Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary." She worked part-time to earn enough money to travel to France and Switzerland and attended the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland. She returned home in 1963 to a Federal Bureau of Investigation interview about her attendance at the communist-sponsored festival.

During her second year at Brandeis, Davis decided to major in French and continued her study of philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre. She was accepted by the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program. Classes were initially at Biarritz and later at the Sorbonne. In Paris, she and other students lived with a French family. She was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed; she had been personally acquainted with the victims.

While completing her degree in French, Davis realized that her primary area of interest was philosophy. She was particularly interested in Marcuse's ideas. On returning to Brandeis, she sat in on his course. She wrote in her autobiography that Marcuse was approachable and helpful. She began making plans to attend the University of Frankfurt for graduate work in philosophy. In 1965, she graduated magna cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

In West Germany, with a monthly stipend of $100, she lived first with a German family and later with a group of students in a loft in an old factory. After visiting East Berlin during the annual May Day celebration, she felt that the East German government was dealing better with the residual effects of fascism than were the West Germans. Many of her roommates were active in the radical Socialist German Student Union (SDS), and Davis participated in some SDS actions. Events in the United States, including the formation of the Black Panther Party and the transformation of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to an all-black organization, drew her interest upon her return.

Marcuse had moved to a position at the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed him there after her two years in Frankfurt. Davis traveled to London to attend a conference on "The Dialectics of Liberation". The black contingent at the conference included the Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael and the British Michael X. Although moved by Carmichael's rhetoric, Davis was reportedly disappointed by her colleagues' black nationalist sentiments and their rejection of communism as a "white man's thing".

She joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA named for revolutionaries Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, of Cuba and Congo, respectively.

Davis earned a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1968. She completed some work for a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, around 1970 but never received a degree because her manuscripts were confiscated by the FBI. Instead, two years later, she received three honorary doctorates: In August 1972 from Moscow State University, and from the University of Tashkent during that same visit, and in September 1972 from the Karl-Marx University in Leipzig, Germany. In 1981, she returned to Germany to continue working on her PhD.

Beginning in 1969, Davis was an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Although both Princeton and Swarthmore had tried to recruit her, she opted for UCLA because of its urban location. At that time, she was known as a radical feminist and activist, a member of the Communist Party USA, and an affiliate of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Davis had previously joined the Communist Party in 1968 and had become a member of the Black Panther Party, working with a branch of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, where she directed political education. When Black Panther Party leadership determined that party members could not also be affiliated with other parties, Davis retained her Communist Party membership although she continued to work with the Black Panther Party.

In 1969, the University of California initiated a policy against hiring Communists. At their September 19, 1969, meeting, the Board of Regents fired Davis from her $10,000-a-year post (equivalent to $65,420 in 2024) because of her membership in the Communist Party, urged on by California Governor and future president Ronald Reagan. Judge Jerry Pacht ruled the Regents could not fire Davis solely because of her affiliation with the Communist Party, and she resumed her post.

The Regents fired Davis again on June 20, 1970, for the "inflammatory language" she had used in four different speeches. The report stated, "We deem particularly offensive such utterances as her statement that the regents 'killed, brutalized [and] murdered' the People's Park demonstrators, and her repeated characterizations of the police as 'pigs'." The American Association of University Professors censured the board for this action.

After her acquittal, Davis went on an international speaking tour in 1972 and the tour included a trip to Cuba, where she had previously been received by Fidel Castro as a member of a Communist Party delegation in 1969. Robert F. Williams, Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael had also visited Cuba, and Assata Shakur later moved there after she escaped from a U.S. prison. At a mass rally held by Afro-Cubans, Davis was reportedly barely able to speak because her reception was so enthusiastic. She perceived that Cuba was a racism-free country, which led her to believe that "only under socialism could the fight against racism be successfully executed." When she returned to the U.S., her socialist leanings increasingly influenced her understanding of racial struggles. In 1974, she attended the Second Congress of the Federation of Cuban Women.

In 1971, the CIA estimated that five percent of Soviet propaganda efforts were directed towards the Angela Davis campaign. In August 1972, Davis visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Central Committee. During her tour of the Soviet Union and other socialist states, Davis praised the Soviet Union for eradicating racism, and spoke favorably of Soviet childhood. Her statements and conduct during the tour disappointed some Soviet dissidents who had hoped she would support political prisoners.

On May 1, 1979, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union. She visited Moscow later that month to accept the prize, where she praised "the glorious name" of Vladimir Lenin and the "great October Revolution".

The East German government organized an extensive campaign on behalf of Davis. In September 1972, Davis visited East Germany, where she met the state's leader Erich Honecker, received an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig and the Star of People's Friendship from Walter Ulbricht. On September 11 in East Berlin she delivered a speech, "Not Only My Victory", praising the GDR and USSR and denouncing American racism.

She visited the Berlin Wall, where she laid flowers at the memorial for Reinhold Huhn, an East German guard who had been killed by a man who was trying to escape with his family across the border in 1962. Davis said, "We mourn the deaths of the border guards who sacrificed their lives for the protection of their socialist homeland" and "When we return to the USA, we shall undertake to tell our people the truth about the true function of this border." In 1973, she returned to East Berlin, leading the U.S. delegation to the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students.

On her 1972 tour, Davis also visited Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Chile.

In the mid-1970s, Jim Jones, who developed the cult Peoples Temple, initiated friendships with progressive leaders in the San Francisco area including Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement and Davis. On September 10, 1977, 14 months before the Temple's mass murder-suicide, Davis spoke via amateur radio telephone "patch" to members of his Peoples Temple who were living in Jonestown in Guyana. In her statement during the "Six Day Siege", she expressed support for the Peoples Temple's anti-racism efforts and she also told Temple members that there was a conspiracy against them. She said, "When you are attacked, it is because of your progressive stand, and we feel that it is directly an attack against us as well." On February 28, 1978, Davis wrote to President Jimmy Carter, asking him not to assist in efforts to retrieve a child from Jonestown. Her letter called Jones "a humanitarian in the broadest sense of the word".

In 1975, Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued in a speech before an AFL–CIO meeting in New York City that Davis was derelict in having failed to support prisoners in various socialist countries around the world, given her strong opposition to the U.S. prison system. In 1972, Jiří Pelikán wrote an open letter in which he asked her to support Czechoslovak prisoners. According to Solzhenitsyn, Davis, in response to concerns about Czechoslovak prisoners being "persecuted by the state", had said: "They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison." Davis's close associate Charlene Mitchell, claiming to speak on Davis's behalf, dismissed the Czechoslovak arguments and characterized emigration from socialist to capitalist countries as a "retrograde step." Davis remained largely unsympathetic to the struggles of dissidents in socialist states until the final years of the Soviet Union, while many of those dissidents likewise became skeptical of her advocacy for racial justice in the United States.

Davis was a lecturer at the Claremont Black Studies Center at the Claremont Colleges in 1975. Attendance at the course she taught was limited to 26 students out of the more than 5,000 on campus, and she was forced to teach in secret because alumni benefactors did not want her to indoctrinate the general student population with Communist thought. College trustees made arrangements to minimize her appearance on campus, limiting her seminars to Friday evenings and Saturdays, "when campus activity is low".

Her classes moved from one classroom to another and the students were sworn to secrecy. Much of this secrecy continued throughout Davis's brief time teaching at the colleges. In 2020 it was announced that Davis would be the Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecturer in Pomona College's history department, welcoming her back after 45 years.

Davis taught a women's studies course at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978 and was a professor of ethnic studies at the San Francisco State University from at least 1980 to 1984; she taught political science courses there until 1990. She was a professor in the History of Consciousness and the Feminist Studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers University from 1991 to 2008. Since then, she has been a distinguished professor emerita.

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

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

Davis accepted the Communist Party USA's nomination for vice president, as Gus Hall's running mate, in 1980 and in 1984. They received less than 0.02% of the vote in 1980. She left the party in 1991, founding the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Her group broke from the Communist Party USA because of the latter's support of the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt after the fall of the Soviet Union and tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Davis said that she and others who had "circulated a petition about the need for democratization of the structures of governance of the party" were not allowed to run for national office and thus "in a sense ... invited to leave". In 2014, she said she continues to have a relationship with the CPUSA but has not rejoined. In the 2020 presidential election, Davis supported the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.

Davis is a major figure in the prison abolition movement. She has called the United States prison system the "prison–industrial complex" and was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison system. In recent works, she has argued that the US prison system resembles a new form of slavery, pointing to the disproportionate share of the African-American population who were incarcerated. Davis advocates focusing social efforts on education and building "engaged communities" to solve various social problems now handled through state punishment.

As early as 1969, Davis began public speaking engagements. She expressed her opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and the prison–industrial complex, and her support of gay rights and other social justice movements. In 1969, she blamed imperialism for the troubles oppressed populations suffer:

We are facing a common enemy and that enemy is Yankee Imperialism, which is killing us both here and abroad. Now I think anyone who would try to separate those struggles, anyone who would say that in order to consolidate an anti-war movement, we have to leave all of these other outlying issues out of the picture, is playing right into the hands of the enemy.

She has continued lecturing throughout her career, including at numerous universities.

From 1980 to 1983, Davis was married to Hilton Braithwaite. In 1997, she came out as a lesbian in an interview with Out magazine. By 2020, Davis was living with her partner, the academic Gina Dent, a fellow humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz. Together, they have advocated the abolition of police and prisons, and championed black liberation and Palestinian solidarity.

In a 2023 episode of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates revealed to Davis that she is a descendant of William Brewster, a passenger on the Mayflower. Another ancestor revealed in the episode was Alabama politician John A. Darden, who is Davis's grandfather. In another episode titled Secret Lives it is revealed that Davis is related to Niecy Nash.

The first song released in support of Davis was "Angela" (1971), by Italian singer-songwriter and musician Virgilio Savona with his group Quartetto Cetra. He received some anonymous threats.

In 1972, German singer-songwriter and political activist Franz Josef Degenhardt published the song "Angela Davis", the opener to his sixth studio album Mutter Mathilde.

The Rolling Stones song "Sweet Black Angel", recorded in 1970 and released on their album Exile on Main Street (1972), is dedicated to Davis. It is one of the band's few overtly political releases. Its lines include: "She's a sweet black angel, not a gun-toting teacher, not a Red-lovin' schoolmarm / Ain't someone gonna free her, a free de sweet black slave, free de sweet black slave".

John Lennon and Yoko Ono released their song "Angela" on the album Some Time in New York City (1972) in support of Davis, and a small photo of her appears on the album's cover at the bottom left.

The jazz musician Todd Cochran, also known as Bayete, recorded his song "Free Angela (Thoughts...and all I've got to say)" in 1972.

If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: Third Press, 1971), ISBN 0-893-88022-1.

Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Random House (1974), ISBN 0-394-48978-0.

Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape (New York: Lang Communications, 1975)

Women, Race and Class, Random House (1981), ISBN 0-394-71351-6.

Women, Culture & Politics, Vintage (1990), ISBN 0-679-72487-7. The essay "Let Us All Rise Together: Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women" (an address to the National Women's Studies Conference at Spelman College, June 25, 1987) is included in Daughters of Africa (1992), edited by Margaret Busby, pp. 570–77.