Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Content Warning: This section references systemic racism, including segregation and mass incarceration.

Angela Davis (b. 1944) is a Black liberation activist, prison abolitionist, feminist, and academic. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she was a child during the Jim Crow era and came of age during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Her father ran a service station, and her mother was a teacher who instilled a love of learning in Davis from a young age. Her family resided in a middle-class neighborhood that was segregated. Davis recalls that white residents refused to allow their Black neighbors to cross the street and bombed homes of Black residents who dared to move into the parts of the neighborhood claimed by white people. This racism led a young Davis to resent white people, though her politically active mother recognized that white people could be allies in the movement against anti-Black racism, something that Davis later advocated too.

Davis’s family had friends in New York City, where she spent time as a child and where she later attended Elizabeth Irwin High School. Her time in the North, however, was not free from racism. She quickly realized that even though the North was not segregated, racism was still pervasive there.

Experiences in her youth shaped Davis’s commitment to Black Liberation and Freedom and fostered her interest in communism and Marxist philosophy. This interest first blossomed in high school when she read The Communist Manifesto. During her undergraduate years at Brandeis University and abroad in France, this interest grew, leading Davis to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) hired Davis to teach philosophy in her final year of graduate school. Controversy soon erupted, however, when Davis’s membership in the Communist Party became known, and the Board of Regents moved to fire her.

Davis was simultaneously active in the Black liberation movement in Los Angeles and became an advocate for the liberation of the Soledad Brothers, three Black men imprisoned in California who were accused of killing a guard during a riot. Davis became close to the families of the men, especially George Jackson’s family, and she acted as a mentor to his teenage brother Jonathan.

Jonathan Jackson and several others were involved in an incident at the Marin County Courthouse in the early 1970s that resulted in the death of a judge as well as Jonathan. Because Jackson used a gun registered to Davis, the FBI charged her with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. She went into hiding but was apprehended in New York and extradited to California, where she was tried and ultimately acquitted of all charges. Her experiences while jailed in New York and California fostered her commitment to prison abolitionism and strengthened her activism. Today, she continues to write and speak on the topics of Black liberation, feminism, prison abolitionism, and US imperialism.