Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1974

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2 Summary: “Rocks”

Davis is born in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is raised in a middle-class home in a segregated neighborhood, and systemic racism marks her upbringing. As more Black residents buy homes in the predominantly white area of the neighborhood, racial violence becomes more frequent and is a regular part of her childhood.

As a young child, she spends part of one summer in New York City with the Burnham family, which makes her “more keenly sensitive to the segregation [she] ha[s] to face at home” (71). This picture of “racial harmony” in the North shatters as Davis spends more time in New York: She learns that a couple her mother knows can’t find a place to live because one of them is Black and the other white.

McCarthyism also reaches its apex during Davis’s youth, forcing James Jackson, a friend of the family, into hiding because of his communist beliefs: “I understood only what my eyes saw: evil white men out to get an innocent Black man. And this was happening not in the South, but in New York” (73).

Davis’s awareness of racial and class inequality grows after she enters first grade. She takes coins from the money her father brings home in the evenings to pay for lunch for school friends who otherwise would go hungry. Davis also notices the physical differences between the Black school she attends and the opulent elementary school for white children.

Yet the segregated schools of the South in some ways benefit Davis, giving Black students “a strong positive identification with [their] people and [their] history” (78). When she visits friends in the North, Davis discovers that they know little about Black history. Simultaneously, her Southern education promotes the concept of Black progress, or the notion that hard work will pay off and that Black Americans simply face a more difficult climb to success than white people—a perspective that she grows to resent, just as she disdains “inaction.”

Books become a welcome distraction from childhood squabbles that often involve other kids criticizing Davis for her light skin or the texture of her hair. She spends hours reading at the Black library near her home.

Davis advances to Tuggle Annex and then Parker High School, where she takes classes that fail to challenge her. Moreover, the school is plagued by “inner-directed violence” (87). Fights occur regularly with one even leading to a student’s death.

The civil rights movement begins as Davis enters Parker, though few of her classmates are involved. Davis and a few friends choose to sit in the front of a bus in solidarity with those taking part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This act leads to an argument with the bus driver, whom some Black riders fearfully ask the girls to obey. Meanwhile, racist violence and harassment continue; Davis and a group of friends are harassed by a police officer who believes her light-skinned, blonde friend is white and hence should not be associating with Black people.

Davis grows increasingly frustrated with life in Birmingham, so she applies for a program through the American Friends Service Committee to attend an integrated high school in the North. Despite her mother’s reservations, Davis attends Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York while living with a white host family in Brooklyn.

This small, untraditional high school plays a significant role in Davis’s intellectual growth and her ideas about Black liberation and freedom. Many of the teachers have been blocklisted because of their leftist political views. It is here that Davis learns about socialism in a history course, causing her to seek out additional reading material in the school library. She reads The Communist Manifesto for the first time, finding the ideas in the text applicable to Black liberation: “What struck me so emphatically was the idea that once emancipation of the proletariat became a reality, the foundation was laid for the emancipation of all oppressed groups in the society” (95). A friend also invites Davis to join Advance, a Communist youth organization, launching her into activist work that includes “civil rights demonstration in solidarity with the movement in the South” (97). Yet Davis feels “cheated” because she left the South just as the movement was taking off. She is also saddened by the violence she sees inflicted on Southern demonstrators on television news. Davis is left looking to her future while feeling pulled toward the movement in the South: “It would be a long time before the two profiles came together and I would know the direction to both the past and the future” (98).

Part 2 Analysis

Davis writes in the 2021 preface to her autobiography that her experience exists on “a continuum of courageous struggles” (x). The book’s second part places her story within that continuum, providing context for her role in the struggle for Black Liberation and Freedom.

Davis knew racist violence and oppression long before she became a Black liberation activist and before her imprisonment in a racist carceral system. She spent her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late stages of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow era was the period that followed the Civil War and persisted until the successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. During this time, white supremacists in the American South enacted laws and unleashed racial violence to prevent Black Americans from exercising their civil rights. The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist terrorist group, formed, lynching numerous Black men who were falsely accused of assaulting or flirting with white women. Davis’s family lived in an area of Birmingham nicknamed “Dynamite Hill” because white supremacists frequently bombed Black residences there. Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws requiring poll taxes or literacy tests to prevent Black men from voting, a right given to them under the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. The South was also legally segregated due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that allowed “separate but equal” schools and bathrooms. As Davis shows, however, educational facilities were far from equal. The Black schools she attends in Birmingham are rundown in comparison to white schools and deprived of resources. Davis’s awareness of the South’s blatant racism takes shape at a young age, especially after she spends time with family friends in New York City, whose diversity and progressivism provide a sharp contrast to the segregated South. However, she soon learned that racism permeates the North too, despite its lack of legal segregation.

The civil rights movement begins as Davis grows up, setting the stage for one of her early acts of protest. Her enrollment at Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York City also plays an important role in shaping Davis’s political activism, for it is here that she is introduced to socialism’s history and reads Karl Marx’s treatise, The Communist Manifesto, for the first time: “The most powerful impact the Manifesto had on me—what moved me most—was the vision of a new society, without exploiters and exploited, a society without classes” (96). This revelation is formative for Davis because it makes her aware of how class and race intersect. Systemic racism, far from being a matter of “personal hatred,” is a consequence of an economic system that relies on inequality and exploitation. Combatting systemic racism therefore must involve combatting the capitalist forces that have given rise to it and creating a “new society” where everyone is economically, and socially, equal.

Davis becomes an official member of the Communist Party in the United States in the following decade, and this longing for a “new society” shapes her activism, particularly her struggle against mass incarceration, which scholar Michelle Alexander terms “the new Jim Crow” in her 2010 book of the same name. The civil rights movement achieved significant victories for Black Americans, such as the passage of the Voting Rights Act, but systemic racism persists, especially in the form of mass incarceration and state violence. (For example, in several states convicted felons are deprived the right to vote.) This violence is not always physical but includes psychological abuse as well as neglect. As Davis shows in Part 2, neglect characterized the Jim Crow South, where Black schools were under-resourced. The mental distress caused by constant racist terrorism also took a toll on Black Southerners, even if they were not physically harmed. Davis sees communism as a vehicle for ending systemic racism, and she sees the Black Power movement, a leftist outgrowth of the civil rights movement, as playing a key role in Black liberation.