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

Themes

Black Liberation and Freedom

Content Warning: This section contains discussion of systemic racism, including the police murders of Black Americans, mass incarceration, Jim Crow laws, white supremacist terrorism, and the history of enslavement in the US.

Angela Davis’s life has been devoted to Black liberation, not only in the period covered in this 1974 autobiography, but afterward too. Liberation for Davis means not only an end to systemic racism but also to classism, sexism, anti-gay bias, and all other systemic injustices. For Davis, communism is a solution to these systemic problems. She reaches this conclusion after reading The Communist Manifesto in high school:

What had seemed a personal hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern whites to confront their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks to acquiesce, became the inevitable consequence of a ruthless system that kept itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition, and the oppression of one group by another. Profit was the word (96).

According to Davis, racism is the natural result of capitalism, a system that relies on exploitation and oppression to function. It follows that capitalism must be replaced by another system if racism is to be overcome and Black liberation achieved.

Davis’s autobiography also draws attention to the tie between Black men’s liberation and Black women’s liberation, something that her male comrades in the struggle do not always acknowledge. She is subjected to male supremacy both in the judicial system, as when the prosecution claims she committed a crime of “passion” for George Jackson, and within her community. This sexism is apparent during her time with SNCC in Los Angeles, where much of the work is left to the women members, including Davis, while men only occasionally show up to meetings. Moreover, these men criticize the women for taking on too much authority and accuse them of collaborating with their white supremacist foes by suppressing Black men. Davis nonetheless persists in her assertion that Black liberation must include women’s liberation. As she writes in one of her letters to Jackson, “But if the revolutionary path is buried beneath an avalanche of containment mechanisms, we, Black women, aim our bullets in the wrong direction and moreover, we don’t even understand the weapon” (327).

Isolation, Community, and Struggle

Communal struggle is a constant theme throughout Davis’s autobiography. Davis’s preface to the 2021 edition notes that she was uncomfortable with the idea of authoring an autobiography when the writer Toni Morrison encouraged her to do so due to the individualism of such a work:

I believe that if we fail to emphasize how our lives are precisely produced at the many junctions of the social and the individual, we fundamentally distort the ways we live and struggle in community with one another (ix).

Thus, in telling her story, Davis is always careful to emphasize the communal nature of her experiences and how the movement sustained her during her ordeal. She stresses that her experience is not unique but rather the product of systemic racism that impacts non-white Americans collectively. Fighting oppression therefore requires collective action. Davis has dedicated her life to such action before, during, and after her arrest and trial.

Davis juxtaposes the sense of detachment and isolation she feels in predominantly white surroundings with this spirit of community. For example, she is one of only a handful of Black women students at Brandeis University, leaving her with a self-described “nihilism.” She is bereft when white supremacists firebomb the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham while she is studying abroad in France. She feels unmoored when she is unable to grieve alongside other students who understand the incident as part of a broader problem. Indeed, her longing to take part in collective anti-racist action at home calls Davis back to the United States after spending two years studying for her doctorate in philosophy abroad. She finds solidarity and community among the Black liberation movement in California, first with SNCC and then through her membership in the Che-Lumumba Club, which serves as a great support to her during her imprisonment and trial.

Moreover, Davis links the movement on the outside with her community behind jail walls, in New York as well as California. For instance, when Davis’s supporters organize a rally calling for her freedom outside the New York jail, Davis and her allies inside organize to take part in the demonstration, fostering a growing sense of solidarity:

We got together in our corridor, deciding on the slogans we would shout and how to make them come out in unison—even though we were going to be spread down the corridor in different cells, screaming from different windows. I had never dreamed that such powerful feelings of pride and confidence could develop among the sisters in this jail (56).

Davis frequently reminds readers that her struggle is not just hers. The racist political oppression that she experienced is built into the judicial and carceral systems, and her fellow prisoners deserve the same support that she has received. Her epilogue reflects on the importance of collective action. Davis’s work did not stop when she gained her freedom via acquittal, and her continued work to liberate others serves as a call to action.

Systemic Racism and State Violence

Individual racism involves singular acts of bigotry, like using a racial slur, while systemic racism is pervasive and built into the fabric of social, political, and economic institutions. Systemic racism—also known as structural racism—is a constant in Angela Davis’s life and spurs her activism.

Systemic racism characterized the Jim Crow South where Davis grew up. Here, white supremacists used laws to prevent Black Americans from exercising their constitutional rights, like suffrage. Southern states enacted literacy tests that one was required to pass before voting, thus frequently preventing Black Americans from exercising this right. The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson allowed “separate but equal” facilities, such as schools, water fountains, and bathrooms, so that Black Southerners could not attend prosperous and elite white institutions of learning. Black schools were often impoverished and poorly equipped, like the elementary school that Davis attended in Birmingham.

As Davis shows, however, systemic racism is not exclusive to the American South. Though legal segregation did not exist in the North, de facto segregation did, as when her mother’s friends have difficulty finding housing in New York because of their interracial marriage. Likewise, Davis encounters this racism at Brandeis University, a majority-white institution where many of her white, liberal classmates refuse to acknowledge that they have benefitted from racism—a fact that Black Panther leader Malcolm X calls out during his campus visit.

Systemic racism also characterizes the judicial and carceral systems, according to Davis. She points out that virtually all the women imprisoned with her in New York are non-white and describes the Black women jailers who are sympathetic to her cause as having been called to participate in their own oppression by the capitalist system. The prosecution in Davis’s California trial also demonstrates and perpetuates systemic racism by eliminating the sole Black jury candidate and putting a white witness on the stand who cannot correctly identify Black individuals, falling back on racist stereotypes. In her 2021 preface, Davis calls attention to the persistence of systemic racism, linking past and present. Just as a California police officer murdered Gregory Clark with the latter’s hands behind his back, so too did police kill innocent Black Americans such as Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the first decades of the 21st century.