Davis, Angela

DAVIS, ANGELA (b. 1944). One of the few Communists to become a national political figure in the period of the New Left, Angela Davis was the defendant in two major legal cases involving civil and political rights. Over the ensuing decades, Davis became a singularly important scholar, activist, and global symbol of the Black freedom movement.

Davis’s upbringing laid that foundation for her socialism and cosmopolitan internationalism. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama to a Black middle-class family who had been involved in leftist groups like the Southern Negro Youth Congress and whose social circle included Communist activists. A scholarship from the American Friends allowed her to attend high school in New York, where she lived with the family of the Reverend William Melish, an individual known for his radicalism. Davis was exposed to socialist thought while in high school and attended meetings for a Communist Party youth group. In 1962, she participated in the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland. At Brandeis University, she became a student of Marxist Herbert Marcuse, who influenced her decision to do her graduate studies at Frankfurt University (1965–1967). During her time in Europe, Davis took part in anticolonial demonstrations and attended the Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London in 1967.

Davis returned to the United States to engage more fully with the Black liberation movement. She again studied under Marcuse, completing her doctorate in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Davis also organized against the Vietnam War and became involved with several organizations, including the largely autonomous west coast branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party. Frustrated by the gender politics and resistance to Marxism, she joined the Communist Party in the summer of 1968 and focused her attention on the Southern California Chapter’s all-Black Che-Lumumba Club. She visited Cuba in 1969 with a CPUSA delegation, a formative trip for her evolving philosophy of liberation. Upon her return to California, and planning to teach at UCLA, an article in the student newspaper written by an FBI informant outed Davis as a member of the CPUSA. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, protested the appointment, citing a state law that banned Communist Party members from teaching at state universities. Davis publicly acknowledged her Party affiliation and was immediately dismissed. In the ensuing litigation, which engaged civil libertarians of various tendencies, the law was declared unconstitutional.

Davis intensified her work with the Black Panthers, becoming more involved with black inmates who had mobilized against racism and the carceral state from behind bars. She was most passionate about the situation of a group called the Soledad Brothers, inmates charged with killing a prison guard, and she became personally involved with their leader, George Jackson. In August 1970, seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson sought to force the release of his brother by seizing hostages at the Marin County courthouse. During the subsequent gunplay Jonathan and a judge were killed. One of the guns was legally registered to Davis, who was immediately accused of involvement in the affair and formally charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder.

The ensuing case against Davis catapulted her into public renown. Declaring her innocence, Davis went underground for two months before FBI agents, who had added her to the Most Wanted list, apprehended her in New York. She spent sixteen months in jail, first in the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village—not far from where she had attended high school—and then in California during a portion of her trial. During this time, the Black liberation and New Left movements mobilized in her defense through the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis. Massive national and international protests and a widely covered trial made Angela Davis recognized name and face—variations of her portrait and Afro plastered on flyers, placards, and billboards—in millions of households. In 1972, when Davis was acquitted of all charges, it was seen as a major victory for the Black movement and the Left. She subsequently toured the United States to thank her supporters and then traveled around the world, including stops with enormous crowds in the Eastern bloc, Cuba, and Chile.

After her acquittal, Davis’s defense committee was renamed the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. With Davis as co-chair, the alliance took on a variety of political cases, particularly of Black and Latinx defendants, that did not necessarily have direct links to the Communist Party. Davis ran as the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party in 1980 and 1984, but was among the group that broke with the Party at the end of the decade over the leadership of Gus Hall. Davis became a founding member, along with others who had left the Party, of the Committees of Correspondence. The Committees sought to create a new socialist movement that would be more democratic and inclusive than the established parties of the American Left. In addition, she remained active in prison work, helping to found the organization Critical Resistance in 1997. Davis also taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote several influential books, most notably Women, Race, and Class (1981).

In the twenty-first century, Davis has become a seminal presence in public life: one of the world’s most astute public intellectuals, and a beacon to subsequent generations. Her work and experience with the carceral state helped lay the foundation for decades of work on prison abolition. Her ongoing solidarity work with Palestine amidst public outcry demonstrated her continued commitment to internationalism. Her identity as radical queer lesbian has proved as a reference point to the intersectional approach of Black Lives Matter activists in the 2010s. Finally, her visible participation in the 2020 uprisings in the Movement for Black Lives, and her characterization of it as building on decades of activism, solidified her status as both an icon of Black liberation and one of the most important living thinkers for young, radical activists.

Davis, Angela Y. Angela Davis–An Autobiography. Reprint. New York: International Publishers, 1988.

Kaplan, Alice. Dreaming in French: the Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Salem, Sara. “On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: Angela Davis in Egypt.” Signs 43, no. 2 (2018): 245-67.

Seidman, Sarah. “Angela Davis in Cuba as Symbol and Subject.” Radical History Review 136 (January 2020): 11-35.

Slutsky, Beth. Gendering Radicalism: Women and Communism in Twentieth-Century California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.