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Angela Y. Davis
History & Commentary
Angela Y. Davis is an American Marxist feminist activist, philosopher, academic, and author known for her work on race, gender, and prison abolition.
Biography
Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American Marxist feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She studied at Brandeis University, the University of Frankfurt, and the University of California, San Diego, and completed some doctoral study at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. After returning to the United States she joined the Communist Party USA, became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War, and later held academic posts, including a 1969 appointment at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Davis’s UCLA appointment produced controversy: the Board of Regents fired her because of her CPUSA membership, a court later ruled that firing illegal, and she was again dismissed for alleged inflammatory language. In 1970 guns registered to Davis were used in a Marin County courtroom takeover; she was prosecuted on capital charges, held in jail for over a year, and acquitted in 1972. In 1991 she helped establish the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, joined the University of California, Santa Cruz faculty, co-founded Critical Resistance, and has remained a prominent and sometimes controversial public intellectual.
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Books by Angela Y. Davis
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2015) is a collection of essays in which Davis links struggles against state violence and oppression worldwide, tracing legacies from Black liberation to the anti‑apartheid movement and connecting events such as Ferguson to the situation in Palestine. She emphasizes the need for intersectional solidarity and argues that freedom requires ongoing collective struggle.