Angela Davis

Angela Davis is one of the most important radical intellectuals in American history — a philosopher, activist, and writer whose life and work have been inseparable from the struggle for racial justice, women’s liberation, and the abolition of the prison system for over half a century. She became an international symbol of resistance when she was arrested, tried, and acquitted in connection with a courthouse kidnapping in 1970, and her subsequent career as a scholar and author has produced a body of work that has fundamentally shaped contemporary understanding of the relationships between race, gender, class, and incarceration. Her analysis of the prison-industrial complex, developed in books and lectures over decades, anticipated the mass incarceration crisis that has become one of the defining issues of American public life.

Birmingham

Angela Yvonne Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, in a neighbourhood so frequently bombed by white supremacists that it was known as “Dynamite Hill.” Her parents were middle-class professionals — her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a schoolteacher and activist; her father, B. Frank Davis, owned a service station. Growing up in one of the most violently segregated cities in America gave Davis a firsthand understanding of American racial oppression that no amount of subsequent academic training could have replaced.

She attended Brandeis University, where she studied with Herbert Marcuse — the Frankfurt School philosopher whose synthesis of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis became the theoretical foundation of the New Left. She continued her studies at the University of Frankfurt (studying with Adorno and Horkheimer) and at the University of California, San Diego, where she completed her doctoral work under Marcuse.

The Trial

In 1969, Davis was hired as a philosophy professor at UCLA. The Board of Regents, under pressure from Governor Ronald Reagan, fired her for her membership in the Communist Party USA. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in connection with a courtroom kidnapping in Marin County, California, in which guns registered to Davis were used. She went underground, was captured, and spent sixteen months in jail before being acquitted of all charges in 1972. The “Free Angela Davis” campaign became one of the largest international solidarity movements of the 1970s.

Women, Race & Class

Women, Race & Class (1981) was Davis’s most influential scholarly work — a historical analysis of the American women’s movement that argued that mainstream feminism had consistently failed to address the concerns of Black women and working-class women, that the suffrage movement had been built in part on racist appeals, and that any genuine feminism must be anti-racist and anti-capitalist. The book was a foundational text of intersectional feminism — a term coined later by Kimberlé Crenshaw but describing a mode of analysis that Davis had been practising for over a decade.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) was the most concise and influential statement of Davis’s abolitionist critique of the American prison system. The book argued that the prison system was not a natural or inevitable response to crime but a historically specific institution — rooted in slavery, convict leasing, and racial capitalism — that had expanded massively since the 1970s to become a self-sustaining industry. Davis argued for abolition — not reform — of the prison system, proposing alternatives rooted in education, healthcare, community-based justice, and the elimination of the economic and social conditions that produce crime.

The argument was considered radical when the book was published; the mass incarceration crisis of subsequent decades — the United States now imprisons more people per capita than any country in history — has made Davis’s analysis seem prescient.

The Later Works

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2016) collected Davis’s speeches, essays, and interviews on Palestine, Black Lives Matter, and the global struggle for justice. Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022, with Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie) extended the abolitionist argument to encompass feminist and anti-violence politics. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998) was a study of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that combined musicological analysis with feminist theory.

Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) was written when Davis was twenty-eight — a precociously powerful account of her political formation, her trial, and her understanding of revolution.

Collecting Davis

Angela Davis: An Autobiography (Random House, 1974) is the primary collecting target. If They Come in the Morning (Third Press, 1971) is also collected. Women, Race & Class (Random House, 1981) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003) are sought as foundational texts of intersectional feminism and prison abolition.