Angela Davis: An Autobiography was published by Random House in 1974. Davis was thirty years old, and the events the book describes — her firing from UCLA for Communist Party membership, her inclusion on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, her arrest and sixteen-month imprisonment, and her dramatic acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy — had made her one of the most famous political figures in the world.
The autobiography traces Davis’s political formation from its origins in Birmingham, Alabama, where she grew up in a neighborhood so frequently bombed by white supremacists that it was known as “Dynamite Hill.” The violence of her childhood — the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963 killed four girls she knew — made her political commitment not abstract but personal. She studied philosophy at Brandeis (under Herbert Marcuse), at the Sorbonne, and at the University of Frankfurt before returning to the United States and joining the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party.
The events that led to her arrest and trial are complex: Jonathan Jackson, the seventeen-year-old brother of Soledad Brother George Jackson, entered a Marin County courtroom in August 1970, armed prisoners, and took hostages in an attempt to negotiate the release of the Soledad Brothers. In the ensuing shootout, Jackson, two prisoners, and Judge Harold Haley were killed. The guns Jackson used were registered to Davis. She was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy, and went underground before being arrested in New York.
Davis’s account of her imprisonment — the isolation, the strip searches, the deliberate psychological pressure, the solidarity with other incarcerated women — forms the book’s most powerful section and anticipates her later work on prison abolition.
Collecting Angela Davis: An Autobiography
First edition (Random House, New York, 1974): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100
- Signed: $200–$500