Short answers, pulled from the story.
Angela Davis was born on the 26th of January 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. She grew up in a neighborhood residents called "Dynamite Hill," named for the bombings of homes belonging to middle-class Black families in the 1950s.
Davis was fired twice by the University of California Board of Regents. The first firing in September 1969, urged on by Governor Ronald Reagan, was for her Communist Party membership; a court ruled that action illegal. The second firing in June 1970 cited inflammatory language in four speeches, including her characterization of the Regents as having murdered People's Park demonstrators and her use of the word "pigs" for police.
Davis was charged with aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder in connection with the August 1970 Marin County courtroom takeover, in which guns she had purchased were used. On the 4th of June 1972, after thirteen hours of deliberations, an all-white jury acquitted her of all charges.
On the 1st of May 1979, the Soviet Union awarded Davis the Lenin Peace Prize. She traveled to Moscow to accept it, where she publicly praised Vladimir Lenin and the October Revolution. In 1971, the CIA estimated that five percent of Soviet propaganda efforts were directed toward the Angela Davis campaign.
Critical Resistance is a national grassroots organization founded in 1997 and dedicated to abolishing what Davis calls the "prison-industrial complex." Davis was one of its co-founders. She has argued that the American prison system resembles a new form of slavery and has proposed education and community building as alternatives to incarceration.
The Rolling Stones dedicated their 1970 recording "Sweet Black Angel," released in 1972, to Davis. John Lennon and Yoko Ono released the song "Angela" on Some Time in New York City (1972), with a photo of Davis on the album cover. Italian singer-songwriter Virgilio Savona with Quartetto Cetra released the first such song in 1971.