Angela Davis

• 1. Introduction

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  Angela Davis grew up on a street her Birmingham neighbors called "Dynamite Hill" - a name earned through the bombings of homes belonging to middle-class Black families who dared to move there in the 1950s. That was the neighborhood where Angela Yvonne Davis, born on the 26th of January 1944, learned what the world thought of her ambitions before she was old enough to name them.

  She would go on to stand trial for her life, spend more than a year in jail, become the subject of a global campaign to free her, and receive honorary degrees from universities in Moscow, Leipzig, and Cambridge. She would be placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List, then acquitted by an all-white jury. She would run for Vice President of the United States twice, co-found an organization dedicated to abolishing prisons, and be recognized in the same breath by the Soviet Union and Time magazine.

  What shaped a girl from Dynamite Hill into one of the most contested figures in twentieth-century American life? The answer runs through Herbert Marcuse's philosophy lectures, the courtrooms of Marin County, the streets of Havana, and the solitary confinement cell of a women's detention center.

• 2. A Fire-Shaped Childhood

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  Birmingham in the 1950s was not a passive place to grow up. The bombings on Dynamite Hill were deliberate campaigns of terror. Davis occasionally escaped to her uncle's farm or visited friends in New York City, but Birmingham remained the center of gravity.

  Her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was not a bystander to any of it. She served as a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization shaped by Communist Party ideas and dedicated to building coalitions among African Americans across the South. Angela grew up in a household where communist organizers and thinkers were a routine presence.

  One of those figures was Louis E. Burnham, an official of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. His daughter Margaret Burnham became Davis's childhood friend - and, decades later, her co-counsel during the 1971 murder and kidnapping trial.

  At Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated Black elementary school, Davis received her earliest formal education. Later she attended Parker Annex, a branch of Parker High School. She found another outlet in the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, and she credits that organization with sparking much of her political involvement. In 1959, she attended the national roundup in Colorado. As a Scout, she marched and picketed against racial segregation in Birmingham.

  By her junior year of high school, an American Friends Service Committee program placed her in an integrated school in the North. She chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, where she was recruited by a communist youth group called Advance. The journey from Dynamite Hill had begun.

• 3. Marcuse and the Making of a Philosopher

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  Davis arrived at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, on a scholarship and as one of only three Black students in her class. The encounter that changed her trajectory happened at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when she met Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

  Marcuse became her teacher and, by her own account, the intellectual who showed her that activism and academic scholarship were not opposites. In a 2007 television interview, Davis said: "Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary."

  She majored in French, studied Jean-Paul Sartre, attended the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program, and lived with a French family while taking classes at the Sorbonne. She was in Biarritz when news reached her of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by Ku Klux Klan members, in which four Black girls were killed. She had known the victims personally.

  Davis graduated magna cum laude in 1965, a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She followed Marcuse to graduate study in Frankfurt, living on a monthly stipend of $100, first with a German family and then with students in a loft above an old factory. She participated in actions with the radical Socialist German Student Union and visited East Berlin during the May Day celebration, where she began to form a view that the East German government handled the legacy of fascism differently than West Germany did.

  Marcuse moved again, this time to the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed. At a conference in London called "The Dialectics of Liberation", she encountered Stokely Carmichael and Michael X. She was moved by Carmichael's rhetoric but reportedly disappointed when colleagues dismissed communism as a "white man's thing." She joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-Black branch of the Communist Party USA named for Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba.

• 4. Fired, Acquitted, Acquitted Again

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  UCLA hired Davis in 1969 as an acting assistant professor of philosophy, a position that paid $10,000 a year. Both Princeton and Swarthmore had tried to recruit her; she chose UCLA for its urban location. She had barely begun teaching when the University of California's Board of Regents, at the urging of California Governor Ronald Reagan, moved against her.

  At their meeting on the 19th of September 1969, the Regents fired her solely because of her membership in the Communist Party. A court ruled that action illegal, and she returned to her post. The Regents fired her a second time, on the 20th of June 1970, citing inflammatory language in four speeches - specifically her characterization of the Regents as having "killed, brutalized and murdered" protesters at People's Park, and her repeated use of the word "pigs" for police. The American Association of University Professors censured the board.

  That same year brought a far graver crisis. On the 7th of August 1970, seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson - whose brother George was one of the imprisoned Soledad Brothers - seized a Marin County courtroom. He armed the defendants, took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary W. Thomas, and three jurors as hostages, and attempted to leave in a van. A defendant opened fire; police returned fire. Judge Haley and three others were killed. Davis had purchased several of the firearms Jackson used, including the shotgun used to shoot the judge, bought at a San Francisco pawn shop two days before the incident.

  On the 14th of August 1970, a warrant for Davis's arrest was issued. Four days later, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover placed her on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List - the third woman and the 309th person ever listed. She became a fugitive, moving through friends' homes at night, until FBI agents found her on the 13th of October 1970 at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City. President Richard M. Nixon publicly congratulated the FBI on the capture of what he called "the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis."

  The campaign to free her spread across two continents. By February 1971, more than 200 local committees in the United States and 67 in foreign countries were working toward her release. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed the song "Angela." On the 23rd of February 1972, dairy farmer Rodger McAfee from Fresno, California, paid her $100,000 bail with the help of a wealthy business owner named Steve Sparacino. The United Presbyterian Church covered some of her legal defense costs.

  At trial in Santa Clara County, her attorneys Howard Moore Jr. and Leo Branton Jr. employed psychologists to help identify jurors likely to be sympathetic - a technique that has since become more widely used. On the 4th of June 1972, after thirteen hours of deliberations, the all-white jury returned a not-guilty verdict on all counts. One juror, Ralph DeLange, made the Black Power salute to the crowd outside. Ten jurors later attended the defense's victory celebration.

• 5. Between Havana and Moscow

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  After her acquittal, Davis embarked on an international speaking tour in 1972 that took her to Cuba, where she had previously met Fidel Castro as part of a Communist Party delegation in 1969. At a mass rally held by Afro-Cubans, she was reportedly so warmly received she could barely speak. She came away believing that Cuba represented a racism-free society, and concluded that "only under socialism could the fight against racism be successfully executed."

  The Soviet government was paying close attention. In 1971, the CIA estimated that five percent of Soviet propaganda efforts were directed toward the Angela Davis campaign. In August 1972, the Central Committee invited her to the Soviet Union. On the 1st of May 1979, the Soviet Union awarded her the Lenin Peace Prize. She traveled to Moscow to accept it, and there she praised "the glorious name" of Vladimir Lenin and the "great October Revolution."

  In September 1972, she visited East Germany, where she met state leader Erich Honecker, received an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig, and accepted the Star of People's Friendship from Walter Ulbricht. On the 11th of September in East Berlin, she delivered a speech titled "Not Only My Victory," praising the GDR and USSR and denouncing American racism. She visited the Berlin Wall and laid flowers at the memorial for Reinhold Huhn, an East German guard killed in 1962 by a man trying to escape across the border with his family. Davis mourned his death as a sacrifice for a socialist homeland.

  These stances put her in direct conflict with Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In a 1975 speech before an AFL-CIO meeting in New York City, the Nobel laureate argued that Davis had failed prisoners in socialist countries while condemning the American prison system. Solzhenitsyn cited a 1972 letter from Jiri Pelikaán asking Davis to advocate for Czechoslovak political prisoners. According to Solzhenitsyn, Davis had responded that those prisoners "deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison."

  Davis also came into contact, in the mid-1970s, with Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple in the San Francisco area. On the 10th of September 1977, fourteen months before the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown, she spoke via amateur radio telephone to Temple members in Guyana during the "Six Day Siege," expressing support for the Temple's anti-racism work and telling members that attacks on them were attacks on progressive movements broadly. On the 28th of February 1978, she wrote to President Jimmy Carter asking him not to assist in efforts to remove a child from Jonestown, calling Jones "a humanitarian in the broadest sense of the word."

• 6. The Prison Abolition Project

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  Davis's analysis of incarceration did not begin with a single book or speech but had been building since the early years of her activism, sharpened by her own time in solitary confinement at the Women's Detention Center while awaiting trial.

  In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization built to abolish what she calls the "prison-industrial complex." Her book Are Prisons Obsolete?, published by Seven Stories Press in 2003, pressed the argument that the American prison system functions as a new form of slavery, pointing to the disproportionate share of the incarcerated population who are African American. Her proposed alternative centers on education and the building of engaged communities to address problems that the state currently handles through punishment.

  Her academic position gave her a platform to develop these ideas systematically. After a period of constrained teaching - at the Claremont Colleges in 1975, classes were kept to Friday evenings and Saturdays, limited to 26 students, and students were sworn to secrecy because donors did not want communist ideas spreading to the wider campus - Davis joined the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1991, where she became department director of feminist studies before retiring in 2008. She has held the title Distinguished Professor Emerita ever since.

  Her partner, the academic Gina Dent, is a humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher also at UC Santa Cruz. Together they have advocated the abolition of police and prisons and championed Black liberation and Palestinian solidarity. Davis had previously been married to Hilton Braithwaite from 1980 to 1983, and she came out as a lesbian in a 1997 interview with Out magazine.

  In 2014, she returned to UCLA as a regents' lecturer and delivered a public lecture on the 8th of May in Royce Hall - the same hall where she had given her first lecture forty-five years earlier. In 2025, the University of Cambridge awarded her an Honorary Doctorate in Letters.

• 7. A Life in Song and Ink

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  The first song released in Davis's support was "Angela" in 1971, by Italian singer-songwriter Virgilio Savona with his group Quartetto Cetra. Savona reportedly received anonymous threats for recording it.

  The Rolling Stones recorded "Sweet Black Angel" in 1970 - released on Exile on Main Street in 1972 - as one of their few openly political songs, directly dedicated to Davis. John Lennon and Yoko Ono placed their own song "Angela" on Some Time in New York City (1972), with a small photo of Davis on the album's cover at the bottom left. Jazz musician Todd Cochran, also known as Bayete, recorded "Free Angela (Thoughts...and all I've got to say)" in 1972. Tribe Records co-founder Phil Ranelin released "Angela's Dilemma" on Message From the Tribe (1972).

  The documentary Angela Davis: Portrait of a Revolutionary, directed by Yolande du Luart while she was a student at the UCLA Film School, wrapped filming before the Marin County incident and covers the period from 1969 to 1970. The 2016 Ava DuVernay documentary 13th, about the Thirteenth Amendment and the civil rights movement, features Davis prominently.

  In a 2023 episode of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, host Henry Louis Gates revealed to Davis that she is a descendant of William Brewster, a passenger on the Mayflower. The same episode identified Alabama politician John A. Darden as her grandfather.

  On the 18th of March 2022, a mural of Davis painted by San Jose artist Ian S. Young was unveiled at the African American Community Service Agency in San Jose, California. Davis attended the unveiling herself, bringing her image on a public wall full circle to the streets where she had once been a fugitive.