Angela Davis

Angela Davis – Life, Thought, and Legacy


Explore the life and influence of Angela Davis (born January 26, 1944), a scholar, activist, and icon of the prison abolition, Black feminist, and radical justice movements. Her philosophy of intersectionality, resistance, and hope continues to resonate.

Introduction

Angela Yvonne Davis is a scholar, philosopher, activist, and author whose work spans civil rights, feminism, Marxism, prison abolition, and racial justice.

From being a high-profile political prisoner in the 1970s to an ongoing voice for radical critique of U.S. institutions, Davis has shaped discourses on power and resistance for decades. She insists that struggles for racial, gender, and economic justice are inseparable—and that enduring change must come through transforming both material conditions and the underlying structures that perpetuate inequality.

Early Life & Education

  • Born: January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama

  • Her family lived in a neighborhood nicknamed “Dynamite Hill,” where African American homes were routinely bombed to intimidate Black residents.

  • Her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a schoolteacher and active in civil rights movements; her father, Frank Davis, worked as a teacher and later owned a service station.

  • Davis grew up in a milieu of activism, discussion, and resistance.

Education & Early Influences

  • She attended segregated schools in Birmingham before participating in a Quaker exchange program that placed some Black southern students in integrated schools in the North.

  • She studied at Brandeis University (BA), later pursued graduate work in Germany (University of Frankfurt), and then University of California, San Diego (MA) and elsewhere.

  • At Brandeis and later in Europe, she encountered thinkers of the Frankfurt School (notably Herbert Marcuse) and began to bridge academic critique with political commitments.

Activism, Trials & Academic Career

Radical Activism & Political Affiliations

  • In the late 1960s, Davis became involved with the Black Panther Party (in political education roles) and joined the Communist Party USA (1969)

  • While some organizations required exclusive membership, she sometimes remained affiliated with multiple groups, which brought tensions.

Dismissal from UCLA

  • In 1969–70 she held a faculty position in philosophy at UCLA, but was dismissed after the university imposed a policy barring known Communists from faculty appointments.

Soledad Brothers Case & Imprisonment

  • Her name became nationally known when she was charged in 1970 with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder in connection with a courtroom “takeover” tied to the Soledad Prison case.

  • She spent about a year in jail awaiting trial. Massive national and international campaigns demanded her freedom (“Free Angela”).

  • In 1972, she was acquitted on all charges.

Later Academic & Organizational Work

  • After the trial, Davis resumed her academic and activist work. She co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.

  • In 1991, she left the Communist Party USA and helped found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS).

  • She taught at institutions including UC Santa Cruz (in feminist and ethnic studies) and remains professor emerita.

Thought & Core Ideas

Intersectionality & Black Feminism

One of Davis’s key contributions is highlighting that race, class, gender, and other axes of identity are intertwined. She rejects the notion of single-issue struggles, insisting that real liberation must address multiple dimensions of oppression.

In Women, Race and Class (1981), she traces how the women’s movement in the U.S. often marginalized or excluded women of color, and argues for a feminist movement grounded in material justice.

Abolitionism & Critique of Prisons

Davis is a leading voice in the prison abolition movement. She contends that U.S. prisons are part of a system that perpetuates racial and class inequality, and that true justice requires dismantling, not merely reforming, carceral institutions.

She argues that imprisonment has become “the response of first resort” to social problems and that marginalized communities bear its brunt.

Revolution, Resistance & Hope

Davis sees revolution not as mere uprooting, but as a total reordering of social relations, guided by principles of justice and solidarity. She emphasizes that commitment to the struggle must often be a lifetime undertaking.

She also centers hope as discipline: activism must maintain optimism and perseverance even amidst setbacks.

Notable Quotes

Here is a curated selection of Angela Davis’s impactful quotations:

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” “Freedom is a constant struggle.” “We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.” “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” “Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo — obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.” “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night.” “Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.” “We must learn to lift as we climb.”

These quotes capture her insistence on agency, collective struggle, structural critique, and enduring commitment.

Legacy & Influence

  • Davis transformed how social movements conceptualize race, gender, class, and state power, influencing generations of activists, scholars, and organizers.

  • She helped mainstream the idea that carceral systems are integral to capitalist and racial regimes, contributing to modern abolitionist frameworks.

  • Her scholarship and public voice have played roles in movements like Black Lives Matter and reproductive justice, especially for marginalized communities.

  • She has received recognition and awards, and continues to lecture, write, and speak globally on justice, connecting past struggles to the present.

Lessons from Angela Davis

  1. Struggles are interconnected.
    No fight for justice stands alone—race, class, gender, and state violence are intertwined, and any movement must reflect that.

  2. Resistance requires longevity.
    Transformative change often occurs over decades; short bursts are insufficient. Davis models patience, consistency, and perseverance.

  3. Critical thinking and knowledge matter.
    She bridges theory and praxis—scholarship should inform activism, and activism should shape theory.

  4. Hope must be cultivated, not taken for granted.
    In the words echoing her public statements, without optimism, movement cannot sustain itself.

  5. We must dismantle systems, not merely tinker.
    In her view, reform is insufficient when the underlying logics of oppression remain intact.

Recent news about Davis
Articles by the author

We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.

Angela Davis

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

Angela Davis

The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

Angela Davis

Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

Angela Davis

I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.

Angela Davis

You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.

Angela Davis

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

Angela Davis

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

Angela Davis

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Angela Davis

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

Angela Davis

As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

Angela Davis

Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

Angela Davis

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Angela Davis