Angela Davis, Date of Birth, Place of Birth

    

Angela Davis

American political activist, scholar, and author

Date of Birth: 26-Jan-1944

Place of Birth: Birmingham, Alabama, United States

Profession: writer, teacher, politician, human rights activist, university teacher, philosopher, autobiographer, feminist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius


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About Angela Davis

  • Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, academic, and author.
  • She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
  • Ideologically a Marxist, Davis was a member of the Communist Party USA until 1991, after which she joined the breakaway Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
  • She is the author of over ten books on class, feminism, and the U.S.
  • prison system. Born to an African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis studied French at Brandeis University and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany.
  • Studying under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a prominent figure in the Frankfurt School of Marxism, Davis became increasingly interested in far-left politics.
  • Returning to the U.S., she studied at the University of California, San Diego before moving to East Germany, where she gained a doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
  • Back in the U.S., she joined the Communist Party and involved herself in a range of leftist causes, including the second-wave feminist movement, the Black Panther Party, and the movement in opposition to the Vietnam War.
  • In 1969 she was hired as an acting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
  • UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her Communist Party membership; after a court ruled this illegal, the university fired her again, this time for her use of inflammatory language.
  • In 1970, Davis purchased firearms for people who used them in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed.
  • She was prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder.
  • After over a year in jail, she was acquitted of the charges in 1972.
  • She continued both her academic work and her domestic activism.
  • In the 1980s she was professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University.
  • Much of her work focused on the abolition of prisons and in 1997 she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex.
  • During the 1970s she visited Marxist-Leninist-governed countries and during the 1980s was twice the Communist Party's candidate for Vice President.
  • In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she left the party and joined the breakaway Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
  • Also in 1991, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008.
  • Since then she has continued to write and remained active in movements such as Occupy and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. Davis is a controversial figure.
  • Praised by many Marxists and others on the far left, she has received various awards, including the Lenin Peace Prize.
  • Criticism has focused on her support for political violence and her refusal to advocate for prisoners in Marxist-Leninist countries.

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