Angela Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to
combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Over the years she has
been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer.
Professor Angela Davis's political activism began when she was a youngster in
Birmingham, Alabama, and continued through her high school years in New York.
But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being
removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a
result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA.
In 1970, Angela Davis was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted
List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that
drove her underground, and that culminated in one of the most famous trials in
recent U.S. history. During her 16-month incarceration, a massive international
"Free Angela Davis" campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.
Professor Angela Davis' long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back
to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to
her own arrest and imprisonment.
Today, Angela Davis remains an advocate of prison abolition
and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system.
She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center,
and currently is working on a comparative study of women's imprisonment in the
U.S., the Netherlands, and Cuba. During the last 25 years, Professor Angela
Davis has lectured in all 50 United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the
Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Her articles and essays have appeared in
numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of five books,
including Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974); Women, Race & Class
(1981); Women, Culture & Politics (1989); Blues Legacies and Black
Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (1998); and
The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998). She is also the editor of If They
Come In The Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971).
Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that
Angela Davis would never again teach in the University of California system.
Today, she is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994, she received the
distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California
Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.
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