Davis, Angela Y. (Angela Yvonne), 1944-

Civil rights and professor, Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 26, 1944, the daughter of two teachers. Active at an early age in the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, Davis also formed an interracial study group and volunteered for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while still in high school. At fifteen, after earning a scholarship, Davis traveled to New York to complete high school. In 1960, Davis traveled to Germany to study for two years, and then to the University of Paris for another year. After returning to the United States, Davis attended Brandeis University, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1965. Davis then returned to Germany for further study before enrolling in the University of California, San Diego, where she earned her M.A. degree in 1968.

Upon earning her master's degree, Davis became an assistant professor at UCSD, but due to her connections with the Panthers and the Communist Party, she was removed a year later. Following her dismissal, Davis worked to free the Soledad Prison Brothers and befriended an inmate, George Jackson. In August of 1970, Jackson and several other inmates attempted to escape from the Marin County Courthouse, and a judge and three others were killed. Davis was quickly put on the FBI's most wanted list, despite the fact that she was not at the crime scene, and was apprehended in New York. After spending eighteen months in jail during her trial, Davis was acquitted in 1972. While in prison, Davis wrote her first book, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, entirely by hand. After her acquittal, Governor Ronald Reagan vowed she would never teach in California again, but nevertheless, she was immediately hired by San Francisco State University, where she stayed for another twelve years. Entering the political ring, Davis ran on the Communist Party ticket as vice president in 1980 and 1984. When the Soviet Union began to fall apart, however, Davis gave up communism. Davis continued to teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Davis toured across the United States and the world lecturing on prison reform, and served on the advisory board of the Prison Activist Resource Center. Davis also co-founded the Committees of Correspondence, an organization that seeks to unite all socialist groups in the United States.

Angela Davis, the iconic social-justice activist who has been arguably the most well-known University of California-Santa Cruz faculty member of the past two decades, has officially retired as a full-time professor.

Davis, a 17-year professor in the History of Consciousness Department and a former chair of Feminist Studies, has worked mostly with graduate students in recent years as she traveled the globe speaking on prison abolition and matters of oppression. She is a longtime champion of civil liberties and a prolific author on the intersections of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

Davis began lecturing at UCSC in the mid-1980s, and her courses on feminist theory, culture and ideology, and other topics in the humanities field became magnets for students. Davis was a big feather in the cap of a campus born during the civil rights era and already renowned for drawing radical thinkers.

“She did marvelous work as a teacher,” said professor Bettina F. Aptheker, a leading feminist studies scholar at UCSC and Davis’ close friend of 50 years. “Her classes were always overflowing.”

Davis was traveling and unavailable for an interview last week, but Donna Haraway, chair of the History of Consciousness Department, said Davis retired because she wanted to travel, work with graduate students and find more balance in her life.

“Many people want something from Angela; she is a fundamentally generous person,” Haraway said. “It has been very difficult for her to juggle all of the demands and her own priorities.”

Davis, 64, who lives in the East Bay, officially — and quietly — stepped down in the spring quarter. Like many retired professors, however, Davis is expected to teach an occasional class, and even now she is continuing to work with graduate students and keep an active, activist presence on campus, colleagues said. She refused this spring to appear at a UCSC commencement ceremony while the university was at odds with union workers.

Last year, Davis spoke out against the suspension of a black student involved in an October 2006 protest at a UC Regents meeting, during which numerous students blocked exits to a building. Police used pepper spray and batons to remove students, but Allete Kendrick, who was charged with battering police, was the only student suspended.

Davis rallied with others outside the chancellor’s office in June 2007, saying a recommendation for a three-year suspension stunk of racism.

Campus officials later reduced Kendrick’s suspension to two academic quarters and community service, and Kendrick pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts in court.

Davis also championed the late Chancellor Denice Denton, applauding Denton’s efforts to diversify UCSC along gender, socioeconomic and racial lines. At Denton’s memorial service in 2006, Davis said Denton had fought “unrelenting homophobia” while helping to raise the profile of women and tackle diversity issues.

Davis has been an activist since her teenage years in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she grew up with Aptheker in “a circle of kids who were part of the progressive and communist left,” said Aptheker, whose father, Herbert, was a leader in the party. After being educated at universities in Europe and the U.S., Davis went on to teach philosophy at UCLA, where she was fired in 1969 by the UC Regents for being a member of the Communist Party.

Although then Gov. Ronald Reagan, who became the Cold War hero of anti-communists as president a decade later, warned that Davis would never teach in the UC system again, Davis was reinstated after an outcry from academics and civil rights advocates. She first came to UCSC as a lecturer in the History of Consciousness Department in 1984.

She was made a professor in 1991 and three years later was appointed to the UC Presidential Chair in African-American and Feminist Studies, one of many national and international distinctions earned by her scholarship. She served as the chair of the Feminist Studies Department from 2003 to 2006.

Although Davis is an internationally known activist made legendary after her 1972 trial and acquittal for murder in connection with a courthouse hostage incident, she always made time for one-on-one student mentorship, campus activism and participation in faculty governance, colleagues said.

“She was very generous with her time,” Aptheker said.

One of Davis’ recent graduate students, Michelle Erai, a New Zealand native who taught feminist studies at UCSC after completing her doctorate in the History of Consciousness Department, said being a student of a legendary professor was “kind of intimidating” at first because “the classes she taught were full of really educated scholars.”

But Davis took a personal interest in Erai and her dissertation on violence against indigenous Maori women of New Zealand in the mid-1800s. Davis guided Erai through seven years of research and writing.

“Even though she travels a lot, she was really present and incredibly thoughtful in her comments,” said Erai, who is serving a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Riverside and planning an October 2009 tribute to Davis at UCSC. “She really modeled how to operate as an academic and an activist.”

Activism with the Communist Party is what first catapulted Davis to national fame. Not long after the battle to regain her teaching position at UCLA, the Birmingham, Ala., native was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

A gun registered in her name was used during a hostage incident at a Marin County courthouse that ended in the death of Judge Harold Haley. In August 1970, two hostage takers forced the judge and a prosecutor from the courtroom while trying to free a man on trial.

The armed men, who were shot and killed by police, were ultimately demanding the release of a trio of black prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers, whom Davis had been involved in defending along with the Black Panthers. The Soledad Brothers were accused of murdering a white guard at Soledad prison in retaliation for another white guard having killed three black inmates in what had been ruled justifiable homicide.

Within days of the courtroom escape attempt, authorities were hunting Davis, saying she was equally responsible for the judge’s death if the shotgun she reportedly bought in Los Angeles was used in the commission of the crime.

Davis was arrested months later, launching an international movement called “Free Angela Davis.” She served more than a year in jail before being cleared of all charges.

The complexity and enormity of her public persona was a boon to UCSC, though colleagues say she acted like anything but a celebrity.

“She has really mattered at putting this campus on the map,” said Haraway, adding that Davis often served on many committees and groups behind the scenes. “What is often not seen is the attention she gives graduate students. She doesn’t ride her reputation.

“She is not a person who uses her considerable fame to get out of things,” Haraway said, adding, “Angela could have been a diva but she never was.”

Title
Distinguished Professor Emerita
Division
Humanities Division
Department
History of Consciousness Department
Humanities Division
Feminist Studies Department
Affiliations
Feminist Studies Department

Summary of Expertise
Feminism, African American studies, critical theory, popular music culture and social consciousness, philosophy of punishment (women's jails and prisons)

Biography, Education and Training
Angela Y. 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. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era.

Professor 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 she 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 culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her sixteen-month incarceration, a massive international "Free Angela Davis" campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.

Professor Davis's 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 she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

During the last twenty-five years, Professor Davis has lectured in all of the fifty 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 nine books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; The Angela Y. Davis Reader; Are Prisons Obsolete?; a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; and The Meaning of Freedom.

Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Angela Davis would never again teach in the University of California system. Today she is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments 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.

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.