Angela Davis

Dynamite Hill was what people in Birmingham called the neighborhood where middle-class Black families bought houses and had them bombed. Davis grew up there. Her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization the Communist Party had helped shape, so the house filled up with organizers. She picketed segregation as a Girl Scout. A Quaker program moved her north to Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, where a communist youth group recruited her, and a scholarship carried her to Brandeis, where she was one of three Black students in her class. She was studying at Biarritz in September 1963 when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed and four girls she knew were killed.

Herbert Marcuse told her a person could be a scholar, an activist and a revolutionary at once, and she followed him from Brandeis to Frankfurt to San Diego. She joined the Communist Party in 1968 and the all-Black Che-Lumumba Club, and worked with the Los Angeles Black Panthers. UCLA hired her to teach philosophy in 1969 and the Regents fired her for party membership. A court said they could not. They fired her again on June 20, 1970, for calling the police pigs in four speeches, and the American Association of University Professors censured them for it. Since 1997 she has been the most audible voice in prison abolition, co-founding Critical Resistance and publishing Are Prisons Obsolete? in 2003. She joined the Santa Cruz faculty in 1991 and ran her department before retiring in 2008.

On August 7, 1970, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson walked into a Marin County courtroom, handed guns to the Black defendants, and took the judge, the prosecutor and three jurors hostage. Police fired on the van in the parking lot. Jackson died there, along with Judge Harold Haley and two of the prisoners. The shotgun taped to Haley's neck had been bought by Davis. She ran, went onto the FBI Ten Most Wanted list on August 18, was arrested in a New York motor lodge on October 13, spent 16 months in jail, and was acquitted of everything on June 4, 1972. The rest complicates the picture. She took the Lenin Peace Prize in 1979, laid flowers in East Berlin at a memorial for a border guard, and in 1975 Solzhenitsyn accused her of abandoning political prisoners in socialist countries.

Nothing about her is settled and she has not stopped arguing. John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote her a song while she was inside. She ran for vice president on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984 and left the party in 1991 as the Soviet Union came apart. On January 7, 2019, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute withdrew the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award, citing her support for boycotting Israel, in the city whose bombings she grew up under. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Santa Cruz, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021, took a Cambridge doctorate in 2025, and is the last living holder of the Lenin Peace Prize.

Angela Davis's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance book
  Assembled while she was awaiting trial 1971
• Angela Davis: An Autobiography book
  Written at 30, two years after the acquittal 1974
• Women, Race and Class book
  Her account of how the suffrage and abolition movements came apart 1981
• Critical Resistance company
  Co-founded to attack what she calls the prison industrial complex 1997
• Blues Legacies and Black Feminism book
  On Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday as theorists 1998
• Are Prisons Obsolete? book
  The short book that carried abolition into ordinary argument 2003

• September 15, 1963 aged 19 Learns in France that four girls she knew died in the Birmingham church bombing She was on a junior year abroad at Biarritz.
• 1965 aged ~21 Graduates magna cum laude from Brandeis and leaves for Frankfurt
• 1969 aged ~25 UCLA hires her, and the Regents fire her over Communist Party membership A court found the firing illegal. They fired her again on June 20, 1970, over her speeches.
• August 18, 1970 aged 26 J. Edgar Hoover puts her on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list She was the third woman and the 309th person ever listed.
• October 13, 1970 aged 26 Arrested at a Howard Johnson motor lodge in New York City She was held in solitary until a federal court order got her out of it.
• June 4, 1972 aged 28 Acquitted on all counts after 13 hours of jury deliberation By February 1971 more than 200 committees in the United States and 67 abroad had formed to free her.
• May 1, 1979 aged 35 Awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union
• 1991 aged ~47 Leaves the Communist Party and joins the UC Santa Cruz faculty She helped found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism the same year.
• January 7, 2019 aged 74 Birmingham withdraws the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award The institute cited her support for the boycott of Israel.

• Huey Newton 1942–1989
  Co-founder of the Black Panther Party who paired armed self-defense with free breakfast and clinic programs. worked with the party he founded
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. put her on the Ten Most Wanted list
• Bessie Smith 1892–1937
  Leading blues recording artist of the 1920s known as the Empress of the Blues. read as a theorist in Blues Legacies
• Billie Holiday 1915–1959
  Jazz singer whose intensely personal phrasing and performances, including 'Strange Fruit,' transformed American vocal music. the third subject of Blues Legacies
• Jim Jones 1931–1978
  Peoples Temple founder whose 1978 Jonestown murder-suicide killed over nine hundred followers. courted her from Peoples Temple