Angela Davis

Background

Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her family was a resident of the Dynamite Hill locality. Davis has two brothers and a sister. She attended Carrie A. Tuggle School and then the Parker Annex branch of Parker High School. Her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and organizer for the Southern Negro Youth Congress. She was thus influenced by the Communist Party while growing up. She was also involved with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She was accepted into the Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village. The communist group Advance recruited her here.

Davis got a scholarship to Brandeis University, where she became a student of Herbert Marcuse after a rally. She attended the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki and came back in 1963 to F.B.I. questions about the same. She majored in French while continuing her study of Jean-Paul Sartre. She was also accepted to the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program. She also studied at the University of Frankfurt with a monthly stipend.
She took up a teaching position at the University of California, San Diego, following Marcuse. She joined the Che-Lumumba Club branch of the U.S.A. Communist Party. She earned her master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1968, and her doctorate in philosophy at East Berlin’s Humboldt University.

She became a professor at U.C.L.A. in 1969. She was already an activist and feminist. She was fired from her position owing to her Communist Party membership. She was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, inmates accused of killing a prison guard at the Soledad Prison. She was accused of conspiring with them and fled thereafter. F.B.I. agents captured her in 1970. She declared her innocence in court in 1971. Her arrest led to movements throughout the country. She was released in 1972. Her speaking tours happened thereafter, including Cuba in 1972. She also visited the Soviet Union and East Germany. She was a lecturer at Claremont College in 1975. The year 2020 saw her being the Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecturer for the history department of Pomona College. She also taught women’s studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978. She was also a professor between 1980 and 1984 at the San Francisco State University. She taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers University between 1991 and 2008. She has been a visiting professor at several other institutions. She came back to U.C.L.A. in 2014 and became the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in Healing and Social Justice in 2016, courtesy of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. She founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism in 1991, leaving the party.

She was married to Hilton Braithwaite from 1980 to 1983. She came out as a lesbian in 1997. She has been living with academic Gina Dent since 2020 as her partner. Her biopic was announced by Julie Dash in 2019. She has authored several books, the first one “If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance” released in 1971.