Angela Yvonne Davis is a tenured professor in the "History of Consciousness" program at the University of California - Santa Cruz. She has also taught at UCLA and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is a former Black Panther and was an active member of the Communist Party until 1991, when she joined the group Committees of Correspondence, which seeks to unite all radical socialist groups in the United States, and of which she remains a member to this day.
Born into a middle-class family in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Davis attended segregated schools in that city until she was selected for a special life of radical privilege, becoming a student at New York's Little Red Schoolhouse (LRS), famous for its Communist faculty and student body (future Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin attended the school during the same period as Davis). Having been exposed to the Marxist classics at LRS, Davis moved on to a full scholarship at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York, an adjunct of LRS. While attending these schools, she was a house guest of Herbert Aptheker, the Communist Party's chief theoretician, and his family.
In 1961 Davis enrolled at Brandeis University, where she majored in French. She spent her junior year studying in Paris, where she came into contact with Algerian revolutionaries. She graduated from Brandeis in 1965 and then spent two years on the faculty of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She returned to the U.S. to take another teaching position at UCLA, where she worked with radical professor Herbert Marcuse. In 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague spring," Davis joined the Communist Party, voicing her belief that "the only path of liberation for black people is that which leads toward complete and radical overthrow of the capitalist class." In September 1969 Davis was fired from UCLA when her membership in the Communist Party became known. This resulted in a celebrated First Amendment battle that made Angela Davis a national figure and forced UCLA to rehire her.
In 1970 Davis was implicated by more than 20 witnesses in a plot to free her imprisoned lover, fellow Black Panther and prison thug George Jackson, by hijacking a Marin County, California courtroom and taking the judge, the prosecuting assistant district attorney, and two jurors hostage. In an ensuing gun battle outside the court building, Judge Harold Haley's head was blown off by a sawed-off shotgun owned by Ms. Davis. To avoid arrest for her alleged complicity in the plot (she supplied the hijackers with a small arsenal, but claimed not to know the purposes for which it was used) Ms. Davis fled California, where she used aliases and changed her appearance to avoid detection. Two months later she was arrested by the FBI in New York City.
At her 1972 trial, Davis presented her version of where she had been and what she had been doing at the time of the shootout; because she was acting as her own attorney, she could not be cross-examined. She presented a number of alibi witnesses, almost all Communist friends, who testified that she had been with them in Los Angeles playing Scrabble at the time of the Marin slaughter. Witnesses who placed her in Marin were dismissed by Davis and her fellow attorneys as being unable to accurately identify blacks -- because they were white. Davis' case was further aided by the pliant nature of the jury, which acquitted her. Following the verdict, one juror faced news cameras and gave a revolutionary's clenched-fist salute. He laughed at the justice system, saying that prosecutors had been mistaken to expect that the "middle-class jury" would convict Davis. He and most of the jurors then went off to partake in a Davis victory party.
On July 9, 1975, Russian dissident and Nobel Laureat Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made the following remarks about Angela Davis in a speech he delivered to the AFL-CIO in New York City:
"There's a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don't know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally, for an entire year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, eight and nine years old, were asked to do this. She was set free, as you know. Although she didn't have too difficult a time in this country's jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents--but more important, a group of Czech dissidents--addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?' Angela Davis answered: `They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.' That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you." (Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, pp. 60-1 ).
In 1979 Davis was awarded the Intenational Lenin Peace Prize (formerly named the International Stalin Peace Prize) and was also honored by the East German police state. The Soviet government appointed a panel which awarded the Lenin prize annually to individuals who had "strengthened peace among peoples" by advancing the agendas of the Kremlin and its totalitarian regime.
Davis ran for Vice President of the United States in 1980 and 1984, alongside Gus Hall, on the Communist Party ticket. She is currently a "University Professor," one of only seven in the entire California University system, which entitles her to a six-figure salary and a research assistant. This income is supplemented by speaking fees ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 per appearance on college campuses, where she is an icon of radical faculty, administrators, and students. Her professorship is in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz - a program that gave a PhD to Black Panther rapist, crack addict, and murderer Huey P. Newton, while Davis was on the faculty. The creator of the History of Consciousness Program once told David Horowitz during a formal interview that he created the program "to demonsrate that the Ph.D. is a fraud." The Provost at UC Santa Cruz is Conn Hallinan, who joined the Communist Party in 1963 at Berkeley and was an editor of the Communist Party newspaper, People's World.
During the months preceding the 2003 war in Iraq, Davis was a frequent guest speaker at rallies against the Iraq war. She is the leader of her own movement against what she calls the "Prison-Industrial Complex," claiming that all minorities in jail are actually "political prisoners" and should be released. Says Davis, "My question is, Why are people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? . . . how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and their families." Pretty difficult, especially for the victims of such predators.
In recent years, Davis has confirmed rumors that she is a lesbian, a subject about which she had long been reluctant to speak openly. As is her wont, she has moved beyond mere openness about her lifestyle, and into the realm of radical activism. She was a featured speaker at the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum conference in 1993. In 1999 she delivered an address at Johns Hopkins University's "Living Out Loud" program, which was a series of lectures, films and events presented by the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance, an undergraduate group on campus. "Living Out Loud" was part of the university's annual Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Awareness Days. In her speech, Davis displayed her communist colors, focusing on how issues of race and class affect the gay movement. For Davis, every facet of life is weighted with political significance. Her lesbianism, she says, is "something I'm fine with as a political statement." She states that issues like sexuality can "enter into consciousness and become the focus of struggle" against domestic violence and AIDS. In her book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Davis asserts that female blues vocalists who sang about homosexual desire, abusive men, jealousy, lust, travel, and love were creating "a working-class Black feminism" and "a politics of resistance challenging race and gender identity."
Davis has never really written a scholarly or academic text. Her books, which are little more than political tracts, include: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003); Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (2001); Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (1999); Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998); The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998); The House That Race Built (1998); Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (1996); Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1992); Women, Culture, and Politics (1989); Women, Race, and Class (1981); Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974); If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971)
Activist and scholar Angela Davis has released a new edition of her 1974 autobiography, first published and edited by Toni Morrison nearly 50 years ago. The book details Davis’s remarkable early life, from growing up in a section of Birmingham, Alabama, known as Dynamite Hill due to the frequency of bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, to her work with the Black Panther Party and the U.S. Communist Party. It also follows her 16-month incarceration, during which she faced the death penalty and was eventually acquitted on all charges, which influenced Davis’s focus thereafter on transforming the criminal justice system and building a movement for abolition. The edition includes a new introduction, which links the racial justice uprisings and events of the past decade to her lifelong learnings and work. “What struck me was how much has changed,” says Davis, on her process of publishing the new edition. “Both how much has changed and how little has changed.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we continue our conversation with the legendary activist and academic Angela Davis. She has two new books out this week: Abolition. Feminism. Now., which she co-authored, and a new edition of her autobiography, which was first published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974. The book details Angela Davis’s early life, from growing up in a section of Birmingham, Alabama, known as Dynamite Hill due to the frequency of bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, to her work with the Black Panther Party and the U.S. Communist Party. In 1970, the FBI named Angela Davis as one of the 10 most wanted fugitives. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California. After being acquitted on all charges, she spent her life fighting to change the criminal justice system.
Angela Davis, before we ask you about this new edition of your autobiography, we want to go back over half a century to an interview you did from jail after you were arrested in 1970.
ANGELA DAVIS: There came a point where the revolutionary forces at work in the Black community began to express themselves in jails and prisons. However, unlike, say, the campuses, unlike any other area in the society, even the armed forces, the room for any kind of meaningful political activity is so narrow that obviously, as soon as the prison officials became aware of what was happening, they would confront these new developments with the most devastating kind of repression imaginable. And this is why, when I was involved in all of the problems at UCLA surrounding my membership in the Communist Party and when I was fighting for my job, I had just become aware of what was happening in the prisons, and I always insisted that people who were supporting me in my fight to retain my job, regardless of what my political beliefs and political activities were, had to look at the prisons.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Angela Davis speaking from jail in 1970. Angela, in your new introduction to the updated edition of the book, you write, “When I decided to write the book after all, it was because I had come to envision it as a political autobiography that emphasized the people, the events and the forces in my life that propelled me to my present commitment.” It was the late great writer Toni Morrison who pushed you to do this. Can you talk about the vision you had together? I mean, you were in your twenties writing an autobiography.
ANGELA DAVIS: Yeah. I think that when Toni Morrison first raised the possibility of my writing an autobiography, I laughed, because it seemed that it was almost ridiculous to consider writing an autobiography in my twenties. However, we both came to the conclusion that it might be possible to write the kind of book that would be meaningful, that would not focus on me individually but would rather be more of a political autobiography. And I’m so thankful to Toni now, that she managed to convince me to write this book, not only because it helps to provide a historical record for the struggles that unfolded 50 years ago, but also because it allowed me to link the writing of this autobiography to other collective undertakings, such as the slave narrative.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Angela, I wanted to talk to you about this. You were, in essence, incubated or a product of what many call the Old Left, the Communist Party USA, but then moved more into the Black Panther Party and what would be called, I guess, the New Left of the radical revolutionaries within the African American community. Could you talk about that change in your life and the impact that the Panther Party had at that time in the African American community? I recall back then a report coming out that the FBI had done a poll and found that over a quarter of all African Americans were supportive of the Black Panther Party at the time, and J. Edgar Hoover was almost catatonic about that.
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yeah, I don’t know that I would characterize my development as a move away from what is referred to as the Old Left and toward formations such as the Black Panther Party. I sort of grew up with the Communist Party as a part of my coming-of-age experience. My mother and father had very close friends who were Black leaders in the Communist Party. And I’m thankful for that experience of recognizing how important it was and continues to be to situate struggles for Black liberation within a larger international framework. You know, we talked about the internationalism of the book we just published together, Abolition. Feminism. Now. And I’m thankful for the internationalism that helped me to recognize how important it was to link Black struggles to struggles of the working class in this country and struggles for African liberation, struggles unfolding in Latin America. And so, I don’t know whether I moved from one point to another, but rather attempted to find points of connection and interconnections among the various perspectives.
AMY GOODMAN: Angela, as you updated your autobiography and wrote a new introduction, what struck you most, as you reflect on your life now, what, almost half a century later, writing that autobiography in your twenties?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, first of all, I realized I could not update it. And in rereading it, revisiting it, I always expressed a sense of relief that I had actually written the book in my twenties, because I don’t know whether I would be able to write such a book today. But what struck me was how much has changed, both how much has changed and how little has changed. And, of course, my first impulse was to revise those expressions and those ways of thinking and knowing that made me almost cringe in rereading the book. By the way, I narrated the autobiography for an audiobook, so I literally had to read every single word aloud. And there were things, of course, I would have wanted to change, and I indicate this in the preface.
But then it became apparent to me that I was also providing a record of how our struggles over time had shaped the ways we think about issues. I point out, for example, that, initially, the language that I used to describe what was happening in women’s prisons was very homophobic. And I was a product of my time. And it is very, I should say, inspiring to recognize how far we have come, not only in the way we talk about sexuality, but the way we talk about gender and the way we are constantly challenging binary notions of gender. And all of these transformations have happened as a consequence of the fact that people have dedicated themselves to struggle, to struggle for an end to racism, to imperialism, to war, an end to misogyny. And let me say that in rereading that text —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.
ANGELA DAVIS: — I became aware of the absolute importance of antiracist, anti-capitalist, abolitionist feminism.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Angela Y. Davis, a world-renowned abolitionist, author, activist, distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Two new books out this week: an updated edition of her autobiography, it’s called Angela Davis: An Autobiography, and Abolition. Feminism. Now.
That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Stay safe. Wear a mask.
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