A 1981 book arguing that the nineteenth-century suffrage movement rested on a racial betrayal, and that domestic labour is the hidden ground of women's oppression (1981)
Women, Race & Class — her most widely taught book.
Philosophy
Angela Davis
born 1944 · American
Marxist feminism; Black radical tradition; prison abolitionism
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American philosopher and activist who became a global symbol in 1970, when she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, jailed for sixteen months and then acquitted of all charges amid an international "Free Angela" campaign. A student of Herbert Marcuse and a member of the Communist Party, she has spent the decades since building the intellectual case for prison abolition and for a feminism that refuses to separate gender from race and class. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
How to spot them
- ▸Sacked from UCLA in 1969 for Communist Party membership; on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list in 1970; acquitted in 1972
- ▸The Afro, the raised fist, and the 'Free Angela' posters
- ▸Prison abolition and the 'prison-industrial complex'; co-founder of Critical Resistance
- ▸A pupil of Herbert Marcuse; Frankfurt School training applied to American racism
- ▸Twice the Communist Party's candidate for US Vice-President, in 1980 and 1984
Key works
A short 2003 book in a pamphlet series asking whether an institution of mass confinement can be reformed at all, or should simply be dismantled (2003)
Are Prisons Obsolete? — the popular statement of her abolitionist case.
A 1998 study of three women who recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, reading their songs as a feminist tradition that arrived long before the vocabulary did (1998)
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism — on Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.
A 1971 anthology of writings by the imprisoned, assembled by an editor who was herself in a California jail awaiting a capital trial (1971)
If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance.
An autobiography written at twenty-eight at the urging of a novelist then working as an editor at Random House, who later became a Nobel laureate (1974)
Angela Davis: An Autobiography — edited by Toni Morrison.
A 2016 collection of speeches and interviews linking American protests against police killings to the occupation of the West Bank and to the abolitionist movement (2016)
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
Key ideas
- Prison abolition: prisons are not a natural response to crime but a historically recent institution that absorbs social problems it cannot solve
- The prison-industrial complex: the web of private contractors, political interests and racialised policing that makes mass incarceration profitable and self-perpetuating
- Intersecting oppressions: race, class and gender cannot be analysed separately, and a feminism that ignores class and race serves only some women
- The blues as theory: the recorded songs of early Black women singers articulate sexuality, independence and violence that written feminism of the time did not
- Slavery did not end but changed form, through convict leasing and the Thirteenth Amendment's exception for punishment
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944 and raised in the neighbourhood nicknamed 'Dynamite Hill' for the bombings of Black families' homes
- •Studied under Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis and spent two years in Frankfurt before returning to the United States
- •Was dismissed from UCLA in 1969 at the insistence of the Board of Regents, then chaired by Governor Ronald Reagan, over her Communist Party membership
- •Guns registered in her name were used in the 1970 Marin County courthouse takeover; she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, only the third woman ever listed
- •Arrested in New York in October 1970 and acquitted of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in June 1972
- •The campaign for her release produced The Rolling Stones' 'Sweet Black Angel' and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 'Angela'
- •Stood as the Communist Party's candidate for Vice-President of the United States in 1980 and 1984, on a ticket with Gus Hall
- •Left the Communist Party in 1991 and helped found the Committees of Correspondence; co-founded the abolitionist organisation Critical Resistance in 1997
- •Is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz, and remains an active public speaker
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Sources
- University of California, Santa Cruz — Angela Y Davis — Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness
- Angela Y. Davis — Women, Race & Class