Angela Davis: From UCLA Philosophy Professor to Political Activist and Scholar
Angela Yvonne Davis, born on January 26, 1944, is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis's life and career have been marked by activism, scholarship, and a commitment to social justice.
Early Life and Education
Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in a predominantly black neighborhood known as "Dynamite Hill" because of the frequent bombings by the Klu Klux Klan. Between the '40s and '60s, over forty unsolved bombings targeting black homes were recorded in the neighborhood. Her father, Frank, worked at a service station, and her mother, Sallye, was a primary school teacher and active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), even though just being a member in Alabama was dangerous at the time. Davis is the oldest of four children: Fania Davis Jordan, Reginald Davis, and Benjamin Davis. Her parents were heavily involved in revolutionary and anti-racist work and were members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which at the time was illegal in the eyes of the government, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a group focused on creating alliances among Black people and defending the wrongfully accused.
Davis’s parents maintained close relationships with other revolutionaries in the neighborhood, including members of the underground Black Communist Party, with whom Davis spent ample time with as a child, likely influencing her future as an activist. From the age of six, Davis recalled her fear of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as they closely monitored her family, due to her parents’ involvement with the Communist Party. From the moment I became aware that Black people were treated as inferior, I can remember hearing my mother’s voice saying, ‘This is not the way things are supposed to be, this is not the way the world is supposed to be organized and one day they will be different’. As a result, Davis learned how to imagine a world different from the world in which she lived.
As a teenager, Davis moved to New York City with her mother and continued her education at Elizabeth Irwin High School, which served as one of Davis’ first exposures to the left since a handful of teachers there were blacklisted for their involvement in the communist party. After graduating high school, Davis pursued a degree in philosophy at Brandeis University, graduating magna cum laude and as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in 1965. Davis later received her M.A.
Before graduating from Brandeis, Davis got involved with the Civil Rights Movement because of the connection she felt to the killing of four young black girls in a bombing in her hometown. After two years of being involved with the movement, Davis began to gravitate farther left. In 1967, Davis was an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the American Communist Party. During these two years, Davis began to get involved with the movement to improve prison conditions because of the research she was conducting about how racism functioned in the prison industrial complex.
Read also: Alsobrooks' Journey to the U.S. Senate
Davis continued her education in graduate school at the Frankfurt School in West Germany and joined the anti-war organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), protesting the Vietnam War at the USA Embassy. She studied under Herbert Marcuse, a political philosopher, social critic, and supporter of the New Left and the protest movements in the 1960s. According to Davis, Herbert Marcuse taught her that it was possible to be an academic and an activist, a scholar and a revolutionary.
UCLA and the Communist Party
Davis was hired as an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1969. However, her time at UCLA was short-lived due to her involvement with the Communist Party. Because Davis was a member of the Communist Party, the UC Board of Regents, at the urging of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, tried to fire her before she even taught her first class. But enraged UCLA faculty, staff and students protested in support of Davis, citing academic freedom. Davis was allowed to teach a course that, for the opening lecture, had to be moved from the Dickson Art Center to Royce Hall to accommodate more than 2,000 students and others who wanted to attend. A request for television cameras to broadcast the lecture was denied, but the controversy still made the national evening news.
The Regents fired Davis again on June 20, 1970, for the "inflammatory language" she had used in four different speeches. Forty-five years later, Davis has returned to teach a class at UCLA for the first time since that tumultuous year. Davis, whose official title is Distinguished Professor Emerita, is a Regents’ Lecturer at UCLA this spring quarter. Angela Davis, then acting assistant professor of philosophy, taught her first class at Royce Hall Oct. “I never in my wildest imagination would have thought accepting the position here at UCLA would have led to that kind of notoriety,” said Davis, 70, who was a professor in the history of consciousness and feminist studies from 1991 to 2008 at UC Santa Cruz and is now retired. “I wasn’t seeking fame,” she added. “I wasn’t seeking notoriety. “It was here that I had my first real job so that will always be a kind of a milestone,” she said.
Imprisonment and Acquittal
On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, the brother of one of the Soledad Brothers, attempted to free the Soledad Brothers by taking hostages at the Marin County Courthouse, who included Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, a deputy district attorney and three jurors. During the stand off, Jackson armed and released some of the black defendants at the courthouse. While attempting to flee, Jackson and the prisoners were chased by the cops who began shooting at the moving vehicle. The armed conflict resulted in the death of Jackson, Judge Haley, and two other prisoners. Later, it was discovered that Davis had purchased the weapons involved in the incident and a federal warrant charging her with kidnapping, murder and criminal conspiracy was put out for her arrest on August 14.
On August 18, 1970, Angela Yvonne Davis was named to the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list for her supposed involvement in the armed seizure of a Marin County Courthouse in California during which four people died, including a judge, earlier that year. Upon hearing this, Davis fled. Four days later on August 18, she became the third woman listed on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives. She was eventually caught in October of that same year at which point President Richard Nixon congratulated law enforcement on the capture of a “dangerous terrorist.” Davis maintained that she was innocent.
Read also: Discover Angela Bassett's path to stardom
While being held in the Women's Detention Center, Davis was initially segregated from other prisoners, in solitary confinement. Across the nation, thousands began organizing a movement to gain her release. In New York City, black writers formed a committee called the Black People in Defense of Angela Davis. By February 1971, more than 200 local committees in the United States, and 67 in foreign countries, worked to free Davis from jail. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed to this campaign with the song "Angela". In 1972, after a 16-month incarceration, the state allowed her release on bail from the county jail. On February 23, 1972, Rodger McAfee, a dairy farmer from Fresno, California, paid her $100,000 (equivalent to $553,100 in 2023) bail with the help of Steve Sparacino, a wealthy business owner.
On June 4, 1972 Davis was found not guilty: her owning the guns was not considered sufficient to confirm her involvement. After 13 hours of deliberations, the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty. After the verdict, one juror, Ralph DeLange, made the Black Power salute to a crowd of spectators, which he later told reporters was to show "a unity of opinion for all oppressed people". Ten jurors later attended victory celebrations with the defense. The fact that she owned the guns used in the crime was judged insufficient to establish her role in the plot. She was represented by Howard Moore Jr. and Leo Branton Jr., who hired psychologists to help the defense determine who in the jury pool might favor their arguments, a technique that has since become more common.
Activism and Political Career
Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). During the 1980s, Davis was twice the Communist Party's candidate for the Vice President of the United States. She left the party in 1991, founding the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Her group broke from the Communist Party USA because of the latter's support of the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt after the fall of the Soviet Union and tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
As early as 1969, Davis began public speaking engagements. She expressed her opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and the prison-industrial complex, and her support of gay rights and other social justice movements. Davis opposed the 1995 Million Man March, arguing that the exclusion of women from this event promoted male chauvinism. She said that Louis Farrakhan and other organizers appeared to prefer that women take subordinate roles in society.
Davis is also a staunch advocate of prison abolition and supports efforts to dismantle the current prison system in the United States. Davis has traveled the country and the world to criticize a prison system that she and others say disproportionately incarcerates people of color. “We have reached a point where even conservatives are acknowledging that mass incarceration is not working,” said Davis, who, shortly after being dismissed from UCLA, was arrested for allegedly conspiring in the abduction and death of a Marin County prison guard.
Read also: Education and Career of Angela Yee
Academic Career and Legacy
After her acquittal, Davis went on an international speaking tour in 1972 and the tour included a trip to Cuba, where she had previously been received by Fidel Castro as a member of a Communist Party delegation in 1969. 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 was appointed as the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. She has spoken in all fifty states as a guest lecturer, as well as abroad in the Caribbean, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. Today, Davis is hailed for standing for what she believed in as well as for writing academic papers on sexism, classism, racism, and prison abolition.
Davis has written or co-authored several books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race, and Class (1983), and Abolition Democracy (2005), and contributed to many more. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex.
Psychobiographical Analysis
Dr. Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, academician, and writer who has navigated and discussed issues of race, class, gender, and USA social policies across her 75 years of life. Davis’s activism established her as the icon of a larger social movement and further related to her decision-making and legacy. Using psychobiographical methods, data were gathered through publicly available sources to explore Davis’s personal, professional, and representational life, as well as understand Davis’s lived experience through a socio-cultural-historical perspective.
Two established theories, Social Cognitive Career Theory and Politicized Collective Identity model, were applied to Davis’s life. The four-person research team initially researched psychobiography and psychobiographical methods. Next, the team researched and eventually chose Angela Davis as a subject because of her incredible contribution to society through writing, scholarship, and activism as a queer Black woman. A plethora of data on Davis’s life was available. The team chose Davis’s 1974 autobiography, books she had written, recorded interviews and commentary, and live conferences in which Davis was the keynote speaker over the course of a year. These sources were chosen because they provided a balanced range of media and were psychologically salient to understanding Davis across her full lifespan, with particular attention to her upbringing, young adult experiences including Communist Party involvement and incarceration, her intersectional identities, as well as her later life work accomplishments and activism.
The study is based in the application of two theories, SCCT and Simon and Klandermans’ (2001) PCI model in relation to the following research questions: 1) What factors, such as identity and historical and cultural experiences, are related to Davis’s career development? What role did self-efficacy play in her different career functions and goals? 2) How can Davis’s life be understood through the tenets of PCI, including historical antecedents, shared grievances with different political groups, and the involvement of the larger general public in her activism?
tags: #angela #davis #UCLA #history
