Angela Davis

"I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change… I’m changing the things I cannot accept."


Angela Yvonne Davis (born 1944) is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ideologically a Marxist, Davis was a long-time member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She is the author of over ten books on class, feminism, race, and the US prison system.

1974 rally; Bettmann / Bettmann Archive

Djeneba Aduayom / TIME

Davis may have become a pinup for social justice 50 years after she rose to prominence, but she insists she gets just as much out of the new generation of protesters and political thinkers. “I see these young people who are so intelligent, who have learned from the past and who have developed new ideas,” she says. “I find myself learning a great deal from people who are 50 years younger than me. And to me, that’s exciting. That keeps me wanting to remain in the struggle.”

What advice would she give the Black Lives Matter movement? “The most important thing from where I stand is to begin to give expression to ideas about what we can do next,” she says.

One thing Davis is clear on is that moments such as the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis or the removal of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol aren’t the ultimate answer. “Regardless of what people think about it, it’s really not going to bring about change,” she says of the statue’s removal. “It’s organising. It’s the work. And if people continue to do that work, and continue to organise against racism and provide new ways of thinking about how to transform our respective societies, that is what will make the difference.”

Born to an African American family of schoolteachers in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis studied French at Brandeis University and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany. Studying under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a prominent figure in the Frankfurt School, Davis became increasingly engaged in far-left politics. Returning to the United States, she studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed a doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the Communist Party and became involved in numerous causes, including the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. In 1969 she was hired as an acting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her Communist Party membership; after a court ruled this illegal, the university fired her again, this time for her use of inflammatory language.

In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, and held in jail for over a year, she was acquitted of all charges in 1972. She visited Eastern Bloc countries in the 1970s and during the 1980s was twice the Communist Party's candidate for Vice President; at this time, she also held the position of professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University. Much of her work focused on the abolition of prisons and in 1997 she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex. In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she helped start the CCDS, a platform initially operating inside the CPUSA seeking to reorient the party's ideology away from orthodox communism. When a majority of party members voted against CCDS proposals, along with CCDS colleagues, she left the CPUSA. Also in 1991, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was appointed a presidential chair amid much controversy before becoming professor emerita (retired) in 2008. Since then she has continued to write and remained active in movements such as Occupy and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Davis sometimes tells a story at her lectures about how, as a young child in Birmingham, she asked her mother why she couldn’t go to the segregated amusement park or libraries. Her mother, who was an activist before her, explained how segregation worked, but didn’t leave it there. “She continually told us that things would change,” says Davis. “And that they would change, and that we could be a part of that change. So I learned as a child to live under racial segregation, but at the same time simultaneously, to live in an imagined new world and to recognise that things would not always be as they were.”

“My mother always said to us: ‘This is not the way things are supposed to be, this is not the way the world is supposed to be.’”