Angela Davis
Angela Davis
Angela Yvonne Davisis an American political activist, academic scholar, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Her interests include prisoner rights; she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She was a professorat the University of California, Santa Cruz. in its History of Consciousness...
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth26 January 1944
CityBirmingham, AL
My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.
It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems
Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.
The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.
The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not conceive of society without it. Within the history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind.
I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.
Often young black people are looking towards the alternative economies. They are looking towards the drug economy.... the economies that are going to that apparently will produce some kind of material gain for them.
Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.
You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.
You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.
I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.
Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.