Angela Y. Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis, born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, is an American Marxist and Marxist feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, author, and social theorist. She came of age in a city marked by segregation and racial terror. Her family lived in Birmingham’s “Dynamite Hill” neighborhood, where bombings in the 1950s were used to intimidate middle-class Black residents. As a child, she attended segregated schools, took part in church youth activities, joined the Girl Scouts, and marched and picketed against racial segregation in Birmingham.

Davis’s political thinking was shaped early by the people around her. Her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and leading organizer in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization influenced by the Communist Party and focused on alliances among African Americans in the South. Davis grew up around communist organizers and thinkers, including Louis E. Burnham. By high school, she had entered a Quaker program that placed Black students from the South in integrated schools in the North, and she chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village. There, she was recruited by the communist youth group Advance.

At Brandeis University, where she was one of three Black students in her class, Davis studied French and philosophy and graduated magna cum laude in 1965 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She encountered Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and became his student. Davis later said Marcuse taught her “that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary.” She also studied in France, including at the Sorbonne, and in West Germany at the University of Frankfurt. She later studied at the University of California, San Diego, and completed some doctoral studies at Humboldt-University of Berlin in East Germany.

After returning to the United States, Davis joined the Communist Party USA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA. The university’s Board of Regents soon fired her because of her CPUSA membership; after a court ruled that firing illegal, UCLA fired her for the 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. She was prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, held in jail for more than a year, and acquitted of all charges in 1972. While imprisoned, she was often considered a political prisoner.

Davis remained a public figure in politics, scholarship, and activism. She ran for Vice President in 1980 and 1984 on the Communist Party USA ticket. In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke with the CPUSA and helped establish the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, later became department director, and retired in 2008 as Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex.

Davis has received the Lenin Peace Prize, has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, was listed in 2020 as Time magazine’s 1971 “Woman of the Year,” and was included that year on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2025, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of Cambridge. She has also been a controversial figure because of accusations that she advocates political violence and because of her support of the Soviet Union. Her words still carry force because they join study with action, especially in lines like: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”