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Table of Contents
Angela Davis, full name Angela Yvonne Davis, was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, and became an American black activist during her confinement and court hearing on conspiracy charges in 1970-72.
See the fact file below for more information on Angela Davis, or you can download our 28-page Angela Davis worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.
Key Facts & Information
EARLY LIFE
- On January 26, 1944, Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Her family stayed in the “Dynamite Hill” community, which was marked in the 1950s by house bombings in an attempt to terrorize and drive out middle-class black residents.
- Davis spent some time on her uncle’s farm with friends in New York City.
- She has two brothers, Ben and Reginald, and Fania, her only sister.
- Davis joined Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated black elementary school in Birmingham, and then a middle-school branch of Parker High School. During this period, Davis’s mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, a Communist Party-influenced organization aimed at forging alliances among African-Americans in the South.
- Davis spent her childhood surrounded by communist organizers and thinkers, who influenced her intellectual development significantly.
- Among them was Southern Negro Youth Congress official Louis E. Burnham, whose daughter Margaret Burnham was Davis’s childhood friend and her co-counsel during Davis’s murder and kidnapping trial in 1971. Davis was a member of her church’s youth group as a child and regularly attended Sunday school.
- She characterizes much of her political involvement as her engagement with the United States of America Girl Scouts.
- Davis also participated in the Colorado Girl Scouts’ national roundup in 1959. As a Girl Scout, she picketed and marched in Birmingham to protest racial segregation.
- Angela Davis got accepted into an American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) program. It was a program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North by her junior year of high school. She chose Greenwich Village’s Elisabeth Irwin High School.
- There, she was recruited by Advance, a communist youth group.
EDUCATION
Brandeis University
- Davis received a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three African-American students in her class. She met the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the latter became his student.
- She worked part-time to save money for trips to France and Switzerland and the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki. When she returned home in 1963, she was subjected to a Federal Bureau of Investigation interview about her participation in the communist-sponsored festival.
- The event of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, happened on September 15, 1963, and was carried out by white supremacist terrorists. Four members of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter positioned 19 sticks of dynamite connected to a timing device beneath the church’s east side steps.
- Martin Luther King Jr. called the church explosion “one of the cruelest and devastating crimes ever committed against humanity,” claiming it killed four girls and injured 14 to 22 others.
- Davis discovered her primary interest in philosophy while completing her French degree. Marcuse’s ideas piqued her interest in particular. When she returned to Brandeis, she sat in on his class. Davis wrote in her autobiography that Marcuse was approachable and helpful. She began planning to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. She obtained her magna cum laude degree in 1965 and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
University of Frankfurt
- She lived in Germany, first with a German family and then with a group of students in a loft in an old factory, on a monthly stipend of $100. After visiting East Berlin during the annual May Day celebration, she detected that the East German government was dealing with the residual effects of fascism better than the West Germans.
Postgraduate work
- Marcuse transferred to the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed him there after two years in Frankfurt. Davis went to London for a conference on “The Dialectics of Liberation.” Davis was reportedly upset by her colleagues’ black nationalist sentiments and rejection of communism as a “white man’s thing” at the conference, despite being moved by Carmichael’s rhetoric.
- She joined an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA, which is known as the Che-Lumumba Club, named after Cuban and Congolese revolutionaries Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, respectively. Davis received her master’s degree in 1968 from the University of California, San Diego. Also, she received her doctorate in philosophy from East Berlin’s Humboldt University.
CAREER
Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, 1969–70
- Davis began working as an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969. (UCLA). Even though both Princeton and Swarthmore attempted to recruit her, she chose UCLA because of its urban location. She was known at the time as an activist and a radical feminist, a constituent of the Communist Party USA, and an ally of the Black Panther Party’s Los Angeles chapter.
- The University of California instituted a policy prohibiting the hiring of Communists in 1969. The Board of Regents dismissed Davis from her $10,000-a-year position on September 19, 1969, due to her membership in the Communist Party, which was encouraged by California Governor and future President Ronald Reagan.
- Judge Jerry Pacht ruled that the Regents could not fire Davis solely because of her Communist Party membership, and she was reinstated.
- Because of this, the American Association of University Professors condemned the board for this action.
ARREST AND TRIAL
- Angela Yvonne Davis was named to the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list on August 18, 1970, for her alleged involvement in the armed seizure of a Marin County Courthouse in California. Earlier that year, four people died, including a judge.
- After evading arrest, Davis was found on October 14 and imprisoned for a total of sixteen months. She was granted bail in 1972 after public steps protested her release and was eventually acquitted of the charges.
- The incident influenced Davis’ future as a political activist, academic scholar, and author, particularly her views on the prison system and her fight for justice in the United States and abroad.
- Years before her arrest, Davis became involved in the Civil Rights Movement before graduating from Brandeis because she felt connected to the killing of four young black girls in a bombing in her hometown.
- Davis began to lean left after two years of involvement with the movement. Davis was involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the American Communist Party in 1967.
- Davis became involved in the movement to improve prison conditions during these two years due to her research into how racism functioned in the prison industrial complex. Soon after, she became involved in a campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, three African-American inmates who had been accountable for the murder of a correctional officer.
- On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, the brother of one of the indicted inmates, attempted to free the Soledad Brothers by kidnapping Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, a deputy district attorney, and three jurors at the Marin County Courthouse.
- Jackson and the prisoners were pursued by cops who began shooting at the moving vehicle as they attempted to flee. Judge Haley, Jackson, and two other prisoners were killed in the ensuing armed conflict.
- Davis was later discovered to have purchased the weapons used in the incident. On August 14, a federal warrant charging her with kidnapping, murder, and criminal conspiracy was issued for her arrest.
- Because the weapons belonged to Davis, she was charged with all of the subsequent crimes in which the weapons played a role. When news of her arrest spread, her supporters organized the “Free Angela Davis” campaign.
- The campaign was so successful that John Lennon and Yoko Ono, two well-known musicians, wrote a song called “Angela” to help.
- Davis was released on bail after sixteen months in prison due to the protests during her high-profile trial.
- Davis was found not guilty on June 4, 1972; her possession of the guns was deemed insufficient to prove her involvement.
- Davis was an assistant philosophy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at the time of the events, a position she lost due to her outspoken Communist Party membership. After the incident, Davis continued to face trouble with the California State university system. The state’s governor, Ronald Reagan, launched an unsuccessful campaign to prevent her from teaching.
OTHER ACTIVITIES IN THE 1970s
Cuba
- Following her acquittal, Davis embarked on an international speaking tour, which included a stop in Cuba, where she had earlier been received by Fidel Castro as part of a Communist Party delegation in 1969.
- Cuba was also visited by Robert F. Williams, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Assata Shakur later moved there after running away from a US detention. The acceptance by the Afro-Cubans at a mass rally was reportedly so enthusiastic that she could not speak.
- Davis saw Cuba as a racist-free country, giving rise to her to assume that “only in the process of socialism could the fight against racism be successfully performed,” and her socialist leanings influenced her understanding of race struggles when she returned to the United States. She attended the Second Congress of the Federation of Cuban Women in 1974.
Soviet Union
- The CIA estimated in 1971 that the Angela Davis campaign received 5% of Soviet propaganda efforts. Davis visited the USSR in August 1972, at the invitation of the Central Committee and received an honorary doctorate from Moscow State University.
- On May 1, 1979, she received the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize. Later that month, she traveled to Moscow to accept the award, praising “the glorious name” of Lenin and the “great October Revolution.”
East Germany
- The East German government organized an extensive campaign in support of Davis. Davis visited East Germany in September 1972, where she met the state’s leader, Erich Honecker. She got her honorary degree from the University of Leipzig and the Star of People’s Friendship from Walter Ulbricht.
LATER ACADEMIC CAREER
- In 1975, Davis lectured at the Claremont Black Studies Center at the Claremont Colleges. She was forced to teach secretly because alumni benefactors did not want her to brainwash the general student population with communist thoughts. College trustees made arrangements to minimize her appearance on campus, limiting her seminars to Friday evenings and Saturdays, “when campus activity is low.”
- Davis taught women’s studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978 and ethnic studies from 1980 to 1984 at the San Francisco State University. She taught in the departments of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers University from 1991 to 2008. She has been a distinguished professor emerita ever since.
- Davis returned to UCLA as a regents’ lecturer in 2014. On May 8, she gave a public lecture in Royce Hall, where she had given her first lecture 45 years before. Davis obtained an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in Healing and Social Justice from the California Institute of Integral Studies during its 48th annual commencement ceremony in San Francisco in 2016.
PERSONAL LIFE
- Despite being present in the eye of the public, Davis faced some struggles in her personal life. From 1980 to 1983, Angela Davis was married to Hilton Braithwaite.
- In an interview with Out magazine in 1997, she emerged as a lesbian. Davis was openly living with her partner, academic Gina Dent, a fellow humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz, by 2020.
- They have worked together to end the use of police and prisons and promote black liberation and Palestinian solidarity.
DAVIS’ AT PRESENT
- Davis is now celebrated for standing up for what she believed in and writing academic papers on sexism, classism, racism, and prison abolition.
- She has given guest lectures in all fifty states, as well as in the Caribbean, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race, and Class (1983), and Abolition Democracy (2005) are among the eight books she has written or co-written, and she has contributed to many more.
- Davis is currently a Professor Emeritus of History and Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is still an activist, working tirelessly to put an end to the death penalty and the prison industrial complex. She motivates her students to pursue activism in areas where they believe they can make a difference, saying,
Angela Davis Worksheets
This is a fantastic bundle that includes everything you need to know about Angela Davis across 28 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use worksheets that are perfect for teaching kids about Angela Davis, who is an American political activist, author, and scholar.
Complete List of Included Worksheets
Below is a list of all the worksheets included in this document.
- Angela Davis Facts
- Davis’ Life
- Vocabulary Picture
- Famous Quotes
- Quote Of My Life
- Reading Comprehension
- I Will Fight For
- As A Youth
- We Matter
- Angela
- She Is My Hero
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Angela Davis so important?
Angela Davis is a famous writer, feminist, political activist, and educator. She became famous for her work with the Civil Rights Movement and later the Black Liberation Movement. Angela Davis is always working to make society better for everyone by writing and through activism to abolish prisons.
What impact did Angela Davis have?
Angela Davis is a woman who speaks up for what she believes in. In the 1960s, she became known as the leader of the Communist Party in the US. She also worked closely with the Black Panther Party. Angela has always fought for what is fair, and she believes that prisons should be abolished completely.
Was Angela Davis a part of the civil rights movement?
Angela Yvonne Davis is an African American educator and activist, best known for her work in Civil Rights.
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