Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

Activist, author, professor, and scholar Angela Davis is best known for her activism throughout the 1960s and 1970s and her ongoing work and commitment in supporting freedom struggles throughout the world. According to activist Frank Barat, the editor of this collection, Davis “is an embodiment of resistance” and “her ongoing work and presence [is] reflected in and inspiring to many of the collective liberation movements we see today” (xii). She has written several works about prison abolition, feminism, and Black liberation and often speaks about issues surrounding race, gender, and class. Her other popular books include Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete?. Additionally, Davis is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz in its History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944, Davis grew up during the era of segregation with an active Ku Klux Klan. She witnessed racist attacks, and “bombs were planted repeatedly” by the Klan and other domestic terrorist groups targeting Black families in her neighborhood during her youth (75). So frequent were such bomb attacks that her neighborhood is known to have been commonly referred to as “Dynamite Hill.” She began her political activism at an early age, including participating in protests against segregation as a Girl Scout. A strong advocate of radical and leftist politics, she joined the Communist Party in 1968 and also briefly joined the Black Panther Party, working with its Los Angeles branch and remaining a longtime supporter.

In 1969, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) hired Davis as an assistant professor of philosophy. However, she became nationally known after UCLA fired her after discovering she was a member of the Communist Party and when the FBI placed her on its Ten Most Wanted list in 1970 based on wrongful charges of murder and kidnapping. Her subsequent arrest and incarceration led to a nationwide campaign, with global support calling for her freedom. She was acquitted of all charges in 1972. Davis has spoken highly of the global support and solidarity she received from all over the world in the movement to free her when she was in jail:

What I do want people to remember is the fact that the movement around the demand for my freedom was victorious. It was a victory against insurmountable odds, even though I was innocent; the assumption was that the power of those forces in the US was so strong that I would either end up in the gas chamber or that I would spend the rest of my life behind bars (131).

Davis has been a well-known advocate for freedom struggles everywhere, particularly prison abolition. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization dedicated to “build[ing] an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex.” Recognizing her contributions and influence, Cornel West writes in the Foreword to this book that Angela Davis “remains—after more than fifty years of struggle, suffering, and service—the most recognizable face of the left in the US Empire” (viii).