Angela Davis

American political activist, scholar, and author (born 1944)

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Born 1944 · age 82United States

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Wikipedia
68 languages
Cross-language footprint
Age
82
Born 1944
Known for
Venom
2018

Summary

Updated 2026-08-31

She went from UCLA lecturer to fugitive to acquittal in three years — her guns, a courtroom shootout, a capital murder charge, and a global movement demanding her freedom. The case made her the face of radical Black politics in the 1970s and never let go.

Biography

About

Born in Birmingham in 1944, Davis studied at Brandeis and Frankfurt before joining the Communist Party and landing at UCLA as a philosophy professor in 1969. The university fired her twice — first for Party membership, then for inflammatory speech. In 1970, guns registered to her were used in an armed courtroom takeover in Marin County that left four dead; she was charged with conspiracy to murder and jailed for over a year before a jury acquitted her in 1972. She co-founded Critical Resistance in 1997 to dismantle the prison-industrial complex, left the CPUSA in 1991 to help start the Committ…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Angela Davis

Angela Davis

said27 Oct 2023

Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world

— Angela Davis: 'Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world' (27 Oct 2023)

Angela Davis

said2005

The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression.

— From Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005), p. 29.

Angela Davis

said1998

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

— "Masked Racism" (1998)

Angela Davis

said1994

It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.

— "Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia" Critical Inquiry. Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 37-39, 41-43 and 45.

Angela Davis

said1971