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ANGELA DAVIS (1944–)

Lisa Guenther

Angela Davis is a scholar, activist, and former political prisoner. She is a leading figure in movements for prison abolition, racial and economic justice, intersectional feminism, queer and trans liberation, decoloniza- tion, and food justice.

From a very young age, Davis felt the impact of racial terrorism in the United States. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama during the Jim Crow era, in a neighborhood called “Dynamite Hill,” named in reference to the regular bombing of Black homes by white suprema- cists. She lost friends in the racist attack on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls in 1963. As a high school student on an exchange program at the “Little Red Schoolhouse” in New York City, Davis encountered a communist youth group, and she eventually became a member of the Communist Party USA, running for Vice- President twice (in 1980 and 1984). As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, she immersed herself in the work of Marx and Sartre, and she attended lectures by James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and others. Davis studied with Herbert Marcuse, first at Brandeis and later as a graduate student at the University of Frankfurt and the University of California, San Diego.

In 1968, Davis became involved in the Che Lumumba Club, the Black collective of the Communist Party, as well as the Black Pan- ther Party for Self-Defense, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her first academic appointment was a two-year position in the philosophy department at UCLA, beginning in 1969, but when her involvement in the Communist Party was publicized, then-Governor Ronald Reagan convinced the Board of Regents to fire her. Undaunted, Davis showed up for the first day of classes and delivered her “Lectures on Liberation” to audiences of over 1,500 stu- dents and faculty members (Ruggiero 2010).

In 1970, Angela Davis joined a campaign to defend the Soledad brothers: three prisoners who were accused of killing a guard in retali- ation for the shooting of Black prisoners. On August 7, 1970, Jona- than Jackson, the younger brother of Soledad Brother George Jackson, staged an armed attack on a courtroom in Marin County, California, which left four people dead, including a judge who had been taken hostage. The guns used in the attack were registered in Angela Davis’ name, and since California law allows for the prosecution of anyone who is directly or indirectly involved in a crime, a warrant was issued

Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers, edited by Lori J. Marso, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=4595234. Created from washington on 2023-03-27 05:24:07.

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ANGELA DAVIS (1944–)

for her arrest. She was charged with aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of the judge; if found guilty, she could have faced the death penalty.

Davis went into hiding for two months, becoming the third woman ever to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List. She was apprehended in New York City and held for several months in the Women’s House of Detention before being extradited to California. After eighteen months in jail, during which a global campaign was launched for her release, Angela Davis stood trial and was acquitted of all charges. Davis returned to academia as a professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1991 to 2008, where she is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita.

Angela Davis’ life and work is often singled out as an example of engaged scholarship. But in her autobiography, Davis challenges the fetish of the heroic individual:

I was reluctant to write this book because concentration on my personal history might detract from the movement which brought my case to the people in the first place. I was also unwilling to render my life as a personal “adventure”—as though there were a ‘real” person separate and apart from the political person … When I decided to write the book after all, it was because I had come to envision it as a political autobiography that emphasized the people, the events and the forces in my life that propelled me to my pre- sent commitment. Such a book might serve a very important and practical purpose.

(Davis 1988, xvi)

As a political autobiography, Davis’ book serves an important theoreti- cal purpose: to resist the individualist ontology of capitalism and, more broadly, of liberal political theory by accounting for the bios of the subject in terms of the relationships, histories, and structures that con- stitute the meaning of her life, while also resisting a reductivist account of structure as univocally determining the direction of that life. Davis’ political autobiography is both the contingent story of a person caught in the dangerous intersection of race, class, and gender at a particular historical moment, and also the collective history of a movement to analyze and dismantle those intersectional forms of domination. There is no Angela Davis without the movement, and at the same time, there is no movement without Angela Davis, George Jackson, Kathleen Cleaver, Huey Newton, Ericka Huggins, and countless others who

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ANGELA DAVIS (1944–)

have found the meaning and materiality of their lives in collective theory and praxis.

In particular, Davis’ life connects with her contribution to feminist thought in her articulation of what has come to be called “intersec- tional” feminism, her activism on behalf of prison abolition, and her investment in the politics of solidarity. Women, Race and Class (1981), for example, is an important work of intersectional feminism avant la lettre. The book tracks both the possibilities and the stumbling- blocks for solidarity across lines of gender, race, and class, from first wave movements for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, to second wave movements to end rape, reproductive injustice, and the patriarchal structure of housework. Throughout the book, Davis tracks the erasure and resistance of black women in relation to single- issue politics centered predominantly around the interests of white women or black men. She shows how feminist, anti-racist, and social- ist movements to dismantle oppressive structures of gender, race, and class, are undermined by their own marginalization of impoverished black women, arguing that the liberation of any given group depends on the liberation of all. This is only possible when the perspectives of those who are directly impacted by multiple forms of oppression are located at the center of both our theoretical analysis and our political movement-building.

The chapters of Women, Race and Class on sexual violence and reproductive politics are especially relevant for feminism and anti- racism today. In “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” Davis anticipates contemporary critiques of carceral feminism by scholars such as Beth Richie and Victoria Law, showing how white radical feminists such as Susan Brownmiller re-inscribe racist tropes of black male sexuality as a threat to (white) women through their own narrowly-focused and ahistorical critique of sexual violence. Davis situates Brownmiller’s account of rape in relation to white supremacist justifications for lynching, which both relied on the myth of the black rapist and also effaced the systemic rape of black women by white men. In so doing, she not only points out the shortcomings of Brownmiller’s analysis, but she also develops a more powerful intersectional critique of racist sexual violence through an engagement with the theory and practice of Black scholar-activists such as Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass. Here, as throughout her life’s work, Davis affirms the impor- tance of historical memory and collective movement-building, not only for the sake of political integrity and effective organizing, but also for the sake of epistemic justice and a fuller understanding of who we are and how we came to be.

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ANGELA DAVIS (1944–)

Davis’ chapter on “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” is also strikingly relevant to contemporary discussions of reproduc- tive politics. While the political terrain has shifted since the essay was written in 1981, from legal challenges to women’s access to abortion to constitutional battles over fetal personhood and the administrative micro-management of abortion clinics, Davis’ intersectional account of reproductive justice, and her historical account of the early birth control movement’s complicity with eugenic discourses and practices, is vital for navigating the dangerous intersections of reproductive poli- tics today.

Today, Angela Davis is probably best known for her account of prison abolition. In Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), she develops a powerful cri- tique of mass incarceration and the hyper-incarceration of poor people of color in the United States, calling for readers to “imagine a world without prisons” (8). Beginning with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” Davis situates the current situation of mass incarceration in an historical context of slavery, its partial abolition, the Black Codes, the convict leasing system, Jim Crow, and the continued existence of plantation prisons, some of which are literally built on former slave plantations. In addition to this genealogi- cal account of mass incarceration as an instrument of white suprema- cy, Davis also develops a structural analysis of “how gender structures the prison system” (60–83) by reproducing norms of femininity and masculinity; by disciplining prisoners with the threat and practice of sexual violence, including routine strip searches and cavity searches; and by normalizing and enforcing a binary gender system that exposes transgender and gender-nonconforming prisoners to multiple forms of violence. Her account of the prison industrial complex adds another dimension to this intersectional analysis by showing how mass incarcer- ation generates profits, both for private prison corporations like Cor- rections Corporation of America, and also in more indirect, insidious ways through military contracts, medical experiments and for-profit health care, manufacturing plants, pre-paid phone cards, and so on.

Building on this intersectional critique, Davis calls for a radical transformation, not just of the U.S. prison system, but also of the com- munity that supports and profits from this system. This is what prison abolition means for Angela Davis: both a critical movement to dis- mantle the oppressive structures that (re)produce mass incarceration, and also a creative movement to build a constellation of strategies, institutions, structures, and practices that would make prisons obsolete. Drawing on DuBois’ notion of an “abolition democracy” founded on

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the abolition of slavery, lynching, racial segregation, prisons, and the death penalty, she calls for a movement of radical reconstruction to uproot and transform the intersecting forms of domination that prison slavery both presupposes and intensifies. This constellation of alterna- tives to prison includes restorative and transformative justice, as well as a meaningful investment in public education and free health care (including mental health care and respectful, effective forms of treat- ment for addictions).

A movement for abolition democracy calls for solidarity in response to intersecting forms of oppression. This solidarity may take many forms. In her political autobiography, Davis recalls several moments— big and small—of solidarity in resistance to the prison industrial com- plex. On the first night after she is moved out of solitary confinement at the House of Detention in New York, Davis is introduced to a “good night ritual” in which the women call out to each other by name from the isolation of their cells. When someone calls, “Good night, Angela!” she feels like an “outsider to this ritual” and, not know- ing anyone’s name yet, can only answer with a lonely, unsupported, though no less vigorous, “good night” (Davis 1988, 49). Later, when supporters gather outside the jail shouting “Free Angela,” she responds by “shout[ing] one by one the names of all the sisters on the floor participating in the demonstration. ‘Free Vernell! Free Helen! Free Joan! Free Laura! Free Minnie!’ I was hoarse for the next week” (65). These two moments, humble as they may seem in the face of inter- locking systems of oppression and state violence, constitute powerful acts of community- building and world-making, even in spaces that are designed to (re)produce isolation and alienation. It is on the strength of this solidarity, and in resistance to the narrow interests of single-issue politics, that abolition democracy is founded.

Davis’s major writings

[1969/71] 2010. “Lectures on Liberation.” In Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Ed. Angela Davis. San Francisco: City Lights Open Media.

[1974] 1988. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers.

1981. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. 2005. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture. New York:

Seven Stories Press.

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