Angela Davis (1944- ) is a famous black American revolutionary, a University of California professor, a “soldier of freedom”, a fighter for equality and the country’s best-known communist. She became world famous in 1971 when she was in prison and people in both America and the Soviet Union protested to “Free Angela”.
Her big Afro and putting her fist in the air are one of those images that sticks in your mind. You see memories of it in Erykah Badu and in the New Yorker cover with Michelle Obama shown as a black revolutionary.
In 1969 Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, had her fired from UCLA for being a communist. A year later her gun was used to kill a judge. That put her on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. She went into hiding and was on the run across the country. She made the cover of Life magazine. After a two-month manhunt she was caught in New York City and thrown into prison. She was widely seen as a political prisoner.
After 16 months in prison and protests round the world, all charges against her were dropped and she walked free. She went to the Soviet Union where she received a hero’s welcome. Then she wrote her life story, edited by Toni Morrison.
Since then she has been teaching, speaking and writing, particularly against American prisons, but more generally about race and women’s rights.
For her Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are no surprise.
A fourth of all prisoners in the world are in American prisons. Prisons have become America’s way of dealing with its freed slaves, otherwise known as black people. Selling crack will put you in prison, but selling Prozac will not. America now has five times more people in prison than it did 30 years ago. It has nothing to do with the crime rate.
Just like Condoleezza Rice, she grew up in the black middle-class of Birmingham, Alabama in the days of Jim Crow. She lived in an all-black neighbourhood, near a street where everyone on the other side was white. Later she came to New York and went to high school there.
She went on to study philosophy, studying under Marcuse. She even studied in Paris and Germany for a while. Overseas she met students from Africa, which made her see that what blacks in America face is worldwide. Then in 1963, when the four black girls were killed in the church bombing in Birmingham, she knew she had to come back.
She joined SNCC, then the Black Panthers and then, after Martin Luther King was killed, the Communist Party. Like Paul Robeson, she saw communism as the best answer to racism.
Being black in America meant she could not accept society the way it is. To do so would mean saying she is not fully human. So working to change society seems natural to her.
Unlike Will Smith and John McWhorter, she believes racism is still alive and well. She says it hides behind a show of colour-blindness.
– Abagond, 2009.
See also:
She is legendary, we still have to struggle against so much, if a black woman so much as expresses a slight motion of dissent , people will immediately call the image of Angela Davies and feel threatened and call the black woman “militant, bitter or loud mouthed”.
we have not come as far as we think.
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Beyonce Knowles in my opinion should be seen and not heard. Basically if she’s not signing or dancing I don’t want to see her. Once she opens that mouth my interest is lost to never return.
Go.
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this post is confined to the topic of Angela Davis, keep it on the topic!!!
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Angela Davis always been a fighter for human rights, here and abroad. She still fighting for the rights of prisoners at Guatamano Bay and against America’s unjust drug laws which disproportionately affect people of Color.
Keep fighting, Angela. Your heart is in the right place.
La Reyna
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I don’t know what her whr is or whether she is curvy or not, but THIS is a woman! A true woman transcendes all the silly superficial stuff that people expect a woman to be.
She is an inspiration!
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I think lyfesimplified’s comment (#2) was a spill-over comment from the post just above this one, the one about a petition against Beyonce playing Angela Davis.
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i think she’s a phenomenal woman who’s strong and i agree with anon. she’s a woman and doesn’t have to change herself in order to please society on what a woman should look like. lyfesimplified, leave beyonce alone because all that is not necessary.
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Hmmm..I didn’t realize your other readers were so spicy. I just wanted to post my opinion and I probably did comment in the wrong comment form so please forgive me. But lil vina what do you mean ” all that is not necessary” “all that” is my opinion of which I have a right to. All you had to do was keep it moving if you didn’t agree.
Go.
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Right: your comment wound up under the wrong post. The post just above this one was about whether Beyonce should play Angela Davis. That is why your comment seemed out of place here.
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Hi – the picture you have of Angela Davis on the left – top row, is not a picture of Sister Angela, but is a photo of me, Denise Oliver – of the Young Lords Party, from the book Pa’lante Siempre Pa’lante.
Thanks.
Denise
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One of my aunts (mother’s sister) was mistaken for Angela Davis back in the ’60s – so much so, that she had an FBI wiretap on her phone for about 3 months! She had some fascinating stories about that…
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Denise:
I removed your picture. Thank you for the correction.
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Hey Abagond.
I always sees hypocrisy in Your posts, but this one is the best proof that You are really (sorry, but it must be said) dumb.
Better check what say Nobel Laureat Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:
“There’s a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don’t know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally, for an entire year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, eight and nine years old, were asked to do this. She was set free, as you know. Although she didn’t have too difficult a time in this country’s jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents–but more important, a group of Czech dissidents–addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?’ Angela Davis answered: `They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.’ That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you.'”
That’s all true about communism regime. If You still think like Angela that this system is good check what they do in Germany after 1945, check how many millions of people die in concentration and work camps or from hunger in communist countries. Find out what former KGB officers said about black politics. And check what they do in Chechnya (concentration camps) etc. This is nothing comparable to Abu Graib or Guantanamo. A will say like Angela: For me post/communist genocides are no surprise.
BTW. Explain me how it can be that in post-commie countries there is so much racism against blacks (although there are few of them). So it is not
I live in post commie country and sort of tragedy, trauma and social disorganization still somehow affects us. No to add welfare lags.
So Abagond be happy that You life in USA. You have moderate life, not so many problems unlike people in South Sudan (see what country make them weapons – for Rwanda also the same).
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Great post, Angela Davis is quit inspiring! You might be interested in checing this out:
Cheers!
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You know, if she hadn’t shoved dissidents under the bus as FWA referred to I might actually respect her. But alas whereas people like Chomsky actually at least tried to be consistent she did no such thing. What on earth does she know about freedom? She protested her lack of freedom here and then endorsed it abroad!
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