Angela Davis

Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, a city marked by severe racial segregation and violence. She grew up in a middle-class family, experiencing discrimination firsthand and organizing interracial study groups as a teen. Davis studied abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris, becoming a master scholar influenced by philosophy and radical thought. In the late 1960s, she joined the Communist Party USA, affiliated with the Black Panther Party and SNCC, and became an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA. Her activism peaked with the 1970 Marin County courthouse incident, leading to her arrest and acquittal by an all-white jury in 1972. Post-acquittal, Davis toured communist countries, received the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1979, and co-chaired the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. She returned to academia, teaching at UC Santa Cruz, authored influential books, and founded Critical Resistance in 1997. Identifying as a lesbian in the late 1990s, she advocates for LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, and Palestinian solidarity.