Biography of Angela Davis
Angela Yvonne Davis was born on January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama amidst the time of racial laws and segregation. Growing up as an African-American girl, Angela Davis lived in a neighborhood with mixed races and had to face many racial conflicts. Both of Angela’s parents are college graduates and promoted the value of education to their children. Angela was excited to learn at a young age, she attended an elementary and middle school for African-American children. Further into her academic career Angela was accepted by a school program, which placed African-American students in the south to attend integrated schools in the north. That wasn’t the end to Angela’s education she then went to another integrated high school in New York and attended college in Massachusetts, Frankfurt, Germany and the University of San Diego. Angela is well known for her association with the Black Panther Party (BPP), an organization for African-Americans to support civil rights and self-defense that at the time were gathering supporters to release a group of imprisoned African-American men known as the “Soledad Brothers”. She was mistakenly sent to jail for owning a gun that was used in the murder of a county judge by an attempted Soledad Brothers prison release. She hid from the police at first but was then caught in New York and sent to a Women’s Detention Center. Angela was then tried in one of the most famous court cases in American history and found not guilty of the murder. After eighteen months of imprisonment she was released from the Detention Center. After Angela’s release from prison she followed other African-American activists to Cuba to enlighten Afro-Cubans of American Civil Rights Movements. Angela is involved in many parties including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and has founded the grassroots Critical Resistance organization and the Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Before finding the Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism she was an active member of the Communist Party USA. Angela is a strong activist for gender and racial equality, socialism and for prison abolition. She does many public speeches nationally and internationally including speeches about the death penalty, women’s rights and recently a speech at a bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender conference. Angela is known nationally especially for her work in Russia and Cuba. Angela Davis is currently a professor of history of Consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz where she continues to voice her thoughts to the world.
