Concept

Angela Davis

Overview

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, author and social theorist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), running for Vice President in the 1980 and 1984 elections under that party. She is also a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She has been active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, she was held in jail for more than a year, before being acquitted of all charges in 1972. While in prison, she was often considered a political prisoner.

In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke away from the CPUSA to help establish the CCDS. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex.

Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize (since 2025 she is its last living recipient) and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Due to accusations that she advocates political violence and due to her support of the Soviet Union, she has been a controversial figure. In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" edition. In 2020, she was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2025, Davis was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of Cambridge.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Again, since the first or spontaneous stage of education is entirely to be left to women, it is most desirable that they should themselves have passed through the second or systematic stage. The only department with which they need not concern themselves, is what is called professional education. But this, as I have before observed, is not susceptible of regular organization. Professional skill can only be acquired…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
States what Angela Davis is.
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And in the German Social Democracy the Revisionists lifted their heads, encouraged by history's having given them such a revenge. The South Germans perpetrated their demonstrative vote for the budget. The Marxists were compelled to change from offensive to defensive tactics. The efforts of the Left wing to draw the Party into a more active policy were unsuccessful. The dominating Center swung more and more towards…
Leon Trotsky, The Bolsheviki and World Peace
Close in meaning to Angela Davis; the term itself is not named.
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While she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to be "master," and inscribes "progress" of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible obviousness: WOMAN RETROGRADES. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has DECLINED in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims; and the "emancipation of woman," insofar as it is desired and demanded by women…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Close in meaning to Angela Davis; the term itself is not named.
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Angela Davis

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