American political activist, professor, and writer Angela Davis. She was born on January 26th, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, and was raised in a segregated neighbourhood.
During her undergraduate years, Davis started participating in activism, joining a number of communist and civil rights organisations. Upon her graduation with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, she accepted a position as a philosophy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
For her role in the Black Panther Party, the Civil Rights Movement, and her opposition to the Vietnam War, Davis rose to prominence. Her involvement in a courtroom shooting that left four people dead in 1970 led to charges of murder, abduction, and conspiracy. Until her complete acquittal, she was imprisoned for more than a year.
Speaking out against racial injustice, police brutality, and jail reform, Davis persisted in her advocacy. She is well-known in the feminist and anti-racist movements and has written a number of works, including “Women, Race, and Class” and “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
For her advocacy and intellectual achievements, Davis has won various prizes and distinctions. She has inspired several individuals all around the world and still speaks and writes on social justice problems.
Read more about Angela Davis click here.
Angela Davis Quotes
- Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation
- Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.
- We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
- Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.
- We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
- You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
- The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?
- Radical simply means “grasping things at the root.
- In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.
- Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.
- It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.
- Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
- The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.
- Justice is indivisible. You can’t decide who gets civil rights and who doesn’t.
- We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
- To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.
