Angela Yvonne Davis was born on January 26,1944 and is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
64 Facts About Angela Davis
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Angela Davis writes extensively on class, gender, race, and the US prison system.
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Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt.
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In 1970, guns belonging to Angela Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed.
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Angela Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
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Angela Davis was born on January 26,1944, in Birmingham, Alabama.
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Angela Davis's family lived in the "Dynamite Hill" neighborhood, which was marked in the 1950s by the bombings of houses in an attempt to intimidate and drive out middle-class black people who had moved there.
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Angela Davis occasionally spent time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City.
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Angela Davis's siblings include two brothers, Ben and Reginald, and a sister, Fania.
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Angela Davis grew up surrounded by communist organizers and thinkers, who significantly influenced her intellectual development.
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Angela Davis was involved in her church youth group as a child and attended Sunday school regularly.
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Angela Davis participated in the Girl Scouts 1959 national roundup in Colorado.
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Angela Davis chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village.
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Angela Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her class.
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Angela Davis encountered the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and became his student.
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Angela Davis returned home in 1963 to a Federal Bureau of Investigation interview about her attendance at the communist-sponsored festival.
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Angela Davis was accepted by the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program.
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Angela Davis was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed.
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Angela Davis grieved deeply as she was personally acquainted with the victims.
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Angela Davis wrote in her autobiography that Marcuse was approachable and helpful.
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Angela Davis began making plans to attend the University of Frankfurt for graduate work in philosophy.
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Many of her roommates were active in the radical Socialist German Student Union, and Angela Davis participated in some SDS actions.
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Marcuse had moved to a position at the University of California, San Diego, and Angela Davis followed him there after her two years in Frankfurt.
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Angela Davis traveled to London to attend a conference on "The Dialectics of Liberation".
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The black contingent at the conference included the Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael and the British Michael X Although moved by Carmichael's rhetoric, Davis was reportedly disappointed by her colleagues' black nationalist sentiments and their rejection of communism as a "white man's thing".
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Angela Davis joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA named for revolutionaries Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, of Cuba and Congo, respectively.
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Angela Davis earned a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1968.
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Angela Davis earned a doctorate in philosophy at the Humboldt University in East Berlin.
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Angela Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates who were accused and charged with the killing of a prison guard at Soledad Prison.
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Angela Davis had purchased several of the firearms Jackson used in the attack, including the shotgun used to shoot Haley, which she bought at a San Francisco pawn shop two days before the incident.
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Angela Davis was found to have been corresponding with one of the inmates involved.
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In September 1972, Angela Davis visited East Germany, where she met the state's leader Erich Honecker, received an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig and the Star of People's Friendship from Walter Ulbricht.
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Angela Davis visited the Berlin Wall, where she laid flowers at the memorial for Reinhold Huhn, an East German guard who had been killed by a man who was trying to escape with his family across the border in 1962.
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On September 10,1977,14 months before the Temple's mass murder-suicide, Angela Davis spoke via amateur radio telephone "patch" to members of his Peoples Temple living in Jonestown in Guyana.
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Angela Davis's letter called Jones "a humanitarian in the broadest sense of the word".
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In 1972, Jiri Pelikan had written an open letter asking her to support Czechoslovak prisoners; Angela Davis had refused, believing that the Czechoslovak prisoners were undermining the Husak government and that Pelikan, in exile in Italy, was attacking his own country.
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Angela Davis was a lecturer at the Claremont Black Studies Center at the Claremont Colleges in 1975.
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Angela Davis's classes moved from one classroom to another and the students were sworn to secrecy.
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In 2020 it was announced that Davis would be the Ena H Thompson Distinguished Lecturer in Pomona College's history department, welcoming her back after 45 years.
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Angela Davis taught a women's studies course at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978 and was a professor of ethnic studies at the San Francisco State University from at least 1980 to 1984.
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Angela Davis was a professor in the History of Consciousness and the Feminist Studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Rutgers University from 1991 to 2008.
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Angela Davis was a distinguished visiting professor at Syracuse University in the spring of 1992 and October 2010, and was the Randolph Visiting Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Vassar College in 1995.
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In 2014, Angela Davis returned to UCLA as a regents' lecturer.
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In 2016, Angela Davis was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in Healing and Social Justice from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco during its 48th annual commencement ceremony.
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Angela Davis accepted the Communist Party USA's nomination for vice president, as Gus Hall's running mate, in 1980 and in 1984.
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Angela Davis left the party in 1991, founding the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
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Angela Davis's group broke from the Communist Party USA because of the latter's support of the 1991 Soviet coup d'etat attempt after the fall of the Soviet Union and tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
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Angela Davis is a major figure in the prison abolition movement.
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Angela Davis advocates focusing social efforts on education and building "engaged communities" to solve various social problems now handled through state punishment.
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Angela Davis has continued lecturing throughout her career, including at numerous universities.
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Angela Davis opposed the 1995 Million Man March, arguing that the exclusion of women from this event promoted male chauvinism.
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Angela Davis said that Louis Farrakhan and other organizers appeared to prefer that women take subordinate roles in society.
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On October 31,2011, Angela Davis spoke at the Philadelphia and Washington Square Occupy Wall Street assemblies.
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In 2012, Angela Davis was awarded the 2011 Blue Planet Award, an award given for contributions to humanity and the planet.
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At the 27th Empowering Women of Color Conference in 2012, Angela Davis said she was a vegan.
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Angela Davis has called for the release of Rasmea Odeh, associate director at the Arab American Action Network, who was convicted of immigration fraud in relation to her hiding of a previous murder conviction.
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Angela Davis was an honorary co-chair of the January 21,2017, Women's March on Washington, which occurred the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration.
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On January 7,2019, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute rescinded Angela Davis's Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award, saying she "does not meet all of the criteria".
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In November 2019, along with other public figures, Angela Davis signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia, and racism in much of the democratic world", and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election.
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On January 20,2020, Angela Davis gave the Memorial Keynote Address at the University of Michigan's MLK Symposium.
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Angela Davis was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
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From 1980 to 1983, Angela Davis was married to Hilton Braithwaite.
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In Renato Guttuso's painting The Funerals of Togliatti, Angela Davis is depicted, among other figures of communism, in the left framework, near the author's self-portrait, Elio Vittorini, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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In 1971, black playwright Elvie Moore wrote the play Angela is Happening, depicting Davis on trial with figures such as Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and H Rap Brown as eyewitnesses proclaiming her innocence.