Newswise — Angela Y. Davis is an activist. Known as an organizer and philosopher, she was associated with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the Communist Party of the United States of America. Still an activist, she now works for racial and gender equality and for prison abolition.
A professor of history of consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Davis will be the 2007 Commencement speaker at Grinnell College on Monday, May 21. Davis will address the graduating seniors and guests to open the Commencement ceremony, which begins at 10 a.m. with a procession by students and faculty to the Central Campus.
Known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad, Davis' political activism began when she was a child growing up in Birmingham, Ala., and continued through her high school years in New York.
But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the philosophy department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970 she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her 16-month incarceration, a massive international "Free Angela Davis" campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.
Davis's long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Generally speaking, a Soledad Brother was an African American man serving time in the state prison in Soledad, Calif., a maximum-security prison at the time. Specifically, the term refers to one of three convicted felons at Soledad charged with killing a guard in retaliation for the 1970 murder of three black activists at the prison.
Today Davis remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a member of the advisory board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, and is currently working on a comparative study of women's imprisonment in the United States, the Netherlands, and Cuba.
During the last 25 years, Davis has lectured in all of the 50 states, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of five books, including "Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class" (Vintage, 1983), "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday" (Vintage, 1999), and "The Angela Y. Davis Reader" (Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1998).
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