Who is Angela Davis?
Born in Birmingham, Alabama on 26 January 1944, Angela Yvonne Davis grew up in a segregated society that was about to experience a great deal of change. Gifted with a brilliant mind, Davis applied for a program operated by the American Friends Service Committee that allowed minority children growing up in the Deep South region of the United States to seek an education in racially integrated schools in the northern part of the country. At the age of fourteen, Angela Davis began classes at the Elizabeth Irwin High School, located in Greenwich Village in New York. It was during her time at Elizabeth Irwin that Davis had the change to learn about the tenets of socialism and communism. Eventually, Angela Davis became active with the Advance program, which was sponsored by the Communist Party USA. Davis also associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while attending college. After completing her education, Angela Davis began work as an acting assistant professor on
The Biography of a Revolutionary, Regina Nadelson, (New York: Peter H. Wyden, 1972), p. 65]. One could really argue that not only did the educational institutions that Angela Davis attended, or was otherwise associated with–Elisabeth Irwin, Brandeis, the Sorbonne, Goethe University in Frankfurt, UCSC–play such a pivotal role in her life that they laid the groundwork for her eventually becoming a revolutionary, but one institution, UCLA, was directly responsible for catapulting her into the legend of near mythical proportions that she is today. Oddly enough, 1989 marks the 20th anniversary of Davis’s dismissal from the University of California at Los Angeles where she had hoped to settle down and teach philophosphy while working on her Ph.D. with her mentor and former teacher from Brandeis, philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, then stationed at the University of California at San Diego. The firing of Angela Davis in September, 1969, because she was an admitted member of the Communist party,
