Angela Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis is an American social theorist, philosopher, academic and political activist, born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. She is distinguished professor emerita of feminist studies and history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught from 1991 until her retirement in 2008. She studied at Brandeis University, the University of Frankfurt, the University of California, San Diego, and Humboldt University of Berlin, and became a prominent figure in the Communist Party USA and the second-wave feminist movement. Her scholarship examines the intersections of race, gender, class and the American prison system; in 1997 she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working toward the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. She was tried and acquitted in 1972 on capital charges connected to a 1970 courtroom takeover, and has remained an influential and often controversial public intellectual on questions of race, gender and incarceration.