Angela Davis became world-famous in her twenties when the FBI put her on its most wanted list. Since securing her freedom, Davis has worked for half a century to expose the practice of repression in formally democratic states like the US.
Angela Davis speaks at Mills College on October 23, 1969, after getting fired from UCLA for her communist politics. (Duke Downey / the San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
At the age of twenty-six, Angela Davis became one of the world’s most famous political prisoners and a revolutionary icon, her image as recognizable as that of Mao Zedong or Che Guevara. The circumstances that led to her imprisonment were complex and partly contrived.
In August 1970, several guns that were registered in Davis’s name had been brandished in an attempt to liberate three incarcerated black men at a courthouse in Marin County, California. After San Quentin prison guards opened fire, four people were killed, including a district judge. Davis had no prior knowledge of the events, but she was implicated on account of the guns.
More significantly, she was a known member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a rising black activist: the state wanted her dead or locked up. It issued an arrest warrant on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder, which carried the death penalty, and Davis was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list.
Davis credits the international pressure campaign waged by the CPUSA and the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (NUCFAD) with saving her life. Between 1970 and 1972, she spent seventeen months in prison before she was released on bail and finally acquitted of all charges. During this period, letters of solidarity from places like Cuba, France, East Germany, and the Soviet Union flooded the San Jose jail and courthouse where she was set to be tried. For her global audience, it was not Davis on trial but America’s own criminal justice system: Could it acquit a black woman communist who was so obviously innocent?
What makes Davis’s example remarkable is that she has never stopped repaying the debt she feels she owes the international left for securing her freedom — and her life. From the boycott movement against South African apartheid to Occupy and the George Floyd rebellion, she has shown up for nearly every mass mobilization in the last half-century. Amid mounting repression and censure, she has been steadfast in her support for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Most significantly, she has provided the Left with one of the most trenchant critiques of the US security state’s deep entanglement in exploitation and oppression, identifying the nexus of obstacles to revolutionary organizing in the present.
The Johannesburg of the South
Davis was born in 1944 under a system of racial apartheid in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father ran a gas station; her mother was active in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, a left-wing civil rights organization with a strong communist membership.
In Birmingham, Alabama, known as the ‘Johannesburg of the South,’ the threat of white violence was constant.
In Birmingham, known as the “Johannesburg of the South,” the threat of white violence was constant. The Davis family lived in a neighborhood that was branded “Dynamite Hill” because of the frequent bombings of black homeowners. They lost neighbors and friends to racist attacks, including the Ku Klux Klan’s 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which shaped Davis’s political consciousness acutely.
Davis attended segregated schools until the age of fourteen, when she was accepted by a Quaker program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. She chose New York’s Elisabeth Irwin High School for its progressive reputation.
At Elisabeth Irwin, Davis read the Communist Manifesto, which hit her “like a bolt of lightning,” as she later recalled. She began to conceive of black liberation as part of a broader workers’ struggle. She joined Advance, a socialist youth organization founded by several of her “red diaper” peers. They included Eugene Dennis Jr, son of the communist leader of the same name; Bettina Aptheker, daughter of the communist historian Herbert Aptheker; and Mary Lou Patterson, whose father, the communist lawyer William L. Patterson, had delivered the famous petition “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations in protest of black lynchings in the American South.
The youth group organized demonstrations against nuclear testing and picketed Woolworth’s for its segregated lunch counters. They convened in the basement of the Apthekers among the papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, which Herbert Aptheker was then storing.
Much later, Davis would return to Du Bois’s notion of “abolition democracy” to conceptualize what radical social transformation would entail in the absence of the overthrow of the state. But at the age of seventeen, revolution still seemed distinctly on the horizon to her.
The Foreign Front
In 1961, Davis enrolled at Brandeis University. She was one of three black students in her incoming class. Her attention was soon drawn to the leading left-wing intellectual on campus, Herbert Marcuse.
The Frankfurt School’s interpretation of Marxism was a natural fit for Davis, already alert to the shared, if often thwarted, interests of communism and black liberation.
Marcuse belonged to a cohort of German Jewish Marxist intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School. Forced into American exile in the 1930s, they had begun to reinterpret classical Marxist categories like class and exploitation to account for their historical experience of eliminationist antisemitism. By the 1950s, they had amassed an extensive catalogue of the material and psychic impediments to collective revolt. In their reading, racialized violence functioned as an outward manifestation of the crisis tendencies of capitalism and a key component in the state’s arsenal for disrupting workers’ liberation struggles.
The Frankfurt School’s interpretation of Marxism was a natural fit for Davis, already alert to the shared, if often thwarted, interests of communism and black liberation. In turn, her intellectual eagerness and remarkable proclivity for grappling with the contradictions of German idealist philosophy — the Frankfurt School’s preferred analytic framework — impressed Marcuse, who became a lifelong mentor.
Through the connection with Marcuse, Davis moved to Frankfurt in 1965 to pursue graduate work in philosophy with Theodor Adorno. She quickly fell in with the hard core of Frankfurt’s branch of the German Socialist Student Union (SDS). She moved into a dilapidated factory building with several SDS members, including the student leader Hans-Jürgen Krahl.
By day, they attended classes at the university with Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas. By night, they transcribed and mimeographed out-of-print works of critical theory, creating pirate editions that they sold at SDS events to finance their political activities.
Between 1965 and 1967, the German SDS’s political activities centered anti-colonial liberation struggles, most acutely in Vietnam. Students were convinced that decolonization would rupture the global capitalist continuum, and they were determined to obstruct the neocolonial machinations of the United States, for which West Germany served as a crucial military outpost. They demanded the dissolution of NATO, built out extraparliamentary organizational forms, contested media disinformation, and fought the police.
Their militancy impressed Davis, who would later recall the seriousness with which her SDS comrades had sought to develop “forms of practical resistance” capable of breaking through the apathy of their own society and bridging global divisions. The experience underscored the possibilities of cross-class, multiracial, and international coalition building, which Davis would champion for the rest of her life.
Critical Theory and Revolutionary Practice
In 1967, Davis decided to return home to join the black liberation struggle. Marcuse had since relocated to the newly established University of California, San Diego (UCSD), so she enrolled in their graduate program in philosophy and began scoping out the rich landscape of radical political organizing in Southern California.
All of Davis’s political work focused on racist police violence and public consciousness-raising.
Over the next two years, Davis organized with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), and the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black chapter of the CPUSA where she met some of her closest comrades, including the couple Franklin and Kendra Alexander and the siblings Charlene and Deacon Mitchell. All of Davis’s political work focused on racist police violence and public consciousness-raising. However, the organizations in which she was active had different views about the strategic path and content of black liberation, and they sometimes fell out.
In 1969, Davis was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), having officially advanced to candidacy at UCSD with a dissertation topic on the problem of force, or violence, in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Her preliminary work indicated that Kant’s capacious notion of moral freedom logically sanctioned an individual right of resistance and even revolution, which was otherwise denied in his proto-bourgeois political philosophy. True to her Marxist training, Davis argued that this theoretical contradiction, which found its contemporary corollary in debates surrounding the legality of activism, could only be resolved in practice, through the total transformation of the bourgeois constitutional state.
Before the fall semester at UCLA could begin, however, an FBI informant publicly outed Davis as a member of the Communist Party, and she was fired by the University of California’s Board of Regents. Overnight, she became a lightning rod for anti-communist, racist, misogynist, and anti-intellectual attacks and death threats.
Davis successfully contested her firing in court, citing her First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly and her right as a professor to academic freedom. But she had found a determined enemy in California’s right-wing governor, Ronald Reagan, who contrived to have her fired again at the end of the academic year.
Meanwhile, Davis used her newfound publicity to spotlight the work of the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, which she had joined in February 1970. George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette were three black men incarcerated at Soledad Prison who had been charged with the murder of a white prison guard. The defense committee maintained that they were being targeted for their political agitation in prison, and they sought to drum up public support for the case.
It was through her work on the defense committee that Davis befriended George Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, who would ultimately lead the failed attempt to liberate three other black men — James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee — at the Marin County courthouse in August 1970. The Soledad Brothers were ultimately acquitted in March 1972, although George Jackson was already dead by that stage, having been killed by a prison guard during another escape attempt in August 1971.
A Constant Struggle
In November 1970, Marcuse wrote to Davis, then incarcerated in New York, that he had made an important philosophical discovery while rereading her academic writings: “Freedom is not only the goal of liberation, it begins with liberation; it is there to be ‘practiced.’ This, I confess, I learned from you!” Davis still abides by this belief, as evident in her better-known mantra, “Freedom is a constant struggle.”
Freedom, she insists, is not a fixed property. It cannot be bestowed upon a person, least of all by a state. By the same token, it cannot be reduced to the negative demonstration that we are free because there are others who are unfree — others whom the state has locked up. To be worthy of the concept, freedom must have its own positive material content, which, because it does not yet exist, must first be enacted.
Davis’s own experience behind bars was formative for her critical understanding not only of the material negation of freedom that imprisonment constitutes but also of freedom’s dynamic practice. In turn, the abolitionist project that she began envisioning from the San Jose jailhouse has transformed the Left’s understanding of the contemporary political terrain.
The abolitionist project that Davis began envisioning from the San Jose jailhouse has transformed the Left’s understanding of the contemporary political terrain.
While incarcerated in 1971, Davis wrote with her communist comrade and friend Bettina Aptheker that the state’s recourse to violent repression indicated that its institutions, including the prison, were “impervious to meaningful reform” and “must be transformed in the revolutionary sense.” A page later, they demanded “the abolition” of the prison system as such.
Davis and Aptheker’s abolitionist call departed from the orthodox focus on organizing the industrial shop floor by intention. In the United States, blue-collar employment had been declining since the 1950s, and those workers who had been historically last to enter the industrial wage relation — black people and other minorities — were the first to be excluded from it, reduced to the status of an underclass defined by the revolving doors of wage precarity and what Davis then called the “law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus.”
By retraining her focus on the police and the carceral obstacles to class struggle, Davis sought to harness what she believed to be the greater oppositional thrust of those proletarians who were most vulnerable to economic redundancy and state violence. She also aimed to directly counter the state’s capacity to continue coercing them into submission long after the racial capitalist order had ceased to provide the requisite wages for the self-reproduction of the working class. Abolition was a revolutionary strategy, in other words, attuned to the contradictions of late capitalism.
But abolition, as would become clear, was also a revolutionary strategy befitting an era of left-wing retrenchment. The New Left’s hope for revolutionary rupture had not panned out, not least because of the state’s enormous capacity for repression. We can debate the shortcomings and blind spots of the New Left’s strategy, but its “failure” had more to do with government programs like COINTELPRO than with hippies and horizontalism.
In the wake of its defeat, the goals of shutting down prisons, rewriting sentencing laws, blocking the construction of new jails and prisons, and institutionalizing restorative alternatives to incarceration have become diffuse, piecemeal ways to extend the vision of radical social transformation while also eroding the state’s counterrevolutionary capacity. The strategic significance of this work has only become clearer as Stop Cop City activists face RICO charges while pro-Palestine activists are subjected to police and vigilante violence, censure, and the loss of employment.
Now that she’s eighty, Davis’s continued support for mass protests is beginning to resemble that of her erstwhile mentor. In the 1960s, Marcuse acquired the honorific “the grandfather of the New Left,” and youth activists even amended their slogan to read: “Don’t trust anybody over 30 — except for Herbert Marcuse.”
While he was flattered, Marcuse insisted that he was not the cause of the revolts. Instead, what he had tried to do was to identify the material and psychic fissures within society that were ripe for rupture, and then to theoretically consolidate the inchoate groups that emerged from those fissures into a revolutionary coalition. Davis has done something similar, and we can still learn from her example.