Angela Davis: MLK Jr. Commemoration Speaker 2019

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis, PhD, has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial and gender justice. Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College and UC Berkeley. She has also taught at UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. At the University of California Santa Cruz she is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness – an interdisciplinary PhD program – and of Feminist Studies.

Davis has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.

Davis has authored numerous books including "“Abolition Democracy” and “Are Prisons Obsolete?” about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, a new edition of “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and two collections of essays titled “The Meaning of Freedom” and “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.”

Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison. Like many educators, Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.