Angela Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.^[3] Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt, where she became increasingly engaged in far-left politics. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies—including conspiracy to murder—she was held in jail for more than a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972.

During the 1980s, Davis was twice the Communist Party's candidate for the Vice President of the United States. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex. In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke away from the CPUSA to help establish the CCDS. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008.

Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize (since 2025 she is its last living recipient) and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame.^[4] Due to accusations that she advocates political violence and due to her support of the Soviet Union,^[5] she has been a controversial figure. In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" edition.^[6] In 2020, she was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.^[7] In 2025, Davis was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of Cambridge.^[8] Davis was also honored in 2025 with the José Muñoz Award given by CLAGS (The Center for LGBTQ Studies) at the CUNY Graduate Center.^[9]