Davis,Angela Yvonne b. January 26, 1944; Birmingham,Alabama

American cultural theorist, scholar, activist, and advocate of civil rights for African Americans in the United States.

Angela Davis was largely influenced by the ideas of her mentor, Herbert Marcuse.

Her parents, Frank and Sally Davis, were teachers and had many Communist friends who brought Angela in contact with Communist youth groups, which she joined. She left home at the age of fifteen after she received a scholarship from the American Friends Southern Negro Student Committee to attend Elisabeth Irwin, an integrated private high school in New York, where she began to study Socialist and Communist philosophies. She was particularly interested in mass movements designed to overthrow political domina­tion by elites.

In 1961 Davis won a scholarship to Brandeis University, where she studied French literature. Her junior year she stud­ied at the Sorbonne. Back in Brandeis for her senior year in 1964, she read philoso­phy with Marcuse, who became her gradu­ate adviser and mentor. His notion, that only independent intellectuals could be­come revolutionary leaders, was readily ac­cepted and used by the student movement in the United States and Europe. Marcuse introduced Davis to the neo-Marxist theo­ries of the Frankfurt School and sent her to the Institute for Social Research in Frank­furt am Main after her graduation. There she studied with Marcuse’s former col­leagues, Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Haber­mas, and Oskar Negt, from 1965 to 1967. Living with Socialist student leaders in the so-called Factory she experienced the hey­day of the German student movement. While studying in West Germany, she re­peatedly visited the GDR, where she met representatives of the Communist Party (CP) of the United States.

Away from home, she closely followed the emergence of the civil rights move­ment. After her return to the United States, Davis worked on her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Marcuse, who was then teaching at the University of Califor­nia at San Diego. She became politically active with the Black Panthers, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and Ron Karenga’s US-organization in graduate school. In 1968, she joined the CP of the United States and committed herself to the work in the all-black section called the “Che Lumumba Club,” In order to fulfill the requirements of her doctorate, Davis had to teach for one year and was ap­pointed to the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1969. After learning of her membership in the CP, the governing body of the university, the Board of Regents, and the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, wanted her out of the uni­versity. After a battle in court, Davis was dismissed. In 1970 Davis was charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide be­cause one of her friends, Jonathan Jackson, had used guns registered in her name in an unsuccessful attempt to free a prisoner dur­ing a court session in the Marin County Center in San Rafael, California, on Aug 7. After Davis had been arrested, a worldwide campaign began for her defense. Angela Davis Solidarity Committees had been founded in East and West Germany. At school, East German kids drew pictures of her, signed them with “Freedom for Angela Davis,” and sent them to the president of the United States, Richard Nixon. In West Germany, the Angela Davis Solidarity Committee in Frankfurt am Main staged a petition to President Nixon to free her.

On June 4, 1972, the jury acquitted her of all charges. Angela Davis became a symbol for the struggle of the “other,” left­ist America in the GDR. Kindergartens were decorated with her picture; schools were named after her. When Davis was fi­nally set free, East Germans felt that they had accomplished something.

Davis’s mentor, Marcuse, had sup­ported the solidarity campaign on behalf of Angela Davis after she was arrested. He spoke at the Frankfurt am Main solidarity conference organized for her by the Offen­bach Socialist Office, the largest indepen­dent group of the New Left in West Ger­many. However, he disagreed with her orthodox communism, which did not allow for criticism of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. For Davis, this issue was compli­cated since the Eastern European Commu­nist countries had supported her struggle for freedom.

After her release from prison, Davis taught black philosophy and women’s studies at San Francisco State College, Stanford University, and Claremont Col­lege. In 1980 and 1984 she ran on the Communist Party ticket for the vice presi­dency. Since 1991 she has been teaching history of consciousness at the University of California. In 1994, she received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. She left the CP in the same year, when she realized that that body could not be reformed and freed from doctrinaire thinking. To fill the void, Davis focused her energies on the Conference Commit­tees for Democracy and Socialism in the United States that she cofounded. In an interview with Neues Deutschland (New Germany) in 2003, she described the soli­darity, especially from East Germans, that she had experienced during her time in prison, as a major motivation in her ongo­ing fight for her political and social ac­tivism. In 2004, Angela Davis was a tenured professor teaching the history of consciousness at the University of Califor­nia at Santa Cruz, an interdisciplinary pro­gram that encompasses philosophy, litera­ture, and history.

Christiane Rosch

See also Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund;

Frankfurt School; Marcuse, Herbert

References and Further Reading

Davis, Angela Yvonne. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. New York: Third Press, 1971.

----------. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New

York: International Publishers, 1984.

Marcuse, Herbert. Die Studentenbewegung und ihre Folgen: Nachgelassene Schriften. Vol. 4. Springe: Verlag zu Klampen, 2004.

Nadelson, Regina. Who Is Angela Davis? The

Biography of a Revolutionary. New York: P H. Wyden, 1972.