Thinker

Angela Davis

(1944–present) • American

Black Feminism Marxist Feminism Critical Race Theory Abolition Feminism

Introduction

Angela Davis (born 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and iconic figure whose work synthesizes Black radical tradition, Marxist feminism, and prison abolition into powerful analysis of how race, class, gender, and state violence intersect. From her role as Black Panther and Communist Party member through false imprisonment (1970-1972) generating international “Free Angela Davis” campaign, to her pioneering scholarship on women, race, class, and mass incarceration, Davis embodies the organic intellectual—theory emerging from and serving political struggle.

Davis’s central insights include: (1) prison abolition—prisons don’t solve problems but reproduce racial capitalism and patriarchy, requiring abolition not reform; (2) intersectionality—race, class, gender, and sexuality are mutually constitutive systems impossible to analyze separately; (3) racial capitalism—capitalism is inherently racial, with slavery foundational rather than exceptional; (4) reproductive justice—reproductive freedom requires economic security, racial justice, and freedom from state violence; (5) radical imagination—liberation requires envisioning worlds currently unthinkable.

Major works include Women, Race & Class (1981)—analyzing how race and gender shaped labor movement and feminism; Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)—systematic argument for abolition; and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2016)—connecting Palestine solidarity, Black Lives Matter, and global liberation movements. Davis shows that liberation movements must be internationalist, anti-capitalist, and attentive to how power operates through multiple, intersecting systems.

Understanding Davis is essential for contemporary critical theory, abolitionist organizing, Black feminism, and analyzing carceral state, racial capitalism, and intersectional struggle.

Life and Political Formation

Early Life and Education (1944-1967)

Born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama—“Bombingham” for frequent racist bombings targeting Black communities. Davis grew up experiencing Jim Crow segregation’s daily violence while witnessing Black communities’ resistance. Family friends included victims of 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four Black girls—personal connection to racist terror shaping Davis’s political commitment.

Davis participated in interracial study groups, communist-organized youth activities, and civil rights movement organizing. Attending segregated schools then integrated ones, she experienced racism’s multiple forms—from violent terror to liberal condescension.

Moving to New York for high school (American Friends Service Committee scholarship), Davis attended Elisabeth Irwin High School—progressive institution introducing her to socialist ideas, Marxist texts, and Left organizing. Brandeis University (1961-1965) provided rigorous education—studying with Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt School Marxist) who profoundly influenced her thinking, introducing critical theory synthesizing Marx, Freud, and philosophy.

Graduate study in Frankfurt (1965-1967) immersed Davis in Frankfurt School critical theory, studying with Theodor Adorno and attending lectures. Returning to U.S. for PhD at UC San Diego, Davis studied again with Marcuse while becoming increasingly involved in radical organizing.

Black Panthers, Communist Party, and Political Persecution (1967-1972)

Davis joined Black Panther Party and Communist Party USA (CPUSA), combining Black revolutionary nationalism with Marxist anti-capitalism. Both organizations faced intense state repression—FBI’s COINTELPRO systematically infiltrated, disrupted, and destroyed Black radical organizations through surveillance, harassment, imprisonment, and assassination.

Soledad Brothers Case: Davis supported Soledad Brothers—three Black prisoners (including George Jackson) charged with killing prison guard. When Jonathan Jackson (George’s brother) attempted courthouse raid to free prisoners, taking hostages with guns registered to Davis, she became subject of nationwide manhunt.

Fugitive and Imprisonment (1970-1972): FBI placed Davis on Ten Most Wanted list; she went underground, eventually captured. Imprisoned for 16 months awaiting trial on charges of murder, kidnapping, conspiracy. International “Free Angela Davis” campaign mobilized massive support—protests, cultural production, solidarity from communist countries, celebrities, and grassroots activists worldwide.

Acquittal (1972): All-white jury acquitted Davis of all charges, vindicating her claim of political persecution. Yet experience of imprisonment—solitary confinement, threats, systemic dehumanization—profoundly shaped her subsequent work on prisons, state violence, and carceral logic.

Academic Career and Continued Activism (1972-present)

After acquittal, Davis continued organizing while pursuing academic career—teaching at San Francisco State, San Francisco Art Institute, UC Santa Cruz, and other institutions. Her scholarship never separated from organizing—books emerged from movement work; teaching served political education; university platform amplified activism.

Davis ran for Vice President on Communist Party ticket (1980, 1984), advocated for political prisoners, supported international liberation movements, and connected struggles globally—from South African anti-apartheid to Palestinian liberation to Latin American revolutionary movements.

Recent decades focused on prison abolition, founding Critical Resistance (1997)—grassroots organization building movement to abolish prison-industrial complex. Davis lectures globally, supports Black Lives Matter, defends Palestinian rights, and connects contemporary struggles to longer histories of resistance.

Major Works and Concepts

Women, Race & Class (1981)

Foundational Black feminist text analyzing how race, class, and gender shaped U.S. history:

Intersectional Labor History: Showing how racism and sexism divided working class:

  • Black women performed most brutal labor (slavery, domestic work, agricultural labor) yet excluded from “women’s” protective legislation
  • White women’s feminism often reproduced racism—supporting Black women’s exclusion from protection, ignoring their specific oppression
  • Labor movement prioritized white male workers, excluding women and Black workers
  • Capitalism benefited from these divisions, preventing unified working-class organization

Abolitionism and Women’s Rights: Analyzing 19th-century connections and tensions:

  • Black women abolitionists (Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman) linked slavery and women’s oppression
  • White suffragists often deployed racism—arguing white women deserved vote over Black men
  • After Black male suffrage (15th Amendment, 1870), white feminists abandoned anti-racism
  • Class divisions—middle-class white feminists prioritized professional access over working-class concerns

Rape and Racism: Showing how rape accusations served racial terror:

  • Black men falsely accused of raping white women, justifying lynching
  • Black women systematically raped by white men with impunity
  • Rape as weapon of racial domination requiring anti-racist analysis
  • Contemporary anti-rape organizing must address racism, not reinforce carceral solutions

Reproductive Rights: Connecting birth control, eugenics, and racism:

  • Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement contained eugenicist racism
  • Forced sterilization disproportionately targeted Black, Indigenous, poor women
  • Reproductive freedom requires economic security, not just legal access
  • Black women developed “reproductive justice” framework addressing this

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

Systematic argument for prison abolition:

Prisons as “Common Sense”: Prisons seem inevitable, natural response to harm. Yet prisons are historically recent (18th-19th centuries) and geographically specific. Many societies addressed harm without caging. Prisons’ apparent inevitability reflects ideological naturalization, not necessity.

Prisons Don’t Work: By prisons’ own stated goals (rehabilitation, deterrence, incapacitation), they fail:

  • Don’t reduce crime—U.S. has world’s highest incarceration rate yet high crime rates
  • Don’t rehabilitate—prison is criminogenic, training and networking criminals
  • Don’t deter—most imprisoned people were desperate, addicted, or mentally ill
  • Create more harm—destroying families, communities, life chances

Prison-Industrial Complex: Term Davis popularized, describing how:

  • Private corporations profit from imprisonment (CoreCivic, GEO Group)
  • Prison labor exploits captive workforce
  • Rural white communities depend on prison jobs
  • Politicians use “tough on crime” rhetoric
  • Media sensationalizes crime, supporting carceral expansion
  • Economic incentives drive mass incarceration independent of crime rates

Slavery’s Afterlife: 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as punishment for crime”—creating legal slavery continuation through imprisonment. Post-Emancipation:

  • Black Codes criminalized unemployment, vagrancy, being Black
  • Convict leasing sold imprisoned Black people to private employers
  • Chain gangs continued slavery’s brutal labor extraction
  • Mass incarceration is contemporary form of racial control

Gendered Carcerality: Women’s imprisonment fastest-growing, driven by:

  • War on drugs disproportionately imprisoning women
  • Criminalizing survival strategies (sex work, drug use)
  • Punishing women for failing patriarchal domesticity
  • Sexual violence endemic in women’s prisons

Abolition Not Reform: Reforms typically expand carceral system:

  • “Better” prisons legitimize imprisonment
  • Alternative programs become net-widening—more people under control
  • Reform rhetoric maintains prison’s inevitability
  • Abolition requires imagining different responses to harm

Abolitionist Horizon: Abolition means:

  • Eliminating prisons, police, surveillance
  • Addressing root causes—poverty, addiction, mental illness, violence
  • Creating accountability without punishment
  • Building mutual aid, restorative justice, transformative justice
  • Fundamentally transforming society creating conditions where prisons are obsolete

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2016)

Collection of essays and interviews connecting contemporary movements:

Palestine and Black Liberation: Arguing Palestinian struggle and Black liberation are interconnected:

  • Israel’s occupation uses tactics developed in U.S. policing Black communities
  • Palestinian solidarity is anti-racist imperative
  • Fighting militarized borders, surveillance, occupation everywhere

Black Lives Matter: Supporting movement while analyzing state violence’s continuities:

  • Police killings are lynching’s contemporary form
  • Carceral state targets Black bodies for control and elimination
  • Abolition is horizon for Black liberation

Transnational Feminism: Connecting women’s struggles globally:

  • Neoliberal capitalism attacks women’s reproductive labor worldwide
  • Militarism, imperialism, and patriarchy are interconnected
  • Feminism must be anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist

Radical Imagination: Liberation requires imagining what currently seems impossible:

  • Abolitionism seemed utopian (slavery) until achieved
  • Prison abolition seems utopian now but is necessary and possible
  • Freedom struggles must maintain radical vision against reformist compromise

Key Theoretical and Political Positions

Prison Abolition

Most radical position: prisons should be eliminated entirely, not reformed. This isn’t naïve idealism but hard-nosed analysis:

  • Prisons produce rather than solve problems
  • Reform strengthens rather than challenges carceral logic
  • Abolition requires transforming conditions producing harm
  • Many societies functioned without prisons; we can too

Intersectionality (avant la lettre)

Before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” (1989), Davis practiced it—analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation mutually constitute each other. Can’t understand racism without understanding capitalism; can’t understand gender without understanding race; etc.

Racial Capitalism

Building on Cedric Robinson (whom Davis knew), analyzing capitalism as inherently racial:

  • Slavery wasn’t pre-capitalist but foundational to capitalism
  • Racism isn’t ideology added to class exploitation but organizes exploitation itself
  • Contemporary capitalism continues racial accumulation through:
    • Mass incarceration as racial control and labor exploitation
    • Border violence as racial sorting
    • Environmental racism as disposability

Reproductive Justice

Davis helped develop reproductive justice framework (with SisterSong):

  • Reproductive freedom isn’t just legal abortion access
  • Requires economic security (can afford children)
  • Requires freedom from violence (state, intimate partner, police)
  • Requires environmental safety
  • Requires opposing forced sterilization and removal of children
  • Connects reproductive autonomy to broader liberation

Organic Intellectual

Gramsci’s concept: intellectuals emerging from and serving oppressed groups’ struggles. Davis embodies this—scholarship serves movements; movements inform scholarship; theory and practice are unified.

Influence and Contemporary Relevance

Prison Abolition Movement

Davis is abolition movement’s most prominent voice. Critical Resistance (co-founded 1997) and broader abolition organizing build on her work. Contemporary movements (defund police, abolish ICE, close jails) directly influenced by Davis.

Black Lives Matter

Movement explicitly engages Davis’s analysis of police violence, carceral state, and abolition. Many organizers cite Davis as influence; she publicly supports and participates in movement.

Intersectionality

Davis’s Women, Race & Class prefigured and influenced intersectional feminism. Her insistence on analyzing multiple systems simultaneously shaped contemporary critical theory.

Transnational Solidarity

Davis’s internationalism—supporting Palestinian liberation, Cuban revolution, South African anti-apartheid—models transnational solidarity connecting local struggles to global systems.

Black Feminism

Davis is canonical Black feminist—foundational for Black Feminism as political and theoretical tradition.

Critiques and Controversies

Communism

Davis’s lifelong Communist Party membership generated controversy—critics citing Soviet authoritarianism, Stalin’s crimes. Davis responded:

  • CPUSA opposed many Soviet policies
  • Communist organizing was multiracial, anti-racist when most left wasn’t
  • Anti-communism served red-baiting, destroying left organizations
  • Marxism provides tools for understanding capitalism’s racial and gendered character

Abolition as “Utopian”

Critics charge abolition is impractical—what about violent offenders? Davis responds:

  • Same was said about slavery abolition
  • Question assumes prisons currently address violence (they don’t)
  • Abolition requires creating conditions where prisons are obsolete
  • Asking “what about rapists/murderers?” maintains carceral logic

Palestine Solidarity

Davis’s Palestinian solidarity generated accusations of antisemitism. She responds:

  • Criticizing Israeli state policy isn’t antisemitic
  • Many Jewish allies support Palestinian rights
  • Anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism
  • Solidarity with oppressed is anti-racist imperative

Gender Essentialism?

Some trans activists initially questioned Davis’s gender analysis. Davis evolved, explicitly supporting trans liberation and acknowledging how abolition must address trans people’s disproportionate imprisonment and violence.

Essential Works

Primary Texts

  • Davis, Angela Y. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. 1971.
  • Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. Random House, 1981.
  • Davis, Angela Y. Women, Culture & Politics. Random House, 1989.
  • Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003.
  • Davis, Angela Y. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. Seven Stories Press, 2005.
  • Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket, 2016.

Edited Volumes

  • Davis, Angela Y., et al. Policing the Black Man. Pantheon, 2017.
  • James, Joy, ed. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Blackwell, 1998.

Documentary

  • Free Angela and All Political Prisoners. Dir. Shola Lynch, 2012.

See Also

Contemporary Applications