Episode 10 Angela Davis

Ken Scott Baron

My birthday is on January 26th, the same day as Angela Davis.

When I was a student at University of California Berkeley, I remember Angela Davis as a prominent counterculture activist in the 1960s during the civil rights movement.

The famous “People’s Park” demonstration cemented her reputation as a firebrand activist. Later, she and others took over the Marin County courtroom during which four people were killed. She was prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, but was acquitted of the charges.

Now, Davis is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and conducts research interests are feminism, African-American studies, and the history of punishment and prisons. She co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex.

Her recent publication titled “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement” shows the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

She highlights the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles. She also talks of the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement.

She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. From all of this, she reminds us that ”Freedom is a Constant Struggle”

Professor Davis, born in Birmingham, was granted the The Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award is supposed to honor the civil rights leader’s legacy and raise funds for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

However, after some members in the city’s Jewish community objected to giving the award. Now, the award presentation is canceled because Davis’ statements and public record do not “meet all of the criteria on which the award is based.”

On her Facebook page, she said “I was stunned to learn that the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Board of Directors had reversed their previous decision to award me the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award. Although the BCRI refused my requests to reveal the substantive reasons for this action, I later learned that my long-term support of justice for Palestine was at issue”.

She reminded every one that “.. my own freedom was secured – and indeed my life was saved – by a vast international movement. And I have devoted much of my own activism to international solidarity and, specifically, to linking struggles in other parts of the world to U.S. grassroots campaigns against police violence, the prison industrial complex, and racism more broadly”.

This is a sad action against Davis, who although controversial, sets a good example of how to affect social justice change.