Angela Y. Davis

Angela Y. Davis

Icon of the movement of black pride in the seventies, Angela Davis is internationally known for her fight against all forms of oppression, not only in the United States. His political activism begins in his hometown of Birmingham (Alabama), known as the Johannesburg of the South. Thanks to successive scholarships, he attends the Brandeis University, where he becomes a disciple of Herbert Marcuse; he expands his studies at the Sorbonne, where the anti-colonial struggle of the Algerians continues, and completes his philosophical apprenticeship in Frankfurt, with Oskar Negt. Encouraged by the growing revolutionary movement of blacks in the United States, she decided to return and continue her doctoral studies at the University of California (San Diego) with Marcuse. At that time Davis is dedicated to the cause of the Soledad Brothers and becomes a member of the communist party. In 1969 he began his political persecution and is declared by the FBI one of the ten most wanted criminals in the United States. After his arrest in 1971, the massive international campaign "Free Angela Davis" and his own defense in the trial ended with the dismissal of charges of murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy. In the seventies, he travels to Cuba, where he lives for a time, and to the Soviet Union. During the following decades, he teaches at the San Jose State University (1980-1984) and then at the University of California (Santa Cruz), in the Department of the History of Consciousness (1991-2008). Since the publication of his famous Autobiography (1974) he has written important books that have transformed the studies of race and gender, articulating one of the most eloquent and solid criticisms of the so-called industrial-prison complex.