Angela Davis (Angela Yvonne Davis) Biography

African-American essayist and political activist, born in Birmingham, Alabama, educated at Brandeis University, Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the University of California, San Diego. In 1969 she was appointed an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. A leading figure in the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, she lost her academic post because of her alleged involvement in an attempt to free three prisoners from San Quentin prison. During her sixteen months in jail, she produced the essays and letters collected in If They Come for Me in the Morning (with Ruchel Magee and others, 1971). Her trial, which became a cause célèbre, resulted in her acquittal, following which she published Lectures on Liberation (1972). Her other writings, which reflect her Marxist and feminist beliefs, include Women, Race and Class (1981) and Women, Culture and Politics (1984). Angela Davis: An Autobiography appeared in 1974.