Angela Y. Davis

From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. 

Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

Women, race & class

Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has had no effect on crime. Here, esteemed civil rights activist Angela Davis lays bare the situation and argues for a radical rethinking of our rehabilitation programmes.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Activist, teacher, author and icon of the Black Power movement Angela Davis talks Ferguson, Palestine, and prison abolition.

Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

"The two women wait for the darkest part of night. Only then will they feel safe enough to leave the little house in Echo Park. Outside there may be men with guns or warrants -- or both. When the dark is at its deepest, the two women step outside. One of them is Angela Davis. From a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century, Angela Davis describes in full the story of her life: from Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School to the U.S. Communist Party; from her political activity in a New York high school to the Soledad Brothers; from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. In spite of voluminous print devoted to Angela Davis, a curious privacy has always surrounded her -- a privacy still intact. Until this publication, no one had managed to provide us with the whole story: What was her childhood really like? How deep were the influences of a Southern and a European education? What precipitated her into political activism? What was her relationship with the Soledad Brothers? How did she elude the FBI? Where did she go? What did she do? Who helped her? This book tells not only what happened, but more important, how she felt about the events, the people, and herself. A powerful and commanding story told with warmth, brilliance, humor and conviction. Of the turbulent sixties, Angela Davis is the last and, perhaps, the only triumphant figure." 4e de couv.

Angela Davis--an Autobiography

The issues of racism, violence, health, children, education, and peace, as they affect the lives of women are considered on a global scale

Women, Culture & Politics

Erica Meiners

Beth Richie

Gina Dent

In this landmark work, four of the world's leading scholar-activists set out a vital, urgent manifesto for a truly intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism. As a politics and as a practice, abolitionism has increasingly shaped our political moment, amplified through the worldwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a uniformed police officer. It is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, in its demands for police defunding and demilitarisation, and a halt to prison construction. And it is there in the outrage which greeted the brutal treatment of women by police at the 2021 Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard. As this book shows, abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause: the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. Abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times. Abolition. Feminism. Now!

Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Revelations about US policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Graib prison story in April 2004. It is within this context that African-American intellectual Angela Davis gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. She talks about her own incarceration as well as her experience as 'enemy of the state' and about having been put on the FBI's most wanted list. Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins.

Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture

Abolition Democracy

Jazz, it is widely accepted, is the signal original American contribution to world culture. Angela Davis shows us how the roots of that form in the blues must be viewed not only as a musical tradition but as a life-sustaining vehicle for an alternative black working-class collective memory and social consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American middle-class values. And she explains how the tradition of black women blues singers - represented by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday - embodies not only an artistic triumph and aesthetic dominance over a hostile popular music industry but an unacknowledged proto-feminist consciousness within working-class black communities. Through a close and riveting analysis of these artists' performances, words, and lives, Davis uncovers the unmistakable assertion and uncompromising celebration of non-middle-class, non-heterosexual social, moral, and sexual values.

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Featuring a new introduction by the author, Angela Davis: An Autobiography is a classic account of a life in struggle.

An Autobiography

Angela Davis

Ruchell Magee

Soledad Brothers

My life is at stake in this case-not simply the life of a lone individual, but a life which has been given over to the struggles of my people, a life which belongs to Black people who are tired of poverty, and racism, of the unjust imprisonment of tens of thousands of our brothers and sisters." "I stand before this court", she declares, "as a target of a political frame up which, far from pointing to my culpability, implicates the State of California as an agent of political repression. I declare publicly before the court, before the people of this country, that I am innocent of all charges which have been leveled against me by the State of California." On the central theme of this book Miss Davis contends that "the offense of the political prisoner in his political boldness, his consistent challenges-legally or extra-legally-of fundamental social wrongs fostered and reinforced by the state.

Voices of Resistance

If They Come in the Morning

Angela Davis' first book in nearly a decade, and her only book of speeches on racism, community, freedom, and politics in the United States.

And Other Difficult Dialogues

The Meaning of Freedom

Erica R. Meiners

Beth E. Richie

As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment — halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist — usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color - organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but a recognition of the stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Angela Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals and commentators such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States and the figure embodied in Davis's arrest and imprisonment-the political prisoner. Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has grown from strength to strength, with more of its black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as relevant today as the day it was published.

Are Prisons Obselete?

Barbara Smith

Patricia Hill Collins

Bell Hooks

Sojourner Truth

Audre Lorde

The Combahee River Collective

Kimberle Crenshaw

Grundlagentexte

Schwarzer Feminismus

Donne, razza e classe

Ex Black Panther and now a leading academic dissident, Angela Davis has long been at the fore of the fight against the expansion of prisons. In this recent talk she reviews the background for the current prison building binge, the effects of mass incarceration on communities of colour, and particularly women of colour who are now one of the fastest growing segments of the US prison population. she also offers a personal view of her own time in prison and the imprisonment of others close to her. Double compact disc.

The Prison Industrial Complex

O novo livro da ativista política Angela Davis reúne uma ampla seleção de seus artigos, discursos e entrevistas recentes realizados em diferentes países entre 2013 e 2015, organizados pelo militante dos direitos humanos Frank Barat. Os textos trazem reflexões sobre como as lutas históricas do movimento negro e do feminismo negro nos EUA e a luta contra o apartheid na África do Sul se relacionam com os movimentos atuais pelo abolicionismo prisional e com a luta anticolonial na Palestina. Além de sua reconhecida atuação política no combate ao racismo, Davis denuncia também o sexismo, demonstrando de forma muito objetiva a relação entre a violência contra a mulher e a violência do Estado. De acordo com a autora, não há possibilidade de se combater a violência sem desmontar as estruturas do sistema capitalista. Ao afirmar que, "quando as mulheres negras se movem, toda a estrutura política e social se movimenta na sociedade", Davis sintetiza a importância fundamental do movimento das mulheres negras na desestruturação e desestabilização das rígidas e consolidadas relações desiguais de poder na sociedade, representadas pela dinâmica de violência, supremacia branca, patriarcado, poder do Estado, mercados capitalistas e políticas imperiais. A liberdade é uma luta constante permite ao leitor acompanhar a saga dessa persistente e ousada ativista contra as diversas formas de submissão humana e tem um significado especial neste momento crítico da sociedade brasileira, que vive certo sentimento de desesperança e impotência ao perceber quão distante se está de uma mudança estrutural na política e de transformações efetivas na condição de vida da maioria. Diante das injustiças globais, Angela Davis inspira o leitor a imaginar e construir um movimento de libertação de todos os seres humanos.

Angela Y. Davis

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