Angela Y. Davis

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

An Autobiography

Angela Davis

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It hurt to see us folding in on ourselves, using ourselves as whipping posts because we did not yet know how to struggle against the real cause of our misery.

Angela Y. Davis on her white classmates’ reaction to the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham September 16, 1963.

No matter how much I talked, the people around me were simply incapable of grasping it. They could not understand why the whole society was guilty of this murder why their beloved Kennedy was also to blame, why the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder. 

James Baldwin’s letter to Angela Davis while she was imprisoned in Marin County Jail, California, 1971.

Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, […] If we know and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own. […] For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Angela Davis quotes

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