Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, to college-educated parents who were school teachers. Her brother, Ben Davis, played in the NFL for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions. Angela attended the 'Little Red School House' in Greenwich Village, New York City, where she became involved in socialism and communism studies and befriended the children of Communist Party leaders.
Davis was awarded a full scholarship to Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where she met philosopher Herbert Marcuse, becoming his student at UCSD. She participated in a political rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and studied Karl Marx, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Davis spent summers in Paris and Helsinki, attending the World Festival of Youth and Students, where she met Cuban students and became a supporter of Fidel Castro and Cuba.
She continued her studies at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, graduating in 1965. Davis then pursued her Ph.D. in philosophy from Humboldt University in East Berlin, Germany. Back in California, she worked as a lecturer at UCLA during the 1960s, becoming a radical feminist and member of the Communist Party USA, associated with the Black Panther Party.
Davis was fired from the University of California in 1969, but was later rehired. In 1970, she appeared on the FBI's Most Wanted List and was arrested after evading the police for two months. She spent 18 months in a New York detention center awaiting trial, which she was acquitted of.
During the Cold War, Davis was hosted by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, but her name and image were used by Soviet propaganda as a symbol of "capitalism's" oppression. She refused to meet with real Russian political prisoners and was controlled by Soviet agents and interpreters.
Davis ran for Vice President of the United States as a candidate from the Communist Party USA in 1980 and 1984. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of Stalin's Gulag prisons, commented on Davis's response to a request for help from Czech dissidents, saying she believed they "deserved" to be in prison.
Davis currently holds the Presidential Chair and Professorship with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is also the director of the Feminist Studies department. She remains a prominent abolitionist and opponent of the Death Penalty in California.
