Angela Davis by Angela Davis

First published: 1974

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The 1950’s to the 1970’s

Locale: Birmingham, Alabama; New York City; Helsinki, Finland; Frankfurt, Germany; and Marin County, California

Principal Personage:

• Angela Davis, a socialist and civil rights activist

Form and Content

Angela Davis, a socialist scholar and longtime activist for African American liberation, wrote Angela Davis: An Autobiography shortly after her acquittal on charges related to a 1970 Marin County, California, prison revolt. Davis had also been actively involved in the American Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, an organization working to defend prison activist George Jackson and others against politically motivated murder charges related to another prison revolt. In principle opposed to “individual-focused” interpretations of history, Davis offers her autobiography not as a “personal” story but as a political autobiography of the time and the movements with which she was involved. In the process, she provides readers with significant insight into the complexity of her experience as an African American socialist during the intense period of black liberation politics in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Throughout the autobiography, Davis keeps a primary focus on the larger political, racial, and social issues of the day. She intertwines her own accounts of political work and prison experience with the lives of other women and men of the time who were working for revolutionary change in American society.

In a section entitled “Nets,” Davis opens the book with an account of her flight to avoid arrest following the Marin County revolt. She is eventually captured by police in New York City, and much of this opening section consists of her account of her incarceration in the New York Women’s House of Detention. She describes conditions for the women prisoners there, condemning the inhumane treatment of mentally ill women and speaking forcefully of the unnecessary dehumanization of the inmates, a disproportionate number of whom are poor, African American, or Puerto Rican. She describes her own jail experience in relation to these other women, presenting much of her experience in explicitly political terms: “I fought the tendency to individualize my predicament.” Given her overall purpose in the book, it is not surprising to find the autobiography beginning on such a clearly political note.

In the next section of the book, “Rocks,” Davis recounts her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. She tells of racist attacks against black middle-class families as neighborhoods slowly integrate, and again uses the events of her childhood to emphasize her growing awareness of racial and economic injustice in American society. When she later goes away to high school in New York City, she encounters the world of socialist economic and political philosophy through her readings and her emerging friendships with the offspring of New York leftist intellectuals.

“Waters,” part 3, takes Davis to Brandeis University for her early college years and increasing involvement in socialist-and communist-affiliated activities, such as the 1962 Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students, held in Helsinki, Finland. Davis focuses on these years as a way to chart her increased exposure to an international framework for understanding American politics. After spending part of her undergraduate years at the Sorbonne in Paris, Davis later begins graduate study in Frankfurt, Germany. It is here that she realizes a tension between her desire to maintain a broad socialist focus and her frustration at being away from the United States during the years of the Civil Rights movement and the evolving Black Liberation movement. In 1967, propelled by a growing need to express her commitment to black liberation politics directly, Davis returned to the United States.

These opening sections allow Davis to set the necessary political and intellectual context for the rest of the narrative sections, entitled “Flames,” “Walls,” and “Bridges,” in which she explains in much more detail the series of events and political involvements that lead to her eventual arrest.

Context

Angela Davis: An Autobiography both continues and alters the autobiographical tradition in African American women’s writing. By using the story of her life as a framework for social analysis, Davis follows in the literary footsteps of such noted American authors as Harriet A. Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 1970), Zora Neale Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942), and Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970, followed by other autobiographical volumes). Additionally, Davis’ autobiography offers an interesting contrast and important opportunity for comparative reading with other autobiographies by African American women dealing with the politics of the Black Liberation movement and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s. For example, Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) and Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (1992) both offer differing perspectives on the same period. Together with Davis and many other African American writers (both women and men), these sources give an increasingly full and complex view of this critical era in African American and American history.

Unlike most other women writers in African American culture, however, Davis takes an explicitly socialist approach to her analysis of women’s experience. Davis’ longtime participation in the American Communist Party reflects her emphasis on understanding broader economic structures, a step that she believes is necessary for understanding the true nature of pervasive racial oppression and widespread sexism in American society. Davis’ membership in the Party sets her apart theoretically and tactically from mainstream or “reform” feminism and at times puts her in tension with black nationalist and separatist feminists, as well as middle-class “integrationists” who argue for fuller black participation in an otherwise accepted American economic culture. Davis is explicit in her analysis of the special oppression facing African American women: Her book Women, Race, and Class (1981) focuses primarily on racism and sexism as central forces in the history of black women. As always, however, Davis links this oppression to class oppression in general, and she argues for multiracial coalitions of both women and men as a fundamental requirement for making revolutionary social change.

Davis’ persistent and very public socialism, combined with her ongoing participation in black liberation politics, has made her a highly visible and controversial activist and scholar. Anticommunist sentiment has a long history in American society, both among intellectuals and in popular culture. Despite broad cultural pressure against her views, Davis has maintained a firm public commitment to the Communist Party, to the liberation of African American people, and to revolutionary economic and social change. She thus occupies an important place along the broad spectrum of American political philosophy.

Bibliography

Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. 2d ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Detailed account of Davis’s trial and its role in her life and in American society.

Ashman, Charles R. The People vs. Angela Davis. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1972.

Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. This excellent volume offers literary and historical context for reading Davis’ book in the tradition of African American women’s autobiography. Does not address Davis specifically, but provides important background and interesting essays on Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Era Bell Thompson, Zora Neale Hurston, and others.

Brisbane, Robert H. Black Activism: Racial Revolution in the United States, 1954-1970. Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1974. Gives a political analysis and historical overview of the Black Liberation movement, including full chapters on the Black Panther Party, Black Nationalism, and “Black Literature and the Black Revolution.” Important for more fully understanding the context of Angela Davis’ political work. Contains a very good bibliography of less well known sources for the period.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Random House, 1989. A collection of Davis’s speeches, with titles such as “Let Us All Fight Together: Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women,” “Ethnic Studies: Global Meanings,” and “Children First: The Campaign for a Free South Africa.”

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. A focused historical study of the significance of race, class, and gender in the history of American culture. Provides good insight into Davis’ broader and evolving political analysis.

Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Octagon Books, 1977. The standard history of the American communist movement, originally published in 1957. Draper’s book gives important historical background on the rise of the Communist Party in the United States—the party Angela Davis writes about rather uncritically—and its relationship to the Soviet Union.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Reading Black, Reading Feminist. New York: Meridian Books, 1990. An extensive anthology of African American feminist theory, both literary and political. An important source for understanding Angela Davis in the broader context of contemporary theorists. Offers a range of perspectives.

Jackson, George. Soledad Brother. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. The book Davis shared with her fellow inmates at the Women’s House of Detention in New York to encourage their political education. Jackson, who attained national prominence before his controversial death in prison, was a major figure in the development of Davis’s thought.

Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. An excellent analytical history of the experience of African American women. Provides an extended economic and social analysis. An excellent bibliography is included.

Major, Reginald. Justice in the Round: The Trial of Angela Davis. New York: Third Press, 1973. A detailed account of Davis’s trial. Major argues that Davis’s indictment stemmed from her notoriety as a militant rather than from the strength of the evidence against her.

Nadelson, Regina. Who Is Angela Davis? The Biography of a Revolutionary. New York: P. H. Wyden, 1972. A sympathetic biography by a childhood friend of Davis. Widely available, though less than objective.

Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Analysis of Davis’s Angela Davis, Assata Shakur’s Assata (1987), and Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power (1992). Discusses the role of autobiographical writing in the context of lives committed to radical activism.

Smith, Nelda J. From Where I Sat. New York: Vantage, 1973.