Happy Birthday, Dr. Angela Davis

Sandwiched between the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and what was then Carter G. Woodson’s fledging national effort to celebrate Black History, a couple in Jim Crow Alabama welcomed a baby girl they named Angela Yvonne Davis on January 26, 1944. Young Angela excelled in school despite the violence around her as racists bombed houses in her Birmingham neighborhood which became known as “Dynamite Hill”, hoping to drive out Black families. The injustice coupled with her family’s commitment to racial equality created a steely determination in Davis that transported her North for high school and college and made her a household name in the 1970.

“I was in grad school at the University of Chicago in 1970 when Angela was captured,” Dr. Ray Winbush, Director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University, recalled. “I heard some students shouting, ‘Get out of class and into the streets.’ They had just captured Angela. It was an amazing thing. ‘Free Angela’ became a motto and a button.”

Authorities arrested Davis in Midtown Manhattan for allegedly conspiring to commit murder after purchasing firearms used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in California where four people were killed. Davis was not aware of the plan to escape nor was she present. In 1972, she was found not guilty of all charges and described the day of acquittal as “the happiest day of my life.”

Academia and philosophy forged a friendship between Winbush and Davis.

Winbush said, “When I was teaching, I brought her to Fisk, and she told me that the night they marched her out of the jail to extradite her to California, they put chains on her ankles and handcuffed her wrists. There was a helicopter, and they let her walk to the helicopter. She said she had this sense of dread they were going to shoot her.”

Davis, who earned her doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin, has taught at UCLA, San Francisco State University and lectured at numerous universities around the world. She is the author of several books and remains a highly sought-after speaker. America’s prison-industrial complex is one of the topics she addresses during speaking engagements.

“Angela asked me to testify before a European Court about the death penalty,” Winbush shared. “While on the train from Paris to Strausberg, we talked a lot. And, I asked her…this was about 2000, 2001 before social media…how she lived with being monitored. And she said, ‘I don’t worry about it because it will drive you crazy.’ She has a peace of mind that I think is in the minds of all revolutionaries committed to the liberation of Black people.”