Angela Davis (26 January 1944-) was an African-American communist politician, author, and Marxist political activist. In 1980 and 1984, she was CPUSA leader Gus Hall's vice-presidential running mate.
Biography[]
Angela Yvonne Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama on 26 January 1944, the maternal granddaughter of Democratic politician John A. Darden, and she went to an integrated school in Greenwich Village, New York City as a girl. There, she was approached by a CPUSA youth group and recruited. She attended communist events abroad and graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in 1965, and she went on to study at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany and become involved in socialist student groups. The formation of Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party motivated Davis to return to the United States, and she later completed her studies in San Diego and East Germany. Back in the United States, she became an active feminist and anti-Vietnam War activist, and she became an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA in 1969. She was fired for her CPUSA membership, only to be reinstated by court order; she was fired again for use of inflammatory language. In 1970, after guns owned by Davis were used in the murder of a federal judge in Marin County, Davis was jailed for a year before being acquitted in 1972. She toured the Eastern Bloc during the 1970s and 1980s before becoming the CPUSA's vice-presidential running mate in 1980 and 1984, losing both times. She went on to become professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University, and she advocated for prison abolition, an end to the prison-industrial complex, the Occupy movement, and the anti-Semitic "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions" campaign against Israel.