I heard Angela Davis speak in Nashville, Tennessee at Vanderbilt University in 2015. It just so happened that I was in the city for a poetry reading at the time. Davis, as always, was her courageous and cool self, still regal in resistance, resolute in her commitment to a different world, a different America. It was February 13, 2015 and the auditorium was packed with students, scholars, radicals, artists, activists, and locals from the city of Nashville.
It was, as expected, a powerful speech but it wasn’t powerful because it was emotional. Davis always speaks truth to power and is always seeking a path for change. Even when she speaks these days or appears on Democracy Now or some other alternative news program, she is contemplating the struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, violence, and exploitative capitalism.
If anyone embodies the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous line that the struggle is “long” but “it bends towards justice,” it is Davis. She totally gets it. Davis knows that change takes decades, perhaps centuries. The key is to continue to maintain your goals to change the world and your country and communities each and every day.
Here’s a quote by her that summarizes this concept:
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
That’s it right there. That’s the formula for change in the world and in America. You cannot think that the world will be transformed in your lifetime. Chances are it won’t but you will and can see change. In my lifetime, the world has not been radically transformed but it has changed considerably. This is because before I was born millions of people across the globe were pushing for that transformation.
The former colonies of the West in Asia, Africa, the Arab world, South America, and Central America were gaining or had gained their freedom and had begun to strike out in their own direction. A successful protest movement in the United States had resulted in major changes in America’s historical racist laws against African Americans. Black people, in America, had also secured the right to vote in the states in which they lived.
Davis’ statement above speaks to all of that. In America, a brazen attempt by the Republican appointed judges and Supreme Court justices is in motion right now to prevent African Americans from voting. In fact, all of the success of the civil rights protest period is under assault by conservative forces. This is what Davis is talking about in her statement.
Even if you make some progress, you must continue (act all the time in the words of Davis) to struggle, dissent, and organize for the greater good. If you believe it is possible to “radically transform the world,” you cannot be satisfied with some progress. You must continue to organize and strategize until your time is up here and then hand the torch of struggle to someone else. Many don’t understand that; Davis is reminding us all.
Here’s Davis’ dossier for those who need to know:
Born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. Radical African American educator and activist for civil rights and other social issues. Grew up in Jim Crow Alabama amidst racial prejudice. Knew several of the young African American girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963. Davis Attended cBrandeis University in Massachusetts where she studied philosophy under Herbert Marcuse (and made Phi Beta Kappa). Graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, in the late 1960s where she became involved with joined the Black Panthers and an all-Black branch of the Communist Party. During the Soledad Brothers trial in August 1970, an escape attempt was made and four people, including the judge, were killed. Davis was brought up on charges related to the case including aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder. She returned to teaching, activism and writing after the trial.
Angela Davis is iconic now, part of the struggle of the people to change the world as we know it. She does not want into the world as it is as an equal citizen, she wants a new country and world and wants to build that.
She has come to represent the Black Liberation period in the United States. Immediately following the limited legislative gains of the civil rights movement, the Black Liberation movement reached its apex. Their goal was more than equal rights; BLM wanted total freedom, self determination, and economic justice for African Americans. Davis was in the center of this struggle but also the struggles for women’s rights, against violence against women, the rights of the LGBTQ community, the rights and dignity of those incarcerated.
She has lived the life of the public intellectual and committed activist for change in America and in the Western world. Her writings reflect a universal humanity that seeks to promote the greater good. Davis would like to abolish prisons and create a new path forward for humanity in addressing those who transgress against society. Davis’ cultural style and womanist approach to all aspects of her life are power itself. Her afro has become as big of a historical statement as Tommy Smith’s fist in 1968 at the Olympics in Mexico.
Here is one of her famous quotes on her advocacy for change in our prison systems:
“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
Davis is still doing what she has done most of her life these days. She even took time out to come through Washington D.C. recently to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Andy Shallal’s community oriented restaurant chain, Busboys and Poets. See her below still at it after all these years.
(photo courtesy of Andy Shallal)
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Thank you so much for the video of Angela Davis's life. I was a hippy protesting everything back in the late 60s and 70s, well before law school, and Angela Davis was one of my heroines. We were the beginnings of white support for the end to racism.
I note now the prominence of so many Black men and women, so visible in the public eye. Obama's election in 2008 was an incredible high and gave us so much hope. Some of us didn't learn the lesson of Jim Crow after Reconstruction, or even hear of the Tulsa Massacre. That was never taught. And now we sit on the tipping point - we have the opportunity to elect an incredible Black woman with her white male VP candidate while the racist/sexist component threatens a crackdown on the entire nation that those of us unfamiliar with what Black Americans suffered all those years of Jim Crow - the white hand of fascism in support of a privilege based on gender and epidermal accessories.
I look at Harris and Stacy Abrams, Karine Jean Pierre, Michael Steele, Katanji Brown Jackson and so many others and know that their earned prominence by virtue of their hard work and intelligence and know that the angry racist sexist white male supremacists of both sexes seethe with resentment and hatred, thinking that those positions belong to them by right of race and gender.
May we as a nation take the next powerful step to end all isms with this next election. What is remarkable is the success that the progress so far has produced so many prominent and gifted Black folks who rose through their own hard work. No more Jim Crow. No more Tulsa Massacres. No more hatred. No more supremacy of any kind.
Loved this, Brian!