Angela Davis

Angela Davis (Birmingham, Alabama, EE.UU., 1944) is a political activist and professor emerita at the Department of History of Consciousness at the Universty of California-Santa Cruz. She is regarded as one of the foremost figures in the struggle for human rights and against racial discrimination. After graduating from Brandeis University, she decided in 1965 to study philosophy at J.W. Goethe University in West Germany, where she first encountered Marxist thought. Closely connected with the Black Panther Party, she was fired from her position as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California in 1969, due to her affiliation with the Communist Party USA. In 2006, she was awarded the Thomas Merton prize in recognition of her struggle for justice and in 2014 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris Nanterre (France). Among her most outstanding publications are Angela Davis: An Autobiography (Random House, 1974), Women, Race & Class (Vintage, 1983), Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire (Seven Stories Press, 2011), Are prisons obsolete? (2003, translated to Catalan by Tigre de paper as Podem abolir les presons?, 2020), and Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books, 2015, translated to Spanish by Capitán Swing). She was invested doctor honoris causa by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2021.