[ Before the world knew what intersectionality was, the scholar,
writer and activist was living it, arguing not just for Black
liberation, but for the rights of women and queer and transgender
people as well.] [[link removed]]

ANGELA DAVIS - ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FIVE GREATS  
[[link removed]]


 

Nelson George; Photographs by John Edmonds
October 19, 2020
New York Times
[[link removed]]


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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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_ Before the world knew what intersectionality was, the scholar,
writer and activist was living it, arguing not just for Black
liberation, but for the rights of women and queer and transgender
people as well. _

Angela Davis, Photograph by John Edmonds // New York Times

 

THERE’S A WALL on Throop Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn,
that is painted with a mural of Black icons. It begins with Bob
Marley
[[link removed]] and Haile
Selassie
[[link removed]] before
going on to include Martin Luther King Jr.
[[link removed]], Betty
Shabazz
[[link removed]] (Betty
X) and Nelson Mandela
[[link removed]].
The last portrait is of Angela Yvonne Davis — scholar, activist and
the only surviving hero of the global African diaspora. Davis’s
image is painted from a photograph taken in the early ’70s, when she
became a symbol of the struggle for Black liberation, anticapitalism
and feminism. It’s a powerful portrait — she is wearing her hair
in a round, black Afro, her hand curled as if she’s making a
rhetorical point. Her expression is pensive, intelligent, challenging.

For the mural’s context, we have to return to the fall of 1969, when
Davis, then an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the
University of California, Los Angeles, was fired at the beginning of
the school year for her membership in the Communist Party, and then,
after a court ruled the termination illegal, fired again nine months
later for using “inflammatory rhetoric” in public speeches. She
had recently become close to a trio of Black inmates nicknamed the
Soledad Brothers
[[link removed]] (after
the California prison in which they were held) who had been charged
with the murder of a white prison guard in January 1970. One, George
Jackson, was an activist and writer whom Davis befriended upon joining
a committee challenging the charges. In August 1970 — after
Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, used firearms registered to
Davis in a takeover of a Marin County courthouse that left four people
dead — Davis immediately came under suspicion. In the aftermath of
that bloody event, she was charged with three capital offenses
[[link removed]],
including murder.

Angela Davis included in a mural in Brooklyn, N.Y., along with Martin
Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
Nicholas Calcott  //  New York Times
Overnight, she became an outlaw. Within two weeks of the shootout, J.
Edgar Hoover placed Davis on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted list
[[link removed]],
making her the third woman ever to be included. A national manhunt
ensued before she was detained two months later in a New York motel.
President Nixon congratulated the bureau on capturing “the dangerous
terrorist Angela Davis.” After her arrest, the chant “Free Angela!
[[link removed]]”
became a global battle cry as the academic — who had studied
philosophy in East and West Germany in the late ’60s and had been a
vocal supporter of the Black Panthers and the anti-Vietnam War
movement — became widely viewed on the left as a political prisoner.
She spent 18 months in jail before being found not guilty on all
charges.

During the trial, Davis’s profile transformed. Before, she had been
a noted scholar. After, she became an international symbol of
resistance. In a period when images of Black women in major newspapers
or on network television were scarce, Davis’s was both ubiquitous
and unique. Whether in journalistic photos, respectful drawings or
disrespectful caricatures, her gaze was uniformly stern — as if
focused on her offscreen accusers — and unbowed. No matter the
platform or the publication, she radiated rebellion and intelligence.
When I search her name online today, there are countless images from
this period to scroll through. There’s a drawing of a bespectacled
Davis that reads, “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t
jail a revolution.” There’s a photo of her holding a microphone at
a rally, her own words written beneath: “The real criminals in this
society are not all of the people who populate the prisons across the
state, but those who have stolen the wealth of the world from the
people.” There’s a painting of her washed with the red, black and
green of the Pan-African flag. There’s a poster that makes her look
like a sexy saint, with the words “Free Angela” hanging above and
below her face; an Ecuadorean pennant depicting Davis in shackles
alongside a sickle and hammer and the phrase “Libertad Para Angela
Davis” — and hundreds and hundreds more.

Angela Davis on the FBI’s list of “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,”
August 1970.
Bettmann/Getty Images  //  New York Times
Davis gives the Black Power salute as she enters court in San Rafael,
Calif., following her extradition from New York, Dec. 23, 1970. (John
Abt, one of the early defense lawyers is seated on her left.)
Associated Press  //  New York Times
The consistent theme is a woman both radical and chic. Davis was more
likely to be seen than read or heard at the time, but her very
existence complicated the white and Black male gaze of what Black
women could be. The impact of this representation has lingered in the
culture. Consider this: For 50 years, Davis has existed as a
pop-cultural reference point as well as a serious academic, one whose
ideas were once thought of as extreme but are now part of the popular
discourse. Both the Rolling Stones as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono
recorded songs about her in the early ’70s (“Sweet Black Angel
[[link removed]]” and “Angela
[[link removed]],” respectively). In
1977, the great Vonetta McGee
[[link removed]] portrayed a
watered-down version of Davis in the little-seen prison drama
“Brothers [[link removed]],” based on her
relationship with Jackson. Davis’s niece, Eisa, wrote and performed
a critically acclaimed autobiographical play, “Angela’s Mixtape
[[link removed]],”
in 2009 about having a radical star as her aunt. A long-lost jailhouse
interview with Davis was the highlight of the 2011 documentary “The
Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
[[link removed]],”
and a year later, the director Shola Lynch’s “Free Angela and All
Political Prisoners [[link removed]],”
which was executive produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith
and James Lassiter, premiered at the Toronto International Film
Festival. All of these projects have celebrated, even fetishized, that
brief, electric period in Davis’s life.

In the ’70s, before the world fully understood who Davis was, they
knew her face. She became, in a way very few public intellectuals ever
do, an icon, a powerful image of Black femalehood in a culture that
often reduced Black women to stereotypes. It’s in celebration of
Davis’s ongoing visual impact and presence that T Magazine asked
three young Black American artists to create portraits of Davis for
this issue. “When I was in high school, I had an Afro,” says the
Fresno, Calif.-based artist Kezia Harrell, 27, of the influence Davis
— who has worn her own hair in an Afro since the late ’60s — has
had on her life. “I had the world on top of my head.” Harrell
painted Davis in an orange sweater she wore in 1972, and “imagined
her gazing at freedom — a theme of such far distance.” 
Kezia Harrell’s “Angela As Black Divinity” (2020).
Photograph by Weichia Huang  //  New York Times
BUT DAVIS, now 76, is not just an image on a wall or a talking head in
a documentary. She remains a vital presence in the world, lecturing at
major universities and advising young activists, like the Dream
Defenders [[link removed]], a group founded in 2012 after
the killing of Trayvon Martin
[[link removed]].
For most of the last 30 years, she has worked as a public
intellectual, teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
and other universities, and embodying the kind of left-wing professor
who drives conservatives crazy. She spoke out against the war on
terror after 9/11, blamed the devastation in New Orleans caused
by Hurricane Katrina
[[link removed]] in
2005 on structural racism and spoke at Occupy Wall Street
[[link removed]] rallies
in Philadelphia and New York in 2011. In 2018, the Birmingham Civil
Rights Institute [[link removed]] in Alabama invited her to
receive an award, which was rescinded three months later after unnamed
members of the community complained to the board about her support for
Palestinian rights and a boycott of Israel. (The institute
eventually reversed its decision
[[link removed]] and
issued Davis a public apology.) Because of her personal history,
ongoing engagement and career as a scholar, Davis is in a distinct
position to connect the radical traditions of the ’60s to Trump-era
activism.

Yet Davis is distinct in another way as well. Over the years, I’ve
come in contact with a great many people who were activists during the
Black Power era. Some are nested in academia. Quite a few have retired
to the South. What unites them are the scars they carry: from being
persecuted by the police and F.B.I., from being challenged on their
more radical views by integrationist parents and friends, from the
profound sadness they share over the fact that the revolution they
fought for has yet to materialize. Davis is their peer, but she has
shrugged off defeat — she still believes that America can be
transformed into a more equitable society. She has kept her fire while
relishing what she can learn from younger generations. Hers is a kind
of openness and generosity that makes her not just an elder but a
still-active participant in change.

Davis speaking at a press conference in 1976 at the Communist Party
U.S.A.’s National Party Headquarters, in New York City. She was the
Party’s nomination for vice president in 1980 and 1984. (Seated is
Henry Winston, then National Chairman of the CPUSA.)
Bettmann/Getty Images  //  New York Times
Icons of the nonviolent civil rights movement — people such as the
late congressman John Lewis
[[link removed]] — are
rightfully revered for their sacrifices in the face of violent white
resistance to integration. But, as former President Bill Clinton’s
dismissive reference to Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael
[[link removed]],
who ousted Lewis as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee in 1966 by advocating for Black political autonomy) at
Lewis’s funeral earlier this year suggests, there’s no love lost
between mainstream liberalism and the more so-called radical voices
that arose in the ’70s. There are no monuments for the many who died
in targeted police shootings or annual tributes to the people
incarcerated because of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence program
(Cointelpro), partly aimed at destroying more aggressive Black
agitation. There are no statues or memorials in Oakland, Calif.,
honoring the Black Panthers (though there are quite a few murals).
Angela Davis survived that dangerous time with her reputation intact,
her spirit unbroken and her critical vision of the American
free-enterprise system unchanged. She may not be a very comfortable
connection to America’s period of “We Shall Overcome,” but she
is to a piercing and radical tradition of struggle in the Black
community that has never, as the kids say, “been given their
flowers.” As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest,
Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to
shape the future. Her face may be on a mural, but it is also out in
the world.

TODAY, DAVIS’S HAIR is gray, though it still circles her head like a
crown. From the garden of her modest eucalyptus-tree-shaded second
home in Mendocino, Calif., she expresses a relaxed optimism about the
country’s direction. As befits a professor who has taught history of
consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades,
her speech is peppered with references to scholars and activists such
as W.E.B. Du Bois
[[link removed]] and Stuart
Hall
[[link removed]],
historical figures such as Prudence Crandall
[[link removed]] (a
white Quaker who opened a school for Black girls in Connecticut in
1833) and the white writer and civil rights activist Anne Braden
[[link removed]],
whom she considers a mentor. In on-camera interviews from the ’70s,
Davis’s voice is melodic yet tart, with a clipped precision she used
to scold naïve and hostile reporters. Decades later, the melody is
still there, but it’s now manifested in a smooth, almost
instructional flow, the result of years of delivering lectures.

“The orange in her hands is illumination,” says the New Haven,
Conn.-based artist Tschabalala Self, 30, of her portrait. “It speaks
to passing on a message that has something of value, an aura.” Self,
who wanted Davis to look regal and powerful, imagined the activist
orating to young Black people, referencing silhouettes from the time
she came to prominence in the 1970s.
Tschabalala Self’s “Angela” (2020).
Photograph by Weichia Huang  //  New York Times
Davis — who has written or edited nine books and retired from
teaching at U.C. Santa Cruz in 2008 — is still very much defined by
the iconography of her past. It hasn’t always been easy. “For a
long time, I felt somewhat intimidated,” she acknowledges. “I felt
that there was no way that I, as an individual, could actually live up
to the expectations incorporated in that image. There came a point
when I realized I didn’t have to. The image does not reflect who I
am as an individual, it reflects the work of the movement.”

The turning point occurred a few years ago, when she met a young woman
in a foster-care program who was visiting U.C. Santa Cruz. “She had
on a T-shirt with my image on it,” Davis recalls. “My usual stance
had been, whenever I would see people wearing T-shirts with my image,
I didn’t really know how to act. I didn’t know what to say. I
didn’t know how to respond. But this time, I asked her, ‘Why are
you wearing that T-shirt? What does that image mean to you?’ She
didn’t know a great deal about me at all, but she said, ‘Whenever
I wear this, I feel like I can accomplish anything. It makes me feel
empowered.’ From that moment, I realized it really was not about me
as an individual. It was about the fact that my image was a stand-in
for the work that masses are able to do in terms of changing the
world.”

IN 1974, JOAN LITTLE
[[link removed]],
a 20-year-old Black inmate in a North Carolina jail, killed her
rapist, the corrections officer Clarence Alligood, and pleaded
self-defense after being indicted on a charge of murder. Davis wrote a
piece on the case for Ms. magazine, which had been launched three
years earlier, that focused on the underreported history of white male
rape of Black women as a tool of social control. Later, she became an
adviser to the defense. The underlying assumption of the prosecution
(and of many white Southerners) was that a white man couldn’t rape a
Black woman, that she had to have seduced her jailer, and that the
case was open-and-shut. Little’s trial united the civil rights, the
feminist and the jail-reform movements in what was then an unusual
confluence of progressive forces. In a stunning victory, Little was
found not guilty of murder — a ruling that, at the time, astonished
both Black and white residents in the still de facto segregated South
and sounds almost like science fiction to folks raised in the current
era, when law enforcement misconduct is rarely punished and Black
victims are rarely believed.

Davis published “Women, Race & Class
[[link removed]]”
in 1981, inspired both by her time in jail and Little’s case, as
well as by her work championing the cases of other unfairly
incarcerated Black women and men. “That book represents a number of
positions of people who had a broader, more — the term we use now is
‘intersectional’ — analysis of what it means to struggle for
gender equality,” she says. “At the time that I wrote it, I was
interested in pointing out that gender did not have to be seen in
competition with race. That women’s issues did not belong to
middle-class white women. In many ways, that research was about
uncovering the contributions of women who were completely marginalized
by histories of the women’s movement, especially Black women, but
also Latino women and working-class women.”

For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a
blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.
The second-wave feminism of the ’70s was — much like its
forerunner, the suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries — driven by white women seeking equality with men in terms
of opportunity, legal protections and control of their bodies. But the
numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black
women — in addition to destroying the cartoonish sexualization of
Black men as threats to white women — had never been very vital to
the mainstream feminist agenda. These are problems Davis identified
when she was trying to grow support for Delbert Tibbs
[[link removed]],
a Black man falsely accused of rape and murder in Florida in the
mid-70s. “He was facing the death penalty,” she recalls. “We
were appealing to these white feminists to support him as well as
Little, and there was reluctance. Some white feminists did, but by and
large that appeal fell flat. So how is it possible to develop the
kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot
effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?”
Although she’s an essential figure in modern feminism, Davis remains
a sympathetic skeptic of much feminist orthodoxy. She believes narrow
definitions of any progressive movement feed a self-centeredness that
limits its ability to unify with other groups. In other words, she
understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even
invented.

 

Davis has kept her fire while relishing what she can learn from
younger generations.

“Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black
law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw
[[link removed]], who
teaches at U.C.L.A. and Columbia University. The concept invites us to
see various forms of inequality as a prism. Its original organizing
principle — that Black women are subject to discrimination based not
just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them — has
since been applied to other groups and animates much of today’s
progressive political conversations and activity. Yet as Davis knows
from her work in the ’70s, asking various advocacy groups to embrace
this philosophy is easier to demand from a podium than to write into
policy, where efforts have been stymied by self-interest and personal
prejudices. But as we discuss her past, I detect no cynicism, no
despair nor frustration — this despite decades of glacial progress
and the current White House occupant’s vision of America as white
nirvana. In America’s deepening income inequality, Davis sees a
chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as
irredeemably flawed. Her optimism is particularly remarkable when you
consider how long she’s believed that America _could_ change. No,
her generation did not get their revolution. And yet in so much of
what they _did_ accomplish — with civil rights, women’s rights,
L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the environment and scores of other issues — they
have radically shifted America’s expectations and norms.

Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about
radically changing the criminal justice system. While defunding the
police has become a philosophical touchstone for Black Lives Matter
and other activists, a reimagining of policing and incarceration has
been essential to her vision for decades. In 1997, she was one of the
founders of Critical Resistance [[link removed]], an
organization dedicated to abolishing the prison system. In “Are
Prisons Obsolete?
[[link removed]]”
(2003), she argued that “the most difficult and urgent challenge
today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where
the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.” Today, Davis uses
the phrase “the abolitionist imagination” to describe the
mentality needed to see beyond how law enforcement works versus how it
should. (She is currently collaborating with three other authors on a
new book on the topic, tentatively titled “Abolition. Feminism.
Now.”)

“The abolitionist imagination delinks us from that which is,”
Davis tells me. “It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing
issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past
that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are
in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons
are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing
harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?”

Earlier this year, on March 23, Daniel Prude
[[link removed]],
a 41-year-old Black man with a history of mental-health issues, ran
naked through the streets of Rochester, N.Y. He was subdued by several
police officers, who placed a spit hood (a restraining mesh hood) over
his head and held him down for two minutes until he stopped breathing.
Prude was treated more like a criminal than a person in need of
psychiatric care and would die a week after his encounter with police.
Over these past months, I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law
enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally ill.
“What if we ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that whenever an issue
arises in the community that involves, say, a person who is
intellectually disabled or mentally challenged, the first impulse is
to call an officer with a gun?’” she asks. “Why do we assume
that the police are the ones who will be able to recreate order and
safety for us? In those instances, there have been so many cases of
people being killed by the police simply because of their mental
health. This is especially the case with Black people.”

The New Haven-based artist Tajh Rust, 31, wanted his painting of Davis
to be a “tribute to her decades of work.” Rust remembers seeing
her in person for the first time as an undergraduate at Cooper Union
in 2008 but being “too shy to thank her personally. I stood a few
feet away from her while other students thanked her and posed for
pictures with her.”
Tajh Rust’s “Angela Davis” (2020).
Photograph by Weichia Huang  //  New York Times
AS THE WORLD has caught up to her, Davis has found herself impressed
with not just the fact of today’s current progressive organizations
but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have
avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish
fixation on a charismatic male leader. Whether it was Huey P. Newton
[[link removed]] with
the Black Panthers in Oakland or Mark Rudd
[[link removed]] with
the Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia, most left-of-center
organizations opposed to the American status quo in the ’60s
suffered from some version of the Great Man syndrome, where women were
either relegated to support roles or their contributions to the
organizations were minimized. (I recently came across a vintage
broadcast from 1973 of a 90-minute panel organized by PBS’s “Black
Journal,” of which only two of the 12 panelists were women — Davis
and the civil rights firebrand Fannie Lou Hamer
[[link removed]] —
a composition inconceivable on any panel today.) “[Younger
activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says.
“They don’t take male supremacy for granted. One aspect of this
shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and
a critique of male supremacy.” She points to Black Lives Matter, the
most influential U.S.-based protest movement in generations, which
was founded by three Black women
[[link removed]] —
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi — all of whom have
prevented a cult of personality developing around themselves.
“Inevitably,” says Davis, “when one asks who is the leader of
this movement, one imagines a charismatic male figure: the Martin
Luther Kings, the Malcolm Xs, the Marcus Garveys. All of these men
have made absolutely important contributions, but we can also work
with other models of leadership that are rooted in our struggles of
the past.”

As she reminds us, women have always been central to the history of
American protest. She cites the 1955 to ’56 Montgomery bus boycott,
which ignited the civil rights movement. Aside from Rosa Parks, whose
arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in
Montgomery, Ala., was the inciting action, the activist E.D. Nixon
[[link removed]],
former president of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., and the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. are most often named as the boycott’s
leaders. Yet “[the boycott] took place because Black women —
domestic workers — had the collective imagination to believe that it
was possible to change the world, and they were the ones who refused
to ride the bus,” Davis says. “The collective leadership we see
today dates back to the unacknowledged work of Rosa Parks and Ella
Baker
[[link removed]] and
many others, who did so much to create the basis for radical movements
against racism.”

An Angela Davis-inspired poster is displayed above the entrance to the
Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, vacated June 8, 2020.
Jason Redmond/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images  //  New York Times
But the Montgomery bus boycott is not simply a historical reference
for Davis. She grew up in Alabama, in nearby Birmingham, in a
neighborhood called Dynamite Hill because of the racist bomb attacks
on the homes of middle-class Black residents there. Two of the four
young girls who were murdered in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church
bombing
[[link removed]] by
members of the Ku Klux Klan lived near the Davis family home.

But the Davises were not intimidated. Her parents — Sallye, a
schoolteacher, and Frank, a former teacher who owned a service station
— made sure Angela, the eldest, her sister, Fania, and her brothers,
Ben and Reggie, had a well-rounded childhood that included spending
time on their uncle’s farm outside Birmingham and taking vacations
up north in New York. Davis was a stellar student, regularly attended
Sunday school and was active in the Girl Scouts. Crucial to her
intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the
Southern Negro Youth Congress; several of the organization’s leaders
were members of the Communist Party. Formed in 1937 and highly active
until 1949, the S.N.Y.C. boycotted businesses, registered Black voters
and educated rural African-Americans about their legal rights long
before the more celebrated work of the 1950s and ’60s civil rights
movement. Though sanitized from many histories of the civil rights
movement, the Communist Party supported the struggle against
segregation from the 1930s until the Red Scare in the 1950s forced
their participation underground. (It’s widely known, for example,
that Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading
tactician of the 1963 March on Washington. What is less well
remembered is how much the party supported the grass-roots organizing
of the S.N.Y.C., along with many activist groups across the nation.)

Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated
school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed
promising Black Southerners in Northern schools. Upon graduating, she
won a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., where she
studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse
[[link removed]],
whose career as an intellectual and activist became a model for Davis.
Marcuse belonged to the Frankfurt School, an ideology whose
articulation of philosophy and critical theory would greatly influence
much of Davis’s work. From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe,
learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German
philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German
Student Union. It was during these expatriate years that Davis began
to see the racism she’d experienced growing up as a byproduct of an
economy predicated on cheap, exploited labor, identifying
institutional racism as a systemic problem long before the phrase came
into vogue. She began to see herself not just as an academic but a
participant in political change.

After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her
commitment to Communism, a key reason that she became associated with
the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers. Because of her training and
time spent abroad, Davis offered a more international vision as she
attempted to build connections between oppressed groups, choosing not
to separate the African-American struggle from that of other
marginalized peoples, such as the Hmong, caught in the violence of the
Vietnam War, and the battle against apartheid in South Africa. It’s
why, in part, her arrest so resonated across the world. Throughout the
’70s and ’80s, as the Communist Party U.S.A.’s presence
dwindled, and Communist regimes worldwide became increasingly
totalitarian, Davis remained a staunch supporter of the party’s
ideas, twice running as its candidate for vice president in the
’80s. In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other
members, because the party refused to engage in processes of
democratization; they formed a new organization, the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Today, she describes
herself as a “small c” communist, remaining enthusiastic about the
ideology but not beholden to any single organization.

NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely
been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer
rights, both forces that have pushed back against the staunchly cis
and heteronormative values that have dominated mainstream Black
politics. It’s a shift that dovetails with Davis’s own biography.
Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as
a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic
Gina Dent. Her public announcement represented both a personal
declaration and made more urgent her belief that racial and gender
issues are deeply interconnected. “We didn’t include gender issues
in [earlier] struggles,” she says. “There would have been no way
to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to
people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as
normal in so many different areas of our lives.” She smiles. “A
part of me is glad that we didn’t win the revolution we were
fighting for back then, because there would still be male supremacy.
There would still be hetero-patriarchy. There would be all of these
things that we had not yet come to consciousness about.”
 

Davis at a Juneteenth rally and dockworker shutdown at the Port of
Oakland, in Oakland, Calif., June 19, 2020.
Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press  //  New
York Times
There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the
upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and
celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have
graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with
streaming services. Davis, however, finds those signifiers
meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as
capitalism remains our secular religion. “The elephant in the room
is always capitalism,” she says. “Even when we fail to have an
explicit conversation about capitalism, it is the driving force of so
much when we talk about racism. Capitalism has always been racial
capitalism.” Davis cites the Covid-19 pandemic as “a crisis of
global capitalism,” adding that “we _do_ need free health care.
We _do_ need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty,
seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing:
That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access
to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has
shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.” She
believes we need to imagine a “future that will allow us to begin to
move beyond capitalism” but refuses to endorse any existing
government as a model for the kind of America she envisions. It may be
easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold
War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s
financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us
into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.

Because of this, many people were surprised by Davis’s support of
Joe Biden’s campaign, but her reasoning is quite pragmatic: “We
cannot allow Donald Trump to remain in power. The damage he’s done
to the federal court system with his appointments will take several
generations to correct.” Does she think the Democratic Party could
be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she
says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats
further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four
progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan
Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib
[[link removed]] —
elected in 2018.

Here again, Davis is ultimately optimistic: this time about the future
of progressive activism, viewing the current agitation in America as a
continuation of the work that occurred during the Occupy Wall Street
movement in 2011 and has grown over the last decade with the
prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement. From her perspective,
this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots
organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics
and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media. It’s also the kind
of organizing that doesn’t always bear fruit quickly. “When we do
this work of organizing against racism, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism
— organizing to change the world — there are no guarantees, to use
Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate
effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were
possible.”

Angela Davis, photographed outside her home in Oakland, Calif., on
July 25, 2020.
Photograph by John Edmonds  //  New York Times
She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black
Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to
embrace the battle against white supremacy. “‘Structural
racism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ all of these terms that have been
used for decades in the ranks of our movements have now become a part
of popular discourse,” she observes. “As we looked at the damage
that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to
which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities
were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the
existence of structural racism. Then there was the fact that we were
all sheltered in place; in a sense, we were compelled to be the
witnesses of police lynching. That allowed people to make connections
with the whole history of policing and the history of lynching and the
extent to which slavery is still very much a part of the influences in
our society today.”

AMERICANS ARE TERRIBLE at understanding history. We buy all too easily
into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious
platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The
effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to
clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.
Davis, though, has never accepted the myth of American exceptionalism
[[link removed]].
Rather, she has consistently argued that our triumphant narrative of
Manifest Destiny is simply a cover for an exploitive financial system
that corrupts our public life and represses our humanity.

These days, Davis uses social media to curate her own image. The photo
at the top of her Facebook page
[[link removed]] is a favorite of mine. It
was taken in Oakland on Juneteenth, June 19 of this year, as
longshoremen along the West Coast shut down ports in support of Black
Lives Matter. Davis, right fist held high
[[link removed]],
salutes (and is saluted by) a sea of young people. It is an image of
defiance that connects labor organizing, activist politics and Black
history. That Davis and the people around her are all wearing masks
indelibly dates it to our present moment.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that our work as activists is always
to prepare the next generation,” she says. “To create new terrains
so that those who come after us will have a better opportunity to get
up and engage in even more radical struggles. And I think we’re
seeing this now.” She plans to be around to see it through.
 

_[Nelson George is an American author, columnist, music and culture
critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the
National Book Critics Circle Award.]_

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