[For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer,
Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why
not? ]
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‘HELL, YES, WE ARE SUBVERSIVE’  
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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
September 7, 2022
The New York Review
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_ For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer,
Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why
not? _

Angela Davis, Illustration by Johnalynn Holland

 

Reviewed:

Angela Davis: An Autobiography
[[link removed]] by Angela Y. Davis 
Haymarket, 358 pp., $28.95

Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing
[[link removed]] edited by Charisse
Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean  Verso, 323 pp., $29.95 (paper)

 In 1969 a  UCLA  student who was also an undercover  FBI agent
revealed in the campus newspaper that the school’s philosophy
department had recently hired a member of the Communist Party. A week
later, the _San Francisco Examiner_ reported that that person was a
twenty-five-year-old professor named Angela Davis.

The University of California Board of Regents confronted Davis and
asked if she was a Communist. Yes, she replied. “While I think this
membership requires no justification,” she wrote the board, “I
want you to know that as a black woman I feel an urgent need to find
radical solutions to the problems of racial and national minorities in
white capitalist United States.” The board fired her, putting her
into the national spotlight over questions of academic freedom and the
lingering effects of cold war anticommunism.

A judge disagreed with the board’s decision, finding that it had no
right to terminate Davis because of her political affiliations. During
the appeals process, she was permitted to teach (to glowing reviews).
But some months later the board, led by then governor Ronald Reagan,
fired Davis again. This time, they claimed her political speech was
unbefitting a university professor, citing her statement, “Hell,
yes, we are subversive…and we’re going to continue to be
subversive until we have subverted the whole damn system of
oppression.”

As Davis’s professorial fate wended its way through the courts, she
grew involved in a campaign demanding justice for three prisoners
known as the Soledad Brothers, who were accused of a retaliatory
murder of a white prison guard. One of the brothers was the well-known
writer and Black Panther George Jackson, with whom Davis would be
romantically involved.

In August 1970, just a few months after Davis’s second firing,
Jackson’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan, held up a courthouse
in Marin County. He interrupted the trial of a Black inmate, gave him
a gun, and the two—alongside two other Black inmates, who had been
in the courtroom to serve as witnesses—attempted to kidnap the
judge, an assistant district attorney, and three members of the jury.
Guards opened fire. Jonathan Jackson, the judge, and two of the
inmates were killed. The district attorney was paralyzed for life.

The guns Jonathan Jackson used were registered to Davis. She had
purchased them long before he stormed the courthouse, out of concern
for her safety. Since the _Examiner_ article, Davis had received
daily death threats. Further, as a member of the Black Panther Party
in Los Angeles, she had seen the efforts of police to destroy the
group. In December 1969 three hundred police used grenades and
dynamite in a siege of the party’s LA headquarters. The following
May, National Guard troops killed unarmed college students at Kent
State in Ohio, and police killed student protesters at Jackson State
College in Mississippi. The repression of the left, especially the
Black radical left, was intensifying.

So when news of the courthouse shooting reached Davis, she calculated
that it was best to go on the run. Starting in August 1970, Davis was
on the  FBI ’s most wanted list, the third woman ever to appear on
it. She was arrested in October, in a motel in New York City, and
spent sixteen months in jail awaiting trial—mostly in solitary
confinement, because officials feared her influence on women
prisoners. Initially, Davis faced the death penalty. Five days after
the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in February
1972, she was allowed to post bail. Her trial began in March. No one
believed that she would get a fair hearing, so then president Richard
Nixon personally invited fourteen Soviet scientists to observe it for
themselves.

Davis’s portrait spread all over the country, no longer on wanted
posters but on buttons, leaflets, and T-shirts. A “Free Angela
Davis” campaign erupted worldwide. Aretha Franklin pledged to pay
her bail in cash, “not because I believe in Communism, but because
she’s a black woman who wants freedom for all black people.” Davis
became a symbol for free speech, for outspoken women, and for Black
militancy, an embodiment of the restlessness and rebelliousness that
defined the era.

Still, she worked to deflect attention from her individual
circumstances and toward the movement. Even in the astonishing moment
when the jury foreperson read out the not-guilty verdict—the jury
having found insufficient evidence to support her part in the
plot—she redirected focus to the international campaign that had
demanded her freedom. Davis described the decision as a “people’s
victory.”

The fiftieth anniversary of Davis’s historic acquittal of murder,
kidnapping, and conspiracy, charges that once threatened her
execution, was little acknowledged this past June, but as a thinker
she may be as influential today as she has ever been. From the
uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, to the outpouring of
protests in the summer of 2020, the past decade has been not a period
of Black pragmatism and obeisance—as Jaime Harrison, the chair of
the Democratic National Committee, has insisted—but an era of Black
rebellion. The relentlessness of recent demonstrations, the glow of
burning buildings, and the sheer brutality of police in response
provoked memories of the Black radicalism of the 1960s. And the
debates these protests inspired have thus also been debates over how
to remember an earlier era of Black activism and political
thought—and how best to continue that tradition.

There are two predominant ways of misapprehending the Black radical
tradition. On one side, liberals have argued that the emergence of
Black radicalism in the 1960s sparked white backlash and spoiled the
goodwill earned by the more palatable civil rights movement. “If
we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that…there were times
when some of us, claiming to push for change, lost our way,” then
president Barack Obama said in 2013, at an event marking the fiftieth
anniversary of the March on Washington. “The anguish of
assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances
against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal
behavior.” That, Obama explained, “is how progress stalled.
That’s how hope was diverted. It’s how our country remained
divided.”

In this view, the civil rights movement stands for “incremental
progress” against the excesses of Black radical politics. But this
dichotomy between the patient civil rights movement and the
self-destruction of the Black liberation movement fails in the light
of historical scrutiny. And it fails to see the relation between the
two sides; the Black insurgency of the late 1960s was driven by people
disillusioned with the slow pace of change, even after highly touted
civil rights legislation had been passed.

The view, alas, endures, in the politicians who believe that Bernie
Sanders failed to win a majority of votes from Black Democrats in the
2020 presidential primaries because Black voters are simply too
pragmatic and have too much to lose. Or in Jim Clyburn, the former
chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and currently the
third-ranking Democrat in the House. After the protests in the summer
of 2020, Clyburn said that he and the late John Lewis had privately
agreed that the demand to defund the police “could undermine the 
BLM  movement, just as ‘Burn, baby, burn,’”—a slogan of the
Watts riots—“destroyed our movement back in the Sixties.”

“John would never yell, ‘Burn, baby, burn,’” Clyburn said. In
fact, when Lewis was scheduled to speak at the March on Washington,
Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph pressured him to change his
remarks at the last minute, fearing that his comments were so
incendiary that they might offend the Democratic Party officials the
two of them were urging to move more quickly on civil rights
legislation. “The time will come when we will not confine our
marching to Washington,” Lewis had planned to say.

We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way
Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn
Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. We shall fragment the South
into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of
democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty.

The point isn’t that Lewis was a Black liberation radical, but that
in 1963 he was as frustrated and angry about the pace of change as are
today’s Black radicals demanding that the police lose their funding.

The other misapprehension of the 1960s usually comes from young people
who search for inspiration from an earlier Black liberation movement.
Today’s radicalizing activists can sometimes indulge in nostalgia
for what is essentially an imagined unity, as if the 1960s were a
period defined by organizational efficacy and political clarity. This
sometimes makes it more difficult to remember both the ceaseless
provocations directed at movement activists by police and federal
agents and the political disagreements within the movement itself. As
ever on the left, there was tension over what leadership roles women
should have, whether the United States was fascist, and whether
multiracial organizing was necessary or desirable. At times we neglect
a more painful history of recrimination, sectarianism, and political
and social intolerance among those who would otherwise be comrades.
Those disagreements may explain why Davis—for all her influence as
an activist, intellectual, and writer—has not always been taken as
seriously as her peers from the era.

In recent years, numerous scholars and activists have made efforts to
recover the histories of these mass struggles.

In particular, they have tried to examine the work of the Communist
Party. In their new collection _Organize, Fight, Win_, which gathers
the writings of Black Communist women starting in the 1920s, Jodi Dean
and Charisse Burden-Stelly provide a genealogy for the strains of
Black feminism that emerged as part of the radicalization of the
1960s. They establish a lineage that connects Davis’s radical
politics and emergence in the 1960s to Black women who as early as the
1920s had helped analyze what they called the “triple burden” of
race, gender, and class as the basis of their oppression. They, like
Davis, saw themselves as part of a global struggle against capitalism
and colonialism and for socialism and a better world.

Davis’s contributions, observations, experience, and originality as
part of this tradition have often been overlooked even as her male
contemporaries from the 1960s have been exhaustively examined. Why? As
a Black queer woman, Davis does not fit into versions of radical
history that predictably valorize Black men—from Martin Luther King
Jr. to Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Huey Newton—as worthy and
complicated subjects.

Many biographies and documentaries have ignored not only Davis and
other women, but also the movements to which they and thousands of
ordinary people were attached. A spate of critical biographies that
appeared shortly after Davis’s arrest did little to capture her
belief that her political radicalization was the typical experience of
other young Black people. Toni Morrison called one of these
dime-a-dozen portraits “a Cyclopean view of Angela Davis that leaves
the reader with a wholly useless biography, somehow offensive in its
one-eyed stare.”

Another reason Davis’s thinking has been overlooked is her
membership in the Communist Party. Communists had long been accused of
invoking antiracism to recruit Black people to their cause without
being genuinely interested in their welfare. Richard Wright, a former
member, described his disillusionment with the party in _American
Hunger_; Ralph Ellison, in _Invisible Man_, questioned how real the
Communists’ commitment to antiracism truly was.

For her part, in 1968 Davis joined an all-Black branch of the party in
Los Angeles, whose members had local reputations as good and reliable
activists. In her writing, like the Black Communist women who
proceeded her, she went far beyond the party’s line, theorizing
about the intertwinement of race, class, and gender in the lives of
Black women years before “intersectionality” was in classrooms and
on every nervous chyron. She even criticized the party as a national
organization: it did not pay “sufficient attention to the national
and racial dimensions of the oppression of Black people, and therefore
submerg[ed] the special characteristics of our oppression under the
general exploitation of the working class.”

She left the party in 1991 because of what she describes as a lack of
internal democracy. All along she was lucid in her understanding of
its shortcomings, but the longevity of her tenure meant she could be
dismissed as its mouthpiece. Her membership also rankled some African
Americans caught up in the long-standing red scare.

For five decades now, Davis has been a prolific writer and public
intellectual, articulating for a broad audience how racial inequality
shapes Black life. Her groundbreaking, prophetic essay “The Black
Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (1971), dedicated to
George Jackson and written from the Marin County Jail as she awaited
trial, was as much about Black women’s resistance to slavery as it
was a rebuke of the 1965 Moynihan Report on Black poverty, which
offered a distorted view of Black matriarchs emasculating Black men,
an idea that had become popular among Black men in the revolutionary
movement.

Davis had been skeptical of the women’s movement, judging it as
essentially white and middle class. Then in jail she saw how race and
poverty overlapped with gender and made women inmates, especially
those who were pregnant, particularly vulnerable to the state. This
persuaded her to integrate gender into her political analyses—and so
did the prosecutors’ concocted theory that Davis participated in the
siege of the courthouse to free her lover, George Jackson (a woman
scorned!). At the time, Davis’s writings were necessary
interventions for building unity between Black men and women within
the movement. Only later did they come to be seen as “Black
feminism.”

Davis is nearly eighty now. She remains politically active and highly
visible, an inspiration to younger activists and organizers
internationally. She did not disappear into academia after her trial,
nor did she retreat from her radical ideas. Instead, in the
half-century since her acquittal, she has continued to campaign
against prisons and on behalf of the incarcerated. She has also
continued to embrace the politics of internationalism, championing
self-determination for Palestinians, decrying police abuse in Brazil,
and railing against neoliberalism in South Africa. She remains
controversial: in 2019 the Birmingham Civil Rights Center announced it
was honoring Davis, then rescinded the award in what was widely
considered a reaction to her support for the Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions campaign against Israel, only to reinstate the award later
that month.

Now, nearly fifty years after its first publication in 1974, Davis has
brought forth a new edition of _Angela Davis: An Autobiography_, a
landmark text of left-wing Black politics. Today it is popular to see
socialism as a preoccupation of young white men; the reissue reminds
us of the long tradition of Black involvement in socialist and
communist organizations, and of this preeminent Black woman
radical’s brilliance. It preserves the text of the first two
editions with some minor factual corrections; Davis acknowledges in a
lengthy and insightful new preface that her views have evolved or that
her language today would be different. (“I am only too aware of the
ways in which masculinist assumptions prevented me from understanding
the impact of prison regimes on women,” she writes about her
homophobic observations of queer relationships behind bars.) _An
Autobiography_ remains an important document for understanding the
scope of political radicalization in the 1960s as well as its extended
lineage, for Davis’s personal history is interwoven with that of the
Black movement from the end of World War II up to today.

Davis was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944. After an
elementary education in the resource-starved local Black schools, she
went on to elite white private schools in the Northeast. Her family
was not rich but had connections outside the South that gave her and
her siblings access to a world beyond Jim Crow
Birmingham—connections that flowed almost entirely through Black
Communist Party members. She went on to study philosophy in Europe; by
twenty-five, she was an adjunct professor at  UCLA .

This was not, some critics of _An Autobiography_complained, the
experience of ordinary Black people. But Davis saw something general
in her life story: the contradiction between the official
proclamations of the US as a free and democratic society and the daily
racism she and her peers endured. This is what radicalized her.
“Certainly, since 1959–1960, black people as a whole in this
country have made enormous progress in the consciousness of the need
for liberation, and I think that I am a part of that,” she
told _Ebony_ in 1972. “Just as I could point to hundreds,
thousands of other black men and women my age who have experienced
almost the same kind of development.”

During the first fifteen years of Davis’s life, the federal
government used the full weight of its power to marginalize the
Communist Party and criminalize participation in it. In a series of
trials between 1949 and 1958, 108 Communists were convicted of
advocating the overthrow of the government and cumulatively sentenced
to more than four hundred years in prison. In 1947 President Harry
Truman signed an executive order establishing a Federal Employee
Loyalty Program to smoke out Communists who may have been working in
the bureaucracy. Nearly five million federal workers were
investigated. In 1950 the McCarran Act required members of
“Communist-action organizations” to register with the attorney
general. These and other legislative efforts helped whip up an
atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination. Blacklists were created
that compiled the names of actual Communists and also anyone deemed
sympathetic to the cause, costing thousands of people their
livelihoods.

For Davis, these persecutions were personal. Sallye Davis, her mother,
had been a leader with the Southern Negro Youth Congress ( SNYC ), an
organization that was cofounded by Black members of the Communist
Party and that campaigned against the poll tax and for the right to
vote. Sallye Davis had organized on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys,
nine Black youths wrongfully accused of raping two white women. Less
is known about the political activity of Angela Davis’s father,
Frank, but John Abt, the general counsel of the Communist Party, wrote
in his autobiography that Frank had contacted him personally to ask
that he represent her when she was jailed in New York City.

Many of Davis’s closest childhood friends, including Claudia and
Margaret Burnham, had parents who were Black leaders in the party.
(Margaret, while working as an attorney for the  NAACP ’s Legal
Defense Fund, was a central member of Davis’s legal team.

) Dorothy Burnham—whose writing appears in _Organize, Fight,
Win_—had left New York City for Birmingham with her husband, Louis,
to join the fight against racism and Jim Crow. Anticommunism was a
national phenomenon, but repression was particularly acute in the
South, where white officials blamed demands for civil rights on the
outside agitation of Communist provocateurs. In the late 1940s, Bull
Connor, the local official notorious for siccing dogs on Black
children in civil rights protests in 1963, forced the Burnhams out of
Birmingham, back to New York City.

When Davis began attending high school in New York City, her
friendship network expanded to include the children of the leading
party members. Among them was Harriet Jackson, daughter of James
Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson, former leaders of  SNYC . She also
became friends with Mary Lou Patterson—the daughter of William
Patterson, best known for his 1951 petition to the United Nations,
“We Charge Genocide,” which was submitted with Paul Robeson and
argued that the US government’s racism was a punishable crime—and
with Bettina Aptheker, whose father was the famous party historian
Herbert Aptheker, the plaintiff in a 1964 Supreme Court case that
successfully challenged the constitutionality of federal prohibitions
on party members’ right to obtain a passport.

In her autobiography, Davis points out that precisely because she
associated the Communist Party with the parents of her friends, it at
first struck her as an old and conservative organization. But these
relationships also contradicted the official and popular portrayals of
Communists as duplicitous and conniving. That had never been her
experience, which meant that she was to some degree impervious to her
era’s red-baiting and knee-jerk anticommunism. She compares her
experience of reading _The Communist Manifesto_ in high school to
being struck by “a bolt of lightning.” It offered a way to make
sense of the bewildering rules and regulations that held Jim Crow
intact:

The eyes heavy with hatred on Dynamite Hill; the roar of explosives,
the fear, the hidden guns, the weeping Black woman at our door, the
children without lunches, the schoolyard bloodshed, the social games
of the Black middle class, Shack I/Shack II, the back of the bus,
police searches—it all fell into place. What had seemed a personal
hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern whites to confront
their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks to acquiesce,
became the inevitable consequence of a ruthless system that kept
itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition, and the
oppression of one group by another.

Davis spent a portion of her college years in Paris, at the Sorbonne,
and eventually attended a graduate program in Frankfurt. There she
embraced her status as a protégée of the Marxist intellectual
Herbert Marcuse, whose lectures she had attended during her senior
year at Brandeis, by undertaking doctoral study of philosophy at
Goethe University with theorists including Theodor Adorno and Jürgen
Habermas. Her radical politics were meanwhile deepening. In Paris she
had encountered the Algerian resistance to the French occupation, and
now in Germany she was under the influence of the mass student
movement. But she had her own battles to wage at home.

Davis returned to the United States in 1967. She headed to San Diego
to continue her studies with Marcuse, who was by then teaching at 
UCSD . She also decided to join in the political activities of the
Black liberation movement in Los Angeles. Particularly after her
experiences in Frankfurt, that meant becoming a part of an
organization. “As 1968 got under way, I realized how much I needed
to find a collective,” she writes.

Individual activity—sporadic and disconnected—is not revolutionary
work. Serious revolutionary work consists of persistent and methodical
efforts through a collective of other revolutionaries to organize the
masses for action. Since I had long considered myself a Marxist, the
alternatives open to me were very limited.

Finding no clear or easy entry points into the Black movement, she had
to create her own. Davis helped organize a Black student union at 
UCSD  and in doing so developed ties to organizing beyond the campus.
But she quickly discovered how complicated the terrain of the Black
movement was. In the years after the Watts riots in Los Angeles, the
Black Congress, representing the many different groups working in the
movement, had become the hub of radical organizing in Southern
California. There was constant jockeying to position one’s group as
part of the congress’s leadership, trying to distinguish one’s
group from the rest based on political superiority or revolutionary
zeal.

These differences could and did spill over into political violence. In
the fall of 1967, at a Black youth conference designed to promote
unity in LA, a shootout erupted between members of the cultural
nationalist US Organization, led by Ron Karenga, the creator of
Kwanzaa, and a group called United Front. Tensions could be easily
manipulated by  FBI  informants or others directed to disrupt the
organizing activity of the Black left. “In the midst of the chaos
that followed the shooting,” Davis remembers, “I read the
literature, sat in on some of the workshops, and discovered that about
the only thing we really had in common was skin color. No wonder unity
was fragile.”

Davis eventually joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
( SNCC ), which in Southern California by the late 1960s was very
different from the student civil rights organization that had been
founded in 1960 in North Carolina. The LA branch of  SNCC  came
together out of a negotiated compromise between the Los Angeles Black
Panther Political Party and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense,
which had been formed in Northern California in 1966. Davis recalls in
her autobiography that an Oakland Panther demanded

that your motherfuckin’ party get rid of the name the Black Panther
Party. In fact, you better change it to the motherfuckin’ Pink
Pussycat Party. And if you haven’t changed your name by next
Friday, we are going to off you all.

With assistance from James Forman, who led  SNCC nationally, the West
Coast chapter was born.

SNCC  quickly established itself in the community by organizing
against police brutality and developing a program around political
education, for which Davis was responsible. Within months, the group
had become popular and influential. Davis would call it “one of the
most important organizations in the LA Black community.” But the
successes were short-lived. Over time, two problems developed that
generated deep political conflict.

The first was sexism, which undermined the daily work of the group.
Davis describes men, anxious about their leadership within the
organization, accusing women leaders of plotting a “matriarchal coup
d’état.” “I was criticized very heavily…for doing a
‘man’s job,’” she writes.

I became acquainted very early with the widespread presence of an
unfortunate syndrome among some Black male activists—namely to
confuse their political activity with an assertion of their maleness.
They saw—and some continue to see—Black manhood as something
separate from Black womanhood. These men view Black women as a threat
to their attainment of manhood—especially those Black women who take
initiative and work to become leaders in their own right.

The second problem was anticommunism. The men who constituted the
leadership of the local  SNCC  chapter objected to the prominence of
Franklin Alexander within the group because he was a Communist.
Eventually Alexander was expelled. This was not just sectarian strife
but a conflict motivated by substantive political differences.
Davis’s part in leading the “liberation school” was criticized
because she was teaching Marxism as part of her political education
classes, where group leaders believed that it would be best to teach
people practical trade skills that could aid in their survival
instead.

Most of the laws used to intimidate Communists nationally had been
ruled unconstitutional by the late 1960s. But the social stigma of
party membership remained, even among students and the emergent Black
radical left. The Communist Party was hounded by the US government,
and its own repressive leadership—with its ever-shifting and
equivocal positions, its intense sectarian opposition to political
opponents, and its rigid and uncritical support of the Soviet
Union—also jaundiced its reputation among intellectuals and
activists.

And yet the deepening crises within the revolutionary Black
left—authoritarian leadership; suffocating sexism, including the
subordination of women leaders; erratic political lines; a tendency to
glorify violence in lieu of organizing mass struggle—nonetheless
paved Davis’s way into the party. In 1968 her entry came through an
all-Black LA branch called the Che-Lumumba Club. The LA chapter of 
SNCC  had included not just Franklin Alexander but also his partner,
Kendra, another party cadre. Davis was enamored of the political
sophistication of Franklin’s older sister Charlene Mitchell, a party
organizer who ran for president of the US on a Communist Party ticket
in 1968.

In Davis’s experience, not only were women leaders, organizers, and
political thinkers in the party—the California Communists were led
by the dissident Dorothy Healy—but her male comrades treated her as
an equal, respecting her organizing acumen and her political
contributions. In her view, the Communist Party had a clear
understanding of the oppression and exploitation under capitalism, and
also centered its doctrine on building a multiracial mass movement
rooted in the working class. Davis’s long-standing commitment to
multiracial organizing came from her parents’ influence, and, as she
explained in the collection _Feminist Freedom Warriors _(2018), she
needed something larger than the Black Panther Party:

My experiences within the Communist Party gave me this global
framework, this way of identifying not only with labor struggles and
struggles that were being conducted by people of other racial and
ethnic backgrounds, white workers, and so forth, but also the world.

It was not so much a moral imperative as the only logical way in which
a successful revolution could actually take place in the US. Anything
that did not involve “the masses” was hopelessly utopian.

Her rejection of Black nationalism put Davis at odds with the dominant
currents of the Black radical left. She was “disturbed” when, in
1968, she heard Stokely Carmichael tell a Black Power conference in
Los Angeles that “as Black people…we have to forget about
socialism, which is a European creation, and have to start thinking
about African communalism.” In the United States, she writes,

when white people are indiscriminately viewed as the enemy, it is
virtually impossible to develop a political solution…. I was
learning that as long as the Black response to racism remained purely
emotional, we would go nowhere.

_An Autobiography_ was written at the prodding of Davis’s editor at
Random House, Toni Morrison. Davis was concerned that, at
twenty-eight, she was too young to write a memoir, but Morrison
encouraged her to write a “political autobiography.” In the first
edition of the book, Davis said it

emphasized the people, the events, and the forces in my life that
propelled me to my present commitment. Such a book might serve a very
important and practical purpose. There was the possibility that,
having read it, more people would understand why so many of us have no
alternative but to offer our lives—our bodies, our knowledge, our
will—to the cause of our oppressed people.

She also hoped others “might be inspired to join our growing
community of struggle.”

Her reluctance to focus on herself in her own autobiography has not
gone away. “I am more convinced than ever that we need to engage in
relentless critique of our centering of the individual,” Davis warns
in her new preface. She is a reluctant self-analyst, torn between
telling her story and refusing the seductive indulgence of reducing
important historical events to her own involvement. Her account is
driven by a need less for people to understand her emotional self than
to situate herself within a larger political movement and use her
experience to shed light on the experiences of her generation.

The autobiography gave Davis an opportunity to reclaim her life story,
which mainstream outlets had grossly distorted during her
incarceration. These pop-psychology assessments of Davis carried over
to the original reviews of the book. “If there is an Angela Davis
separate from the Communist woman,” the Black writer Julius Lester
wrote, “Davis does not know her and has little desire to do so….
Her will is so strong that, at times, it is frightening.” The
reviewers’ search for the “real” or “other” Angela Davis
reeks of sexism, as does the assumption that her life was not fully
consumed by politics—that there must be some interior built around
other desires.

It is hard to imagine such a question being asked of Malcolm X. “If
this book were about a man,” Morrison wrote in response to a
reader’s report expressing concern about the lack of “humanness”
in the manuscript,

certain problems of credibility would never arise. The real question
you know is why doesn’t she think and behave like a female?… How
nice it would be if Angela were really Jane Fonda and not Jean
d’Arc.

For Davis’s male critics, her “frightening” lack of sexual or
romantic desire and her ill-fitting position in the world of
revolutionary politics turned her into an exotic figure and made it
possible to dismiss her political and intellectual contributions. This
perception is not only inaccurate—she writes intimately about her
love for George Jackson, for one—it also continues to marginalize
the work of women radicals from the era.

One of the more comprehensive engagements with Davis’s ideas can be
found in Ibram X. Kendi’s award-winning _Stamped at the
Beginning _(2016), which uses her life to understand the past fifty
years of the struggle against racism. And yet Kendi misreads Davis’s
politics to explain his own ideas. Kendi and Davis share
“antiracism” as a political objective, but they mean vastly
different things by that word. For Kendi, racism is the product of
errant public policies that produce disparities in social, political,
and economic life. Accordingly, he sees the resolution of those
disparities in “antiracists” taking electoral power so that their
ideas can guide public policy, eventually turning them into “common
sense.” But this solution depends on the essentially liberal
assumption that changing ideas, without changing the structure of
society, is the way to social transformation.

For Davis, by contrast, the root of the problem in American society is
not racism but capitalism. Racism is central to the function of
capitalism because it divides those who have the greatest interest in
fighting it—including working-class and poor white people.
Undoubtedly, capitalism makes life harder for those who are not white.
But in Davis’s view, “antiracism” means developing a political
strategy for changing everything, not just ascending to positions of
power in the existing structure. When the Nation of Islam
publication _Muhammad Speaks_ asked its readers in Harlem in 1971 to
submit questions for Davis, a number of them asked why she was a
Communist. She answered them in an article she wrote
for _Ebony_ while she was jailed in California. “I am a Communist
because I am convinced that the centuries-old suffering of Black
people cannot be alleviated under the present social arrangement,”
she wrote. “Capitalism cannot reform itself. Black people more than
any should understand the truth of this statement.”

Davis eventually left the Communist Party, but not her belief that
capitalism is at the root of oppression and exclusion in American
society. It is a belief that has animated her activism and organizing
as a prison abolitionist. She was involved in the establishment in
1997 of the prison and police abolition organization Critical
Resistance. She also returned to the classroom, going on to teach in
the history of consciousness program at the University of California
at Santa Cruz for fifteen years (this after Reagan said, in 1970, that
she would never teach in the California system again). In 2018 Davis
donated to Harvard her enormous collection of personal papers,
reflecting, in her words, “fifty years of involvement in activist
and scholarly collaborations seeking to expand the reach of justice in
the world.”

The power of _An Autobiography_ lies in Davis’s understanding of
both the tremendous forces assembled against her generation’s dreams
of a new society and the ideas and actions of her cohort that stalled
their forward momentum. She distills how male supremacy undermined the
leadership of Black women and introduced authoritarianism and
intolerance into more general debates over the politics, strategy, and
tactics of the movement. Today, the struggle for Black liberation has
taken new form and exists in an altogether different context, but the
endless assault on Black life continues to make that pursuit
necessary.

_An Autobiography_ confirms some of what we know, including the
ruthless efforts of American officials to bury a movement. But it also
shows how sexism and sectarianism unravel potential coalitions and
undermine crucial solidarities. In writing about her own experiences,
Davis captures why so many of her peers became radicalized. Hundreds
of thousands of Black Americans engaged in riot and rebellion in the
1960s, literal attempts to burn down the status quo. The breadth of
their struggle, undertaken against a backdrop of global resistance to
colonialism and white supremacy, gave young radicals the impression
that revolutionary change was within their grasp.

“We felt we had the energy of stallions and the confidence of eagles
as we rushed into the neighborhoods of LA—on the streets, in houses,
campuses, offices—driving, walking, meeting, greeting,” Davis
writes about her early organizing with  SNCC .

We experienced the heights of brotherhood and sisterhood doing
something openly, freely, and above ground about our own people. This
was no sly manipulation of the establishment, marked by compromise and
gradualism. Nor was it the individual heroism of some one person whose
outrage had reached the point of no return. Our stance was public and
our commitment was to our people—and for some of us, to the class.

_[Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the Leon Forrest Professor of African
American Studies at Northwestern. She is the author of From
#BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black
Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.]  _  

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* Angela Davis
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* autobiography
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