50 pages • 1-hour read
Angela Davis: An Autobiography
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Background
Historical Context: Civil Rights Movement/Black Power Movement
Content Warning: This section references systemic racism, including racial segregation in the Jim Crow South and acts of white supremacist violence.
The American civil rights movement of the 1960s had its roots in World War II and its aftermath. Black resistance to systemic racism existed prior to the war, but war made change more urgent. For example, the GI Bill, passed in 1944, provided returning soldiers with mortgage loans and educational assistance to attend colleges and universities. Black veterans benefitted from the bill’s passage, but white supremacists implemented methods to restrict their gains. The Veteran’s Administration pushed Black veterans into technical training programs or historically Black institutions rather than allowing them into elite white colleges and universities, and real estate moguls refused to sell to Black veterans. Moreover, as Black families bought homes in cities during the Second Great Migration, urban white people retreated to the suburbs in a phenomenon known as white flight. The federal government, in conjunction with the real estate industry, started giving “scores” to residential areas that determined whether inhabitants were eligible for mortgages, with Black neighborhoods downgraded (or “redlined”). Davis was introduced to these problems at a young age when friends of her mother couldn’t find housing in New York because of their interracial marriage.
Meanwhile, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP fought back. In 1954, they won the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This ruling found the “separate but equal” designation in education discriminatory and illegal. Black authors such as James Baldwin, whom Davis heard speak during her time at Brandeis University, published works criticizing systemic racism. In 1955, Black Southerners challenged racial segregation on the city’s buses in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Davis and her friends sat in the front of a Birmingham bus in an act of solidarity with the people of Montgomery, which caused a dispute with the driver. An environment ripe for change brewed.
Young Black Americans took an active role in the civil rights movement. In 1961, Black and white Freedom Riders boarded buses in the South to protest segregation. White supremacists violently attacked them in multiple cities. Black students organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, and at the March on Washington in 1963 activist Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech titled “I Have a Dream.” Racists fire-bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham shortly thereafter while Davis was studying abroad in France. She knew the four young girls who were murdered in this act of white supremacist terrorism and felt guilt for not being home to participate in the civil rights movement’s efforts. In 1965, King and others marched from Selma to Montgomery, famously crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where police violently attacked them. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in response to these events, which ended many of the Jim Crow laws that had suppressed Black voters in the South for decades. Nonetheless, racist discrimination and violence continued, leading some, including Davis, to the Black Power movement, which grew out of the civil rights movement.
Stokely Carmichael, one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), popularized the term “Black Power” in the late 1960s. The Black Power movement emphasized Black self-sufficiency, and SNCC no longer welcomed white allies as members to ensure that Black members were not overshadowed. The Black Panther Party (BPP), a communist group for Black liberation, also grew out of the Black Power movement. The FBI monitored these groups, and organizers like Davis, who was involved with both, became targets for arrest and prosecution. Movement leaders were instrumental in organizing opposition to this political persecution. Indeed, Davis credits the movement with sustaining her during her time in jail and helping ensure her acquittal.
Though the civil rights and Black Power movements achieved a great deal, they certainly did not stamp out racism in the United States. Today movements like Black Lives Matter follow in the footsteps of these earlier movements as they struggle against systemic racism in the form of police violence and mass incarceration. Davis and Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, for example, were featured in a keynote conversation at the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association meeting in Baltimore, where they discussed Davis’s legacy and current struggles.
Ideological Context: Black Feminism
During a 2019 oral history interview for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, Angela Davis said:
I rarely talk about feminism in the singular. I talk about feminisms. And, even when I myself refused to identify with feminism, I realized that it was a certain kind of feminism…It was a feminism of those women who weren’t really concerned with equality for all women (“The Revolutionary Practice of Black Feminisms.” National Museum of African American History and Culture, 8 Dec. 2021).
Black women are among those whom mainstream feminism has often left behind, and Davis’s autobiography explores the intersection of race and gender to show that Black women’s experiences, particularly within the US justice system, are unique. Davis describes white women prisoners being privileged over Black women inmates and addresses the conflicts that Black women working in jails face, comparing them to Black overseers who supervised the work of their fellow enslaved people. Davis also observes early in her time at the detention center in New York that most of the inmates are non-white women, many from lower-class backgrounds. She notes that in California women prisoners are expected to do their own laundry, unlike men. Black inmates are made to perform this labor when no white women volunteer for the job, yet when Black prisoners request laundry duty, they are denied in favor of white inmates. Though legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw did not coin the term “intersectionality” until the 1980s, Davis’s autobiography could be called intersectional in approach because it addresses the ways in which multiple forms of oppression—for example, racism, classism, and sexism—converge to shape lived experiences.
Black women have been involved with feminist movements since the 1800s, when Sojourner Truth argued that Black men and women should gain suffrage rights simultaneously. She gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a feminist conference in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. Black journalists and feminists challenged white feminists’ racism and established the National Association of Colored Women’s Club in 1896. Nevertheless, white feminists continued to articulate racist ideas. Susan B. Anthony, for example, argued that white women deserved voting rights before Black men.
The Second Wave Feminist Movement of the 1970s took inspiration from the civil rights movement but was dominated by white women, leading Davis to reject it. For Black feminists such as Davis, feminist thought must consider the ways in which race and gender, among other factors, interact to oppress women. Likewise, Black women’s experiences are distinct from those of Black men, and Black liberation must include Black women’s liberation.
This belief sometimes caused strife between Davis and men involved in the Black liberation movement. For example, when working with the Black Panthers to organize a demonstration in San Diego, Davis reflects, “I ran headlong into a situation that was to become a constant problem in my political life. I was criticized very heavily, especially by male members […], for ‘doing a man’s job’” (139). Misogyny also contributed to the dissolution of the Los Angeles chapter of SNCC, to which Davis dedicated much of her activist labor. Male members of the organization claimed that women in the group were contributing to their subordination by taking on leadership roles: “The brothers opposing us leaned heavily on the male supremacist trends that were winding their way through the movement” (157). Davis lamented this trend in her correspondence with George Jackson. Jackson had articulated some of these sexist ideas in his memoir, Soledad Brother, something for which he expressed regret to Davis. Franklin Alexander of the Che-Lumumba Club was another exception to this trend. He defended Davis and others from the misogynistic criticism that male members of SNCC articulated.
Today’s feminist activism seeks more inclusivity and diversity of voices, but it is not immune to criticisms that it promotes and favors the white feminism that Davis describes as exclusionary. Davis said in her speech at the inaugural Women’s March in Washington, DC, in 2017:
This is a women’s march and this women’s march represents the promise of feminism as against the pernicious powers of state violence. And inclusive and intersectional feminism that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation (Matthews, Lyndsey. “Here’s the Full Transcript of Angela Davis’s Women’s March Speech.” ELLE, 11 Oct. 2017).
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