3 December 2005
Moira Nolan looks at Angela Davis, who has campaigned against racism and injustice for over 35 years
In October 2004, the Not In My Name US anti-war coalition took out a full page advert in the New York Times condemning the war in Iraq.
Among the high profile academics and Hollywood stars uniting to oppose George Bush’s war was Angela Davis — a key figure of the black liberation movement in the 1970s.
Davis was catapulted to international renown in 1970 when the FBI put her on its Most Wanted list and issued an “Armed and Dangerous” poster of her — in those days an invitation to any racist cop in the US to gun her down in cold blood.
Yet for millions of black Americans Davis was a symbol of the movement to end the institutionalised racism of the US—and especially its prison system.
As a child in the 1940s Davis grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in an area known as Dynamite Hill because of the vast number of black American houses firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan.
The 1960s civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war campaigns were springboards for radical change and brought Davis into struggle.
Read more here.
