On March 31, Head-Royce School in Oakland hosted “An Evening with Angela Davis” via Zoom as part of the K-12 school’s CommunityEd Speaker Series. The conversation was facilitated by Director of Equity Inclusion, Ms. Johára Tucker, and ended with a student Q&A. Professor Davis spoke of her experiences in education during the time of Jim Crow 1.0, her views on internationalism, and what she recommends to young activists as she continues her work today.
It has always been a dream of mine to see Ms. Davis speak. Of course, I have seen video clips and documentaries (see Free Angela and Black Power Mixtape). I have a copy of her book, Women, Race & Class. I would love to have taken her class at UC Santa Cruz. Thus, it was an absolute treat to be able to see her “live” during the pandemic and experience her pontificating in real-time in the measured thoughtfulness of the one of a kind cadence that is truly her own. There is a lot to unpack from this event, the least surprising thing being that there is, has been, and always will be only one Angela Davis.
To begin the evening, Ms. Tucker, with a pillow on her couch in the background reading, “Too Tired to Codeswitch,” asked Ms. Davis to speak about her beginnings and what it had been like to go from a segregated school in Birmingham, AL to an integrated high school in NY. Ms. Davis spoke about how she had come from a family of activists and that her mother had fought for the Scottsboro Nine (whose plight also greatly inspired Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird). Her high school experience in New York at the independent Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village sounds like it was somewhat of a refreshing change in that the school was integrated (she was one of only a few Black students in her class), though she was clear that even so, racism still existed. Later, spending time in Paris and Frankfurt and learning about the Algerian Revolution further shaped her internationalist world view. A life-long communist, Davis believes that American nationalism as we see it in the U.S. is just a small part of the Americas as a whole and the world writ large. Nation-states will not always be the way we live and adopting “internationalism” through the creation of a community beyond borders is what the legendary activist sees as the way to an equitable future.
(Side note: I love Ms. Tucker's pillow and it begs the question, how can we make it so BIPOC don’t need to do the exhausting work of code-switching in order to acceptably participate in “mainstream” society? That’s a conversation for another day, but one certainly worth having, white folks).
The area for which Ms. Davis is perhaps best known for her activism is prison abolition. Through her own experience being in prison after spending a brief period on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for capital crimes for which she was acquitted in 1972, she saw that there was a completely separate set of issues for women in prison that were not being addressed. Additionally, contemporaneous riots at San Quentin and Attica called attention to poor prison conditions and the mistreatment of inmates in the U.S. It is no secret that mass incarceration is driven by racism and the prison-industrial complex. The question is, when are we actually going to do something about it? The answer, according to Davis, might be now. The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police last year was a flashpoint moment which galvanized more people than ever (and notably more white people than ever) to protest against police brutality. Davis called the Derek Chauvin trial "horrendous" (it is) and seems pleased that the ACAB sentiment is now coming from the community and not just from long-time activists and prison abolitionists like herself.
This brings us to what’s next for the movement. While I’m sure many young activists would be delighted to get some pro tips from Angela Davis, she doesn’t want to be one of those people who tells them “This is how we did it in my day.” Partly because it isn’t necessary – young activists have already learned from those who came before them and have access to information on historical as well as present day movements, such as the foundation that Ella Baker laid and the Black Brazilian movements of today – and partly because she has found that she is actually learning a lot from what the next generation has to offer. Davis is still active in the Oakland community and has attended recent protests there. She recommends getting police out of schools to help curb the school-to-prison pipeline and reallocating the funds to scholarships. She would like to finally see an end to police occupation of Black communities. She suggests looking at The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program and measuring the movement’s progress against these goals that were set forth decades ago. She would like for white folks to recognize that the "glass ceiling" feminism that moves white women into spaces that white men occupy and leaves everyone else behind isn't enough and that we can't say "All Lives Matter" until we as a society demonstrate that Black, Trans, Indigenous, AAPI, and Poor Lives Matter.
It was incredibly heartening to hear that after 60 years of activism, Angela Davis still has hope for the future. "We think of freedom as an endpoint. But I don't think there is an endpoint. Freedom is an infinite struggle. There's always more work to do," she said. Now, it’s up to all of us to do that work to bring about the much-needed change she has been fighting for all these years. Hopefully we can make it happen through a collective call for change to our institutions, collaboration between community organizing and elected officials who actually reflect the community, and intersectionality. I’m ready to do my part. Who’s with me?
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