Angela Davis - the 40th Anniversary of Davis' Firing and Political Arrest

Story and video by Democracy Now

For over four decades, Angela Davis has been one of most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. An icon of the 1970s black liberation movement, her work around issues of gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and social movements for years.

She is a leading advocate for prison abolition, a position informed by her own experience as a fugitive on the FBI's Top 10 most wanted list forty years ago. Davis rose to national attention in 1969 when she was fired as a professor from UCLA as a result of her membership in the Communist party and her leading a campaign to defend three black prisoners at Soledad prison.

Today she is a university professor and the founder of the group Critical Resistance, a grassroots effort to end the prison-industrial complex. This year she edited a new edition of Frederick Douglass’s classic work, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. We spend the hour with Angela Davis and play rare archival footage of her.

Angela Davis, professor emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a visiting distinguished professor at Syracuse University. She is a founder of the group Critical Resistance, a grassroots effort to end the prison-industrial complex. She has just edited a new edition of Frederick Douglass’s classic work, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (City Lights). She will be appearing with the author Toni Morrison at the New York Public Library on Oct. 27 for an event titled 'Frederick Douglass: Literacy, Libraries, and Liberation'.