Professor Angela Y. Davis will speak at 7:30 p.m. Monday in T.H. Harris Auditorium, after which she will conduct a book-signing.
Davis, known as an activist throughout her career, has maintained her commitment to radical feminism and human rights.
A native of Birmingham, Ala., Davis attended Elizabeth Irwin High School, best known as the Little Red School House, in the Greenwich Village section of New York City in her early teens. It was there that Davis became involved in radical politics and began a lifelong commitment to social change.
Upon graduation, she accepted a full scholarship at Brandeis University; where she was one of three African-American students in the freshman class. After a year abroad and further radicalization at home, Davis graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis in 1965.
During graduate school at the University of Frankfurt, she participated in German Socialist Student League activities and deepened her commitment to Communism as a means for social change. Davis returned to the United States and earned a master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego.
Since the late 1960s she has maintained an academic career in the United States, and has been a prolific writer and activist. Davis has been associated with radical groups, notably the Blank Panther Party in the 1970s, and she was a vice presidential candidate on the Communist Party USA ticket in 1980 and 1984.
Now a University of California professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Davis focus continues to be prisons. In her own words, she is not a prison reformer but a prison abolitionist.
No longer a Communist Party USA member, Davis maintains her commitment to human rights and feminism in her writing and activism.
For information, contact Dr. Mari-anne Fisher-Giorlando at (318) 274-2526; or (318) 255-6900 after 5 p.m.