Activist, former UCLA professor Angela Davis to give lecture

Shortly after internationally renowned scholar and activist Angela Davis came to teach at UCLA in 1969, the University of California Board of Regents attempted to remove her as a professor because of her membership in the Communist Party.

Then-Chancellor Charles Young defended her academic freedom alongside many UCLA students and faculty members.

Amid this controversy, 25–year-old Davis delivered her first philosophy lecture on the topic of freedom in black literature to a packed crowd of more than 2,000 in Royce Hall.

Davis, now 70, will return to Royce Hall Thursday for the first time in almost 45 years to deliver a Regents’ lecture about feminism and prison abolition.

The Regents’ lecture is part of a lecturers program started by the Board of Regents to bring faculty of non-academic fields to temporarily teach at UC schools.

When the UCLA Department of Gender Studies invited Davis to give the lecture, and to teach a graduate course this spring, she said it was an “offer (she) couldn’t refuse.” She considers her full-circle journey a kind of poetic justice.

“It’s one of those ironies of history,” she said with a laugh.

Davis, born in Birmingham, Ala. at a time of deep racial segregation, was a known radical feminist and activist and an associate member of the Black Panther Party when she began teaching at UCLA in the fall of 1969. Controversy about Davis’s academic freedom developed later that fall after an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigations agent wrote an article in the Daily Bruin stating that UCLA had hired a faculty member affiliated with the Communist party.

Davis confirmed she was a member of the Communist Party, and sued the university for attempting to remove her from her professorship because of it. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled in her favor, but Davis was later terminated permanently in 1970 for “inflammatory language” allegedly used in four off-campus speeches.

She eventually returned to the UC, however, as a professor at UC Santa Cruz from 1991 to 2008. In 1994, she was appointed to be the UC Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies, despite what she called a “very negative” response from the regents.

She said the year she spent at UCLA as a young professor set her on a trajectory that defined her political activism and academic interests for the next 40 years.

At her Thursday speech, titled “Feminism and Abolition: Extending the Dialogue,” Davis will discuss her current academic interest: engaging the ideas of feminist and abolitionist movements to determine how feminist theory can enhance the abolitionist movement. Abolitionism – an ideology Davis supports – calls for the abolition, rather than the reform, of the prison system.

Davis is well known for her activism critiquing racism in the criminal justice system, and she is often credited for the coining of the term “prison-industrial complex,” pointing to linkages between business and government that contribute to growth of private prisons. She developed her passion for incarceration issues while campaigning for the freedom of three black male prisoners called the “Soledad Brothers,” charged with the murder of a white prison guard. In 1970, Davis was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List in connection with a deadly courthouse shootout related to the Soledad Brothers controversy. The charges against Davis were later dropped.

“For my generation, there was no one more radical than Angela Davis,” said Robin Kelley, a UCLA history professor and acting chair of the African American studies department. “What I mean by that is not just her experience as an incarcerated person. … It had nothing do with ‘afros’ and the FBI – it had to do with what she wrote.”

Kelley, who will join Davis on stage at Royce Hall Thursday, began reading Davis’ academic work at age 16. He said she was one of the first scholars to write about the importance of including gender in discussions of race and class. That kind of interdisciplinary approach to radical, Marxist thinking was rare at the time, he added.

Davis said she is impressed by the critical thinking of UCLA student-led movements, in particular recent efforts by student organizations to persuade the UC to divest from companies supporting the prison industrial complex and from companies funding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Davis will speak about the intersection of these issues at an event hosted by the organization Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA May 14.

Davis has spoken about collegiate activism at various campuses across the nation, and at two Occupy Wall Street assemblies – one in Philadelphia and one in Washington Square Park in New York City.

In 2011, UCLA students of the Occupy UCLA movement voted to call UCLA’s Wilson Plaza, the location of the Occupy camp, “Angela Davis Plaza.”

Members of Occupy UCLA, 14 of whom were arrested by university police during a peaceful protest, renamed the plaza to honor Davis’s commitment to fighting for “radical transformation on campuses despite adversity and oppression,” said Jason Ball, a graduate student in political science who facilitated the discussion about the renaming.

A student from a class Davis taught at UCLA more than 40 years ago will be in the audience at her lecture this Thursday. James Jordan said he was 20 years old when he took his first class with Davis at UCLA, and he continued to attend her philosophy classes for the remaining two quarters she taught at the university. When Davis’ professorship was at stake, he signed a petition along with thousands of other students and faculty urging the regents not to dismiss Davis.

“I think she terrified the regents because here’s this young black woman who called herself a communist. … Wealthy people in charge had something at stake,” Jordan said.

In terms of activism and campus climate, Davis said much has changed at UCLA since she delivered her speech at Royce Hall more than 40 years ago. When Davis worked at UCLA, she said she was the only black assistant professor – and one of two women – in the philosophy department.

She views the creation of a UCLA gender studies department, and more recently, an Afro-American studies department, as strides forward in the movement toward social justice on college campuses.

But she said she is disappointed to see the fight to bring more students of color on campus is still ongoing. Currently, 3.8 percent of undergraduate students at UCLA are black.

Davis emphasized the importance of crafting solutions to this issue that combine concepts of diversity with the cause of social justice.

“It’s not simply about creating a student body that looks different but also one that represents different economic classes and is moving in the direction of justice,” Davis said.

Sometimes UCLA does not feel like a familiar place to her, she said. When she was on campus from 1969 to 1970, countless activists marched for race and gender equality, protested the ongoing Vietnam War and took part in a multitude of civil rights movements. In 2014, the campus looks different. When she walked across campus on May 1, International Workers’ Day, she said she was surprised to see only a small crowd of people protesting.

But activism is now taking new forms – Davis said she considers social media an innovative way to facilitate organizing, and is excited to see young people develop new activist strategies.

“One does not want to return to the period 40 years ago,” Davis said. “But one wants to create a kind of tradition that allows us to build on traditions (of) activism and scholarship in ways that are going to bring transformation to our social worlds.”