Leadership and Social Responsibility

Angela Davis is known internationally for her work to combat all forms of oppression. Her political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama, and continued over the years in her work as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer. In 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground, and that culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history, leading to her acquittal in 1972. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. She is in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994, she was appointed to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.