#angeladavis

boston, massachusetts october 1970

anti-war protest, boston common

There are people who do not simply live through history. They are shaped by it, and then spend their lives shaping the world in return.

Professor Angela Y. Davis grew up in Birmingham, AL, in a city marked by segregation, bombings, and the constant threat of racial terror. She was a child when white supremacist violence earned her neighborhood the name “Dynamite Hill.” She knew the little girls who were killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. That loss was not abstract to her. It was personal. It was formative. It helped shape a lifelong commitment to justice rooted not in theory, but in lived reality.

For more than half a century, Angela Davis has stood at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and moral courage. In the early 1970s, she was wrongfully imprisoned in a case that revealed how the criminal legal system can be used as a political weapon. Her eventual acquittal was not inevitable. It was won through global solidarity, through people across the world insisting that her life and her freedom mattered.

She has spent her life naming uncomfortable truths. About prisons and punishment. About state violence. About whose suffering is made visible and whose is ignored. As an abolitionist, she has challenged us to imagine a world beyond cages, beyond fear, and beyond the belief that repression creates safety.

That she opens the Voices for a Just World series matters. That she does so right now matters even more.

We are living in a moment defined by war, displacement, authoritarianism, and a growing effort to criminalize protest and dissent. Angela Davis reminds us that moments like this are not new, but they are always decisive. As she has long echoed from Frantz Fanon, each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

There is no more fitting place for this conversation than Tougaloo College. This is sacred ground in the Black freedom struggle. A campus where students organized when doing so carried real risk. A place where conscience and courage have always met.

“For my family, my strength. For my comrades, my light. For the sisters and brothers whose fighting spirit was my liberator. For those who humanity is too far to be destroyed by walls, bars, and death houses. And especially for those who are going to struggle until racism and class injustice are forever banished from our history.” - Angela Davis