Who is Angela Davis?

The word "discrimination", according to Encarta Encyclopedia, is "different treatment of others based solely on their membership in a socially distinct group or category, such as race, ethnicity, sex, religion, age or disability."

A certain race, the Black race, have been discriminated against as early as 1444 when the Portuguese practiced importing slaves from the African coast to be trained as agricultural workers.

On December 1, 1955, seamstress and housekeeper Rosa Parks displayed a form of civil disobedience: she refused to relinquish her seat at the request of a white man. Such an act of heroic defiance spurred the Civil Rights Movement.

On September 19, 1969, Angela Davis, a black militant leader and philosopher at the University of California at San Diego, was relieved of her position. The Regents at the University of California discovered that Ms. Davis had joined the "Che Lumumba Club" in the Communist Party of the United States.

This is her story.

Angela Yvonne Davis was born in Birmingham (nicknamed "Bombingham" in reference to the bombing of African American families' homes), Alabama on January 26, 1944 to Sallye Davis and Frank Davis. Her mother was a schoolteacher, civil rights campaigner and a member of the NAACP. Her father was also a schoolteacher and a businessman. Davis grew up on Dynamite Hill at the corner of North 11th Court and Center Street.

She attended Tuggle Elementary and later went to Parker High. She received a scholarship to attend Elisabeth Irwin High School from the American Friends Southern Negro Student Committee. Elisabeth Irwin was an integrated private high school. In the book "Who is Angela Davis?" she was given an opportunity at 15 to attend Fisk University but opted to continue her education at Elisabeth Irwin. Davis attended Brandeis University in Massachutes in 1961. She majored in French. She also was a student at the University of Paris from 1963 to 1964.

In her early adulthood, Davis came back to the United States to study with Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher. This occurred her senior year at Brandeis. Marcuse was the "Father of the New Left". In 1965, she traveled to West Germany to study at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. During her residency, she lived with the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund or SDS leaders in the "Factory". It was here where she experienced the German student movement. (Nadelson, p. 113)

Davis flew from Germany

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