Angela Davis Essay Research Paper Angela Davis

Angela Davis Essay, Research Paper Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Random House, 1974, revised edition, 1990. In Angela Davis: An Autobiography . She has eloquently wrote down her story and intelligently named each chapter nets, rocks, waters, flames, walls, and brides each name symbolizing a step in her life. Her autobiography details how her aims to help oppressed individuals found expression in the political ideals of communism. In the chapter nets and rocks she lays the foundation of her life she describes her upbringing and her way of life as a child. Angela Yvonne Davis was born January 26, 1944, to B. Frank, a teacher and businessman, and Sally E. Davis, who was also a teacher. Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, at a time of great political unrest and racism in the

United States. Davis experienced exposure to multiple socio-economic systems throughout her youth. She participated in civil rights demonstrations and helped form interracial study groups while being a Birmingham, Alabama, teenager. As a child, Davis’ parents had many Communist friends and she later joined a Communist youth group while a scholarship student from the American Friends Service Committee at Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York. About her early introduction to communism, she states in her autobiography that the Communist Manifesto (the declaration of principles and objectives of the Communist League a secret organization of migr German artisans and intellectuals, published in London in 1848, shortly before the February Revolution in Paris written by Karl Marx)

hit her like a bolt of lightning. She read it eagerly, finding in it answers to many of the seemingly unanswerable dilemmas which had plagued her. She began to see the problems of black people within the context of a large working-class movement. Her ideas about black liberation were inexact, and she could not find the right concepts to articulate them; still, she was acquiring some understanding about how capitalism could be abolished. She continues, explaining the connection between communism and minority liberation, by saying that what struck her so emphatically was the idea that once the emancipation of the proletariat became a reality, the foundation was laid for the emancipation of all oppressed groups in society. Davis traveled to Germany in 1960, where she spent two years

studying at the Frankfurt School under acclaimed teacher Theodor Adorno. From 1963 to 1964, Davis attended the University of Paris. Davis then returned to the United States and attended Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. After earning her B.A. and graduating magna cum laude in 1965, Davis flew to Germany, where she conducted graduate research. Upon returning to the U.S., Davis enrolled at the University of California at San Diego, where she began pursuing her master’s degree, which she received in 1968. . In addition, while in college, she studied under political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who considered her the best student he ever taught. At the University of California, San Diego, she participated in several activist organizations, including the San Diego

Black Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; she also helped found the Black Students Council. Davis became a member of the Communist party, as well as a member of the Black Panthers. It was her involvement in these radical groups that caused Davis to be watched very closely by the United States government. After teaching for only one year, it was also these radical associations that resulted in her dismissal from her position as assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles In the chapters waters, flames, and walls she speaks about what troubles her crusade for the liberation of black people. Davis allied herself mostly with the Che-Lumumba Club, a black faction of the Los Angeles Party membership. The black Communists of