Angela Davis: An Autobiography

“And nothing could detract from the thought that they wanted to isolate me because they feared the impact that the mere presence of a political prisoner would have on the other women.”

Davis’s arrest and imprisonment are politically motivated. For this reason, the New York jail where she is held before her extradition to California refuses to allow her to mix with the general population. Instead, Davis is placed in the ward for inmates with mental health conditions. Her jailers argue that this arrangement protects Davis from other prisoners, who might attack her for being a communist. Their true motive, however, is to prevent Davis from interacting with and teaching the other women about communism and Black Liberation and Freedom. Once Davis’s attorneys succeed in having her moved to the general population, the other inmates are not hostile toward her and indeed show significant interest in these ideas, something that dismays the authorities.

“Whatever problems they had had initially were not solved, but rather systemically aggravated.”

Imprisonment does nothing to better the lives of inmates, according to Davis. While jailed in New York, she struggles to access reading material that is of any intellectual value, for example. Such deprivation does little to improve inmates’ conditions in the hopes that their lives after incarceration will be better. Instead, their problems persist and contribute to a cycle of imprisonment. This is one of Davis’s chief charges against the carceral system and likewise one of her main arguments for the abolition of prisons.

“Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population to specimens in a zoo—obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to one another.”

Davis argues the carceral system deliberately dehumanizes inmates. Authorities suppress their independence, and they are kept caged, like animals in a zoo. Subordination to one’s jailers is expected and enforced, while the prison experience foments division or enforces isolation (as when jailers place Davis in solitary), which prevents inmates from working together and thus successfully resisting.

“Through her own political work she had learned that it was possible for white people to walk out of their skin and respond with the integrity of human beings.”

Davis develops a deep resentment for white people during her childhood because of the violent racism she witnesses around her, including the bombings of Black homes in her neighborhood. Her mother, however, teaches her that white allyship is possible. Though Davis remains wary of white people in her orbit as she attends predominantly white schools, including Brandeis University, she finds allyship among sympathetic white supporters of the Black liberation movement.

“For a long time, I thought about those who ate and those who watched. Finally, I decided to do something about it. Knowing that my father returned from his service station each evening with a bag of coins, which he left overnight in the kitchen cabinet, one night I stayed awake until the whole house was sleeping. Then, trying to overcome my deep fear of the dark, I slipped into the kitchen and stole some of the coins. The next day I gave the money to my hungry friends.”

Davis describes one of her early experiences with class inequality as an elementary school student. The hardships of others disturbed her from a young age, and she was never willing to watch and do nothing. When she notices some children at school going hungry because they cannot pay for their meal, she steals coins from home to feed them. The Black Panther Party, with which Davis organized during her activist work in California, later created a free breakfast program for school children to combat the problem that haunted Davis as a child.

“The inner-directed violence that was so much a part of our school lives at Tuggle accelerated at Parker to the point where it verged on fratricide”

Davis’s account of her racially segregated schooldays examines Isolation, Community, and Struggle from yet another angle. Deprived of the resources their white counterparts enjoyed, Davis’s classmates turn against one another. Although Davis often frames the shared experience of oppression as an opportunity for solidarity, this episode makes it clear that it does not automatically strengthen bonds. Rather, the violence of oppression can tear communities apart by sparking anger and resentment, which then find the easiest outlet: other members of the community.

“Now I sensed a need to change some of my ideas about liberation. I realized that despite some of my superficial aversion for some of the social activities of the Black middle class, I had been depending on it to guide the workers, the jobless, and the poor among us to freedom.”

Davis describes a shift in her thinking after reading The Communist Manifesto. She realizes that class and race intersect and that white supremacist capitalism relies on dividing people along class as well as racial lines. Fomenting this division, Davis suggests, is essential to maintaining dominance that relies on exploitation, which is why fostering community looms so large in Davis’s work.

“Only in the artificial surroundings of an isolated, virtually all-white college campus could I have allowed myself to cultivate the nihilistic attitude. It was as if to fight off the unreal quality of my environment, I leaped desperately into another equally unreal mode of living.”

Davis feels alienated when she arrives at Brandeis University in rural Massachusetts. As one of only a few Black students, she lacks community. She embraces her isolation for a while before finding belonging among a cohort of like-minded international students and her Black classmates.

“To be an Algerian living in Paris in 1962 was to be a hunted human being. While the Algerians were fighting the French army in their mountains and in the Europeanized cities of Algiers and Oran, paramilitary terrorist groups were falling indiscriminately upon men and women in the colonialist capital because they were, or looked like, Algerians.”

Davis’s time abroad helps her understand the global nature of racist and capitalist oppression. It is not merely that the same forces that led to the enslavement of Davis’s ancestors also led to the colonization of places like Algeria, but rather that systems of oppression remain interconnected. This strengthens Davis’s belief in the need for collective liberation.

“This act was not an aberration. It was not something sparked by a few extremists gone mad […] And it was this spectacular, violent event, the savage dismembering of four little girls, that had burst out of the daily, sometimes even dull, routine of racist oppression.”

The racist firebombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young Black girls was not an isolated event. Rather it was one violent act among many that happened in the Jim Crow South, particularly as Black Americans struggled to secure their civil rights. Systemic racism is as much to blame as the individual perpetrators of this violence.

“Racism meant more profits and, insofar as white workers are concerned, division, and confusion.”

In 1967, Davis attends the Black Youth Conference in Los Angeles, where Communist activist Franklin Alexander gives a compelling presentation. He argues that capitalism benefits from racism because elite white people use it to foment division between Black and white workers and prevent a united opposition.

“We experienced the heights of brotherhood and sisterhood doing something openly, freely, and above ground about our own people.”

Davis finds belonging among her fellow members of SNCC in Los Angeles. The activism in which they engage heavily involves community outreach in Black neighborhoods. This open activity creates a strong sense of solidarity among members and those they serve.

“In this way he subtly criticized me for having romanticized something that was really nothing more than terribly hard work. It was then that I began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading.”

During a summer trip to Cuba, Davis helps harvest sugarcane and compliments a Cuban on his skills. Yet he quickly reminds her of the work’s backbreaking and dangerous nature. He hopes that mechanization will soon make this physically laborious work unnecessary, a reminder to Davis not to idealize the experiences of working people.

“Jails are thoughtless places. Thoughtless in the sense that no thinking is done by their administrations; no problem-solving or rational evaluation of any situation slightly different from the norm. The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules and the fear of establishing a precedent (meaning a rule they had not yet digested).”

Davis sees jails as irrational institutions. They simply cage inmates while jailers mindlessly enforce regulations. The carceral system does nothing to improve the lives of those inside to prevent them from resorting to actions that may have resulted in their jailing in the first place.

“When the superficies of our two lives were set aside, what they had in common could easily be seen. It all boiled down to the fact that we were Black and in our own ways had tried to fight the forces that were strangling our people.”

Davis and her co-defendant, Ruchell Magee, are of very different socioeconomic backgrounds. Magee was imprisoned at 16 while Davis is middle-class and highly educated. Davis and Magee refuse to let these class divisions work against them, however. Both are Black survivors of a racist judicial system that they work to dismantle.

“In that state of almost continuous solitude, getting totally involved in my work was a fundamental condition of survival and sanity.”

Davis describes the importance of intellectual stimulation while she is jailed. She is kept away from the general population for much of the time that she is imprisoned in California, so her work on her case and her book project becomes her primary companion. Her jailers recognize this fact and constantly try to disrupt her.

“For several months this deputy continued to be silent while I carried on conversations with women prisoners whom I had never seen and whom I could never hope to see. On the day Erika Huggins and Bobby Seale were acquitted of murder charges in New Haven, we held a regular celebration. Once this matron handed me two bars of candy the sisters in the main tank had sent as presents. When I opened them, I discovered long letters—kites—concealed under the wrappers.”

Davis’s account of the sympathetic deputy recalls her earlier remarks about the Black staff in the New York prison. Davis does not specify this woman’s race (or any other demographic information, such as her class), so it is impossible to say whether she too was in some sense a “victim” of the carceral state. However, her actions, like those of Davis’s fellow prisoners, are a reminder of solidarity’s ability to flourish in unlikely places.

“There were well-worn cards and games, indispensable props for every jail—things to coat the fact of imprisonment with sugary innocuousness, fostering an imperceptible regression back to childhood.”

Davis again points out that imprisonment fails to improve inmates’ lives and circumstances. Instead, it uses “props” such as board games to create the illusion of activity and stimulation while depriving inmates of anything that could provide real stimulation, education, or consciousness raising, such as books. Implicit in this policy is a recognition of the subversive potential of education. Davis works to combat this deprivation by teaching her fellow prisoners about communism and Black liberation.

“Since that survey had been conducted, George had been murdered by San Quentin guards. The hysteria whipped up around these events—designed to turn the victims into the criminals—was pervasive. Public opinion in this wealthy white county considered anyone who spoke out on behalf of San Quentin prisoners as guilty as they presumed prisoners to be.”

Davis and her legal team fight to have her trial moved out of Marin County because of the potential for juror bias. Authorities blame George Jackson for his own murder, and data shows that most of the county’s rich white residents would look unfavorably upon her case. The judge subsequently moves her trial to San Jose.

“My very existence, it seemed, was dependent on my ability to reach them. I decided then and there that if I was ever free, I would use my life to uphold the cause of my sisters and brothers behind walls.”

Davis is compelled to build community with her fellow inmates. Her experience in jail confirms her commitment to the liberation of those unjustly imprisoned by a racist judicial and carceral system. Indeed, she has spent her life since advocating for the release of political prisoners and for prison abolition.

“It did not permit people to express their resistance to the system of repression, which was not only behind my own imprisonment but was why so many others were languishing in prison.”

Davis criticizes the bail system. Davis’s supporters from the Che-Lumumba Club create a bail fund for her, but she is uncomfortable with this move. Moreover, collecting the bail fund does not resist the system of oppression in which she and others are trapped but rather participates in its very structure.

“This new framework was based on the motive of passion. I simply wanted to liberate, he said, a man whom I loved.”

The prosecution in Davis’s case decides to pursue a misogynistic “passion” motive. According to their argument, Davis’s love for George Jackson, articulated in her letters to him, spurred her to conspire with his brother Jonathan in the Marin County Courthouse siege. Thus, despite not being there, Davis is guilty in the prosecution’s eyes. This argument implicates Davis while simultaneously eliding her political activism, the true reason for her persecution.

“Women’s liberation in the revolution is inseparable from the liberation of the male.”

Davis writes in a letter to George Jackson about the link between women’s liberation and the overall Black liberation movement. She has witnessed the important role women can play in revolution—in Cuba, for example. She argues that women can break down the barriers that misogyny created and that they should be equal partners in the Black liberation movement.