Dr. Angela Davis, Lectures at Cal State
By Eliz Dowdy
Dr. Angela Yvonne Davis was guest lecturer at Cal State San Bernardino last week. The Santos Manuel meeting room was filled to capacity; there were people in an overflow room, and standees along the walls of the building. The lecture was sponsored by the Santos Manuel Student Union Women's Resource Center. Davis could be described as a one-woman revolution; she has definitely been a catalyst for change, undaunted in the face of opposition, and steadfast in her beliefs.Davis was born January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama in an area known for racial conflicts; both parents were teachers. Her biographers describe her as an American Socialist, political activist, and retired professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the History of Consciousness Department.
When she was introduced, she received a resounding standing ovation. She opened the dialogue with the audience by stating she has incorporated a ritual in public speaking engagements. It is the acknowledgement of the Native people upon whose lands we meet. She had witnessed this acknowledgement in action in Australia concerning the aboriginal people; they also have been systematically excluded. A word of admonition to the attendees followed, “Never forget this land was colonized.”
Dr. Davis asked the assemblage how we all felt this time last year when there was a season of international ecstasy. Smiling, she asked the attendees, “Do you remember those dreams?” She followed with a rhetorical question, “Why do we so easily forget? Sometimes forgetting eases the pain of trauma; however, we now know that in order to purge the trauma we must remember the pain.” With those statements she moved the gears into the essence of the lecture, pain! Reminding the listeners that if we had spent the funds on education that was spent on incarceration fifteen years ago, we would not be at the critical point in education we are facing today. Returning to the election once again she said, “Why do we so easily forget? Did we think we were electing a transcendent being? The election of one black man was in no way going to change racism, or classicism.” She then began to frame it in the framework of Black History, and the
struggle for equality.
Davis constantly reminded the audience in a not-so-subtle manner that the disillusionment many are embracing today is because the movement became a monument, and one person was left to attempt to right all the wrongs. The promise was not in the name of the man, she stated, but in the movement.
Davis held the audience spellbound for almost two hours. Throughout the dialogue she was constantly reminding the students especially to get engaged in issues; they will not just go away nor solve themselves, she said. If the movement that swept Obama into the White House had maintained the same level of fervency, we would have completed the push for health care reform, and “Gitmo” (Guantanamo) would already be closed.
As a highly educated woman, she dispelled the myth that to become an activist one needs to leave school and get involved. All good activists have to learn to think. Davis is a philosopher; she has studied Hegel, Emanuel Kant and other European philosophers. Someone once asked why she studied all those dead white men. To learn about movements, the people behind them and how to utilize those same modified tenets, was her reply. It has been said that it was not the French revolution that shaped the mind of Hegel, but the Haitian revolution, when an enslaved people rose up and cast off the shackles of their oppressors. It was the model for the end of slavery in North America. One train of thought is that for a movement to be successful you need generous white people. Haiti dispelled that myth, yet European nations have continued to keep a stranglehold on the tiny nation.
Davis gets respect because she is not just spouting rhetoric from a podium in a white university; but she is one who has lived the life she projects.
She was selected as one of the children from the south to attend an integrated school in the north in her junior year of high school. She chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village in New York City, It was there she was introduced to socialism and communism and later recruited by a Communist youth group. Davis received a scholarship to study at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts; she later traveled to France and Switzerland, attended the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland. When she returned to Brandeis University she changed her major to French, studying Jean-Paul Sartre. She lived and studied in France at the Biarritz and Sorbonne Universities. She was in Biarritz in 1963 when the church in Birmingham was bombed; Davis personally knew the young victims. It was shortly after this juncture that as she neared the completion of her degree in French that she decided to study her real love, philosophy.
She also studied at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, having seen the struggles of the people and studied methodology of the struggle of the working people. When the Black Panther Party was formed she returned to the United States, earned a master’s degree from the San Diego campus, and a doctorate from Humboldt University in East Berlin.
In 1969 she was acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at UCLA. However her affiliation with the Communist party prompted then-California Governor Ronald Reagan to urge the Board of Regents to fire her; she was later rehired after legal action. In the seventies she burst upon the national scene with the abduction of a Superior Court judge in Marin County, and his eventual murder in an attempt to free a convict. The firearms used in the attack had been purchased in Davis' name. She fled the state and gained notoriety as the third woman to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. Later arrested, tried and released, Davis has the proverbial nine lives of a feline. After her release, she lived briefly in Cuba.
She is currently in the struggle for abolishing prisons. She describes the United States prison system as the prison-industrial complex where the unacceptable are locked out of sight and forgotten. She is also an
advocate for women’s rights, especially women prisoners who suffer physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the authorities. She is appalled that women prisoners give birth in shackles in most of the states. Davis definitely follows her trademark of posing questions that will encourage critical thinking rather than simply imparting knowledge.
Now in her sixth decade, the fires of activism and compassion for the underclass are still burning brightly, and she is still sounding a clarion call for new recruits to join the movement.
Women in their forties, fifties and beyond posed with Davis after the lecture, when she signed whatever they brought. Younger women brought their children to take photos with Davis, who is the living epitome of a “Legend in her own time.” The line for signed artifacts moved across the lobby of Santos Manuel building all the way to the entryway.
Davis visited San Bernardino in the late nineties; she was a guest of then Phenix Information Center at Valley College. She has been a recent lecturer at San Francisco State University, Stanford University, Bryn Mawr College, Brown University and Syracuse University. This reporter spoke with a grandmother who chuckled as she remembered protesting in the streets for the release of Davis from jail. Her grandchildren were amazed.
