Angela Davis

Political activist and academic Angela Davis will visit Davidson on Tuesday, Feb. 12, to present the college’s annual Wearn Lecture, on the subject “Political Activism and Protest from the 1960s to the Age of Obama.”

Her talk is Feb. 12 at 8pm in Duke Family Performance Hall in the Alvarez College Union. It’s free and open to the public.

While at Davidson, Ms. Davis also will lead a discussion on “Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s, Black GIs, and West German activists.” That presentation also is free, with the time and place to be determined. The discuss coincides with the award-winning multimedia exhibition “The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany” that will be on display in the Brown Atrium of Alvarez College Union during February.

Through her activism and scholarship, Ms. Davis has been deeply involved in the quest for economic, racial, and gender justice. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration, and the generalized criminalization of communities affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as a person who was placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List” and spent eighteen months on trial and in jail before being acquitted of all charges.

She is a founding member “Critical Resistance,” a national organization dedicated to dismantling the prison system. She is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she urges audiences to consider the possibility of a world without prisons, and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

The author of nine books, she has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Her most recent studies — “The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues,” “Abolition Democracy” and “Are Prisons Obsolete?” — concern the abolition of the prison system.

Ms. Davis taught for the last 15 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary PhD program, and of Feminist Studies. She has also taught at San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley, UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University.

For more information on her talk at Davidson, call 704-894-2284.