Hey guys! For August's Black Hero of the Month, I wanted to highlight Angela Davis. She was one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party and continues to advocate for an upheaval of the United States prison-industrial complex and fight against racism, sexism, and homophobia.
She was a highly sought-after college professor, with Princeton and Swarthmore attempting to recruit her. She decided to go to the philosophy department at UCLA because of its urban location. In 1969, the University of California tried to fire her due to a new policy against hiring communists that California governor and future president Ronald Regan created. She was a member of the Communist Party as well as the Black Panthers, in addition to being a vocal radical feminist. This was eventually dropped when Judge Jerry Pacht ruled that she could not be fired for her political ideology. She was eventually fired for the “inflammatory language” she used to state that the Regents “killed, brutalized, [and] murdered” the People's Park demonstrations and her frequent use of “pigs" to refer to law enforcement.
She went on to give lectures at universities and found organizations such as Critical Residence, an organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison system. She is also an accomplished author and philosopher, with 26 books. She now lives with her partner, Gina Dent, a humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz. Together, the two women fight for the abolition of police and prisons, Black liberation, and Palestinian solidarity.
she’s really cool