Angela Davis
Biography
Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an African-American left-wing political activist, academic, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist in the 1960s working with the Communist Party USA, of which she was a member until 1991, and was briefly involved with the Black Panthers.
She is a professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, in its History Department. She is also a former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. In 1998, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the "prison–industrial complex."
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Her membership in the Communist Party USA led California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969 to attempt to have her barred from teaching at any California University. She supported the governments of the Soviet Bloc for decades. During the 1980s, she was twice a candidate for Vice President for the CPUSA.
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