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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Angela Davis

Angela Davis

Over the last forty-odd years, ANGELA YVONNE DAVIS has been active in numerous organizations challenging prison-related repression. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Davis studied at Brandeis University, the Sorbonne, and with Herbert Marcuse at the Goethe Institute. Her advocacy on behalf of political prisoners, and her alleged connection to the Marin County courthouse incident, led to three capital charges, sixteen months in jail awaiting trial, and a highly publicized acquittal in 1972. In 1998, Davis was one of the twenty-five organizers of the historic Berkeley, California conference “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” She is the author of many books, including Are Prisons Obsolete?, Abolition Democracy and The Meaning of Freedom. She currently teaches in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The need to generate a conversation about the prospects for abolition is perhaps even greater now, because linked to the abolition of prisons is the abolition of the instruments of war, the abolition of racism, and, of course, the abolition of the social circumstances that lead poor men and women to look toward the military as their only avenue of escape from poverty, homelessness, and lack of opportunities.