ANGELA DAVIS, Danz Lecture Series
Feminist Writer
April 17, 2007, 7pm
Kane Hall, Room 130

Lecture Title: Civil Rights and Human Rights: Future Trajectories

Free ticket required, available from University Book Store starting April 3rd.
For additional information, contact the Lecture Information Line by phone at
206.616.1825 or by email at lectures@...

Biography: Angela Y. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to
combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Over the years she has
been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar and activist/organizer. She
is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era.

Davis' political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, AL,
and continued through her high school years in New York. But it was not until
1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching
position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social
activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970, she was
placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject
of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of
the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her sixteen-month
incarceration, a massive international "Free Angela Davis" campaign was
organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.

Davis' long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her
involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own
arrest and imprisonment. Today, she remains an advocate of prison abolition and
has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. In
1997, Prof. Davis helped found Critical Resistance, a national organization
dedicated to dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), a topic that is
central to her current scholarship and activism.

Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies,
and she is the author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography;
Women, Race & Class (1989); and Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude
"Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday; The Angela Y. Davis Reader
(1999), a collection of Davis' writings that spans nearly three decades, was
published in 1998.

Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Davis would never
again teach in the University of California system. From 1994 to 1997, she held
the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California
Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. Today, she is a
tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University
of California, Santa Cruz.

Sponsors: The Graduate School, The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the
Humanities

_______________________________________________
Ihp mailing list
Ihp@...
http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/ihp