Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She writes extensively on class, gender, race, and the U.S. prison system.
Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt. Studying under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, an adherent of the Frankfurt School, Davis became increasingly engaged in far-left politics. Upon returning to the United States, she studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed a doctorate at the University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in numerous causes, including the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA; after a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language.
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