Angela Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an African American radical activist, primarily working for racial and gender equity and for prison abolition.

Childhood

Angela was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, in the days of Jim Crow. Her father, a graduate of St. Augustine's College, a traditional black college in Raleigh, North Carolina, was briefly a high school history teacher. Leaving teaching due to the low salary, he owned and operated a service station in the black section of Birmingham. Her mother, also college educated, was an elementary school teacher with a history of political activism. Using their modest income, the family purchased a large home in a mixed neighborhood where Angela spent most of her youth. The neighborhood, called locally "Dynamite Hill," was marked by racial conflict. She was occasionally able to spend time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City.

Related Topics:
Birmingham, Alabama - Jim Crow - St. Augustine's College - Traditional black college - Raleigh, North Carolina - Service station - New York City

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During her childhood, Angela experienced the humiliations of racial segregation. She was bright and begged to enter school early, attending Carrie A. Tuggle School, a Black elementary school in dilapidated facilities and later Parker Annex, a similarly dilapidated annex of Parker High School devoted to middle school education. Angela read voraciously. By her junior year, at 14, she applied for and was accepted to both an early admission program at Fisk University and a program of the American Friends Service Committee which placed Black students from the South in integrated schools in the north. She wavered between the two, finally choosing to attend high school at Elizabeth Irwin High School, also known as the Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village in New York City. This was a small private school favored by the radical community. There Angela was exposed to study of socialism and communism and recruited to the Communist youth group, Advance, where she became acquainted with children of the leaders of the Communist Party including her lifelong friend, Bettina Aptheker.

Related Topics:
Racial segregation - Fisk University - American Friends Service Committee - Little Red School House - Greenwich Village - Socialism - Communism - Communist Party - Bettina Aptheker

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