Angela Davis

Angela Davis was teaching philosophy at UCLA when the university's regents dismissed her in 1969 for belonging to the Communist Party, a decision a court struck down. She had grown up in Birmingham, Alabama, taken her degree at Brandeis under Herbert Marcuse, and studied in Frankfurt before returning to California. In 1970 guns registered in her name were used in an armed takeover of a Marin County courtroom in which four people were killed. She spent time on the FBI's most wanted list, sixteen months in jail, and was acquitted on every count on 4 June 1972. She stood for vice president on the Communist ticket in 1980 and 1984, helped found the prison abolition organisation Critical Resistance in 1997, and taught in the History of Consciousness programme at UC Santa Cruz until 2008, where she is distinguished professor emerita. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle gathers her speeches, essays and interviews, edited by Frank Barat and fronted by a foreword from Cornel West, arguing that Ferguson, Palestine and the older Black freedom movement belong to a single argument.