Angela Davis to Give Black History Month Keynote Talk

02/13/2018

Noted Civil Rights activist Angela Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Human Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will give the keynote address as part of Saint Louis University’s celebration of Black History Month on Wednesday, Feb. 14. The talk will take place at 6 p.m. in the Wool Ballroom, Busch Student Center.

Through her activism and scholarship over the last decades, Davis has been deeply involved in our nation’s quest for social justice. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial and gender justice.

Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College and the University of California, Berkeley. She also has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Vassar College, the Claremont Colleges and Stanford University. She has spent the last fifteen years at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary doctoral program, and of feminist studies.

She is the author of nine books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America. In recent years, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.”

Davis has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her most recent book is Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.

She is a founding member Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a twenty-first century abolitionist movement.

The talk is open to the public.