BLACK HISTORY SPOTLIGHT : ANGELA DAVIS!
BY: LEON KWASI KUNTUO-ASARE
Angela Yvone Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama.
Angela’s family lived in an area nicknamed “Dynamite Hill”, it was an a neighborhood where domestic white supremacist terrorist attacks against the rising black middle-class, who fought against segregation were frequent and more often than not, ignored by local law enforcement . In an article published on npr.org, on July 6, 2013, Birmingham historian Horace Huntley states:
“There were 40 plus bombings that took place in Birmingham between the late 40’s and mid 60’s, forty-some unsolved bombings.”
As a child, Davis would attend Carrie A. Tuggle elementary school, a school that was racially segregated. By her junior year in high school, Davis applied and was accepted into the American Friends Service Committee Program, a program that took black students from the segregated south and placed them in schools in the integrated north. Davis decided to attend Elisabeth Irwin high school in the Greenwich Village.
After high school, Davis would be awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, where she was only one of three black freshman. After she graduated Brandeis University, she would attend the University of Frankfurt (in Frankfurt, Germany ) for graduate work in philosophy.
After returning to the United States to be a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Davis would earn a reputation on campus as being a civil rights activists and radical feminists. Davis was also a member of the Communist Party USA and was an associate of the Black Panther Party.
In 1969, then-Governor of California, Ronald Reagan would put pressure on the Board of Regents at the University of California to fire Davis because of her communist party ties.
In 1970 Davis was charged, but later acquitted of Federal charges of conspiracy, when armed-men took over a Marin County, California courtroom, which resulted in four people being killed, when alleged associates of hers , used weapons she bought earlier, to commit the hostile the takeover.
After her acquittal, Davis would visit Cuba, where she received a warm reception from the Afro-Cuban population, Davis reportedly said she believed Cuba to be racism free.
In July, 1979, Davis would visit Moscow, Soviet Union and would be presented the Lenin Peace Prize, from the communist government.
In recent years Davis has written several books, co-founded Critical resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison industrial complex and has lectured at many top Universities, including San Francisco State University, Stanford University, Brown University, Rutgers University and many other Universities.
A 2014 INTERVIEW WITH ANGELA DAVIS ON DEMOCRACY NOW , SPEAKING ABOUT PRISON ABOLITION, THE WAR ON DRUGS AND WHY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS SHOULDN’T WAIT FOR OBAMA:
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION USE LINKS BELOW :
BLACK HISTORY SPOTLIGHT : IDA B. WELLS!
BY : LEON KWASI KUNTUO-ASARE
Ida Bells Wells-Barnett, more famously known as Ida B. Wells was born during the time of the American Civil War on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs Mississippi. Wells would go from being born into the system of slavery, to becoming a school teacher in the post civil war America . Wells would eventually go on to become an editor of her own news paper, which she would use to crusade for many causes, including women’s rights and Civil rights for the African-American community, which would include speaking out against the lynching and murder of African-American men by racist white mobs.
Growing in her activist role, In 1896, Wells would found two civil rights organizations, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and the National Afro-American Council, which she co-founded.
Sadly on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68, Wells would die, due to kidney failure.
HER LEGACY:
Ida B.Wells was a woman ahead of her time, she was courageous, strong-minded, outspoken , and very assertive . She put her life in grave danger crusading against illegal lynching of blacks and the injustice of segregation.
THE EARLY LIFE OF IDA B. WELLS:
IDA B. WELLS : PIONEERING JOURNALIST.
IDA B. WELLS : WOMEN’S RIGHTS.
IDA B. WELLS : ANTI-LYNCHING CRUSADER.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION USE LINK :
LETS UNITE!✊
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