Angela Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama — in the neighborhood so frequently targeted by Ku Klux Klan bombs that it was known as "Dynamite Hill." She knew four of the four girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. These were her neighbors. This is the experience that made her a radical: not ideology, but the specific texture of what it meant to grow up Black in Birmingham in the 1950s.

She won a scholarship to study in New York, then studied philosophy at Brandeis University, studying under Herbert Marcuse, then graduate work in Frankfurt with Theodor Adorno. She returned to the United States and completed her doctorate, becoming a philosophy professor at UCLA. Governor Ronald Reagan personally moved to have her fired after learning she was a Communist Party member. She was fired; a California court reinstated her.

Davis became involved in the campaign to defend the Soledad Brothers — three Black prisoners, including George Jackson, charged with killing a prison guard. She purchased firearms legally in California. In August 1970, George Jackson's younger brother Jonathan used guns registered to Davis in a courtroom escape attempt that resulted in four deaths, including a judge. Davis had no involvement in the incident but owned the guns.

She was placed on the FBI Most Wanted list. J. Edgar Hoover called her "one of the ten most wanted criminals." President Nixon publicly congratulated the FBI when she was captured. She was held in jail for 16 months. At trial in 1972, an all-white jury acquitted her of all charges after deliberating for 13 hours. The prosecution had no evidence she was involved in any crime.

After her acquittal, Davis returned to academic work and built one of the most rigorous intellectual frameworks for understanding mass incarceration as a system — not a series of individual criminal justice decisions, but a structural response to the abolition of slavery, a mechanism for producing cheap labor and neutralizing political resistance.

Her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? brought abolitionist arguments to a mainstream audience, tracing the direct line from slavery through convict leasing, chain gangs, and the prison-industrial complex to the mass incarceration system of the late 20th century. The argument: mass incarceration is not a response to crime. It is a continuation of racial social control by other means. This is the argument that the threads on mass incarceration and the war on drugs in this archive document with specific evidence.