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Dr. Angela Y. Davis
"Civil Rights and Human Rights:
Future Trajectories"

Tuesday, January 17, 2006
10:00 am
Brayboy Gymnasium

Angela Y. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Over the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar and activist/organizer. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era.

Davis' political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, AL, and continued through her high school years in New York. But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her sixteen-month incarceration, a massive international "Free Angela Davis" campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.

Davis' long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today, she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. In 1997, Prof. Davis helped found Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), a topic that is central to her current scholarship and activism.

Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Davis would never again teach in the University of California system. From 1994 to 1997, she held the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. Today, she is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

For more information regarding her biography, go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis