Political Activist and Scholar Angela Davis to Speak at Williams College

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 24, 2014—Political activist and scholar Angela Davis will visit the Williams College campus on Saturday, April 12, to present a lecture titled “Leadership in the 21st Century.” Her talk will focus on activism and developing a social consciousness. The event, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 6:30 p.m. in Chapin Hall. Doors will open at 6 p.m.

Davis is known internationally for her work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Her activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Ala., and continued through her high school years in New York. In 1969 she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position at UCLA as a result of her social activism and membership in the Communist Party USA.

She was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 1970, accused of conspiracy to free George Jackson, one of the three African-American inmates called the Soledad Brothers who were charged with the abduction and murder of a white prison guard. During her 16-month incarceration, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized, and Davis was acquitted by an all-white jury in 1972.

Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. Davis is a founding member of 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. She has lectured in all 50 states, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of nine books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Are Prisons Obsolete?; and The Meaning of Freedom.

Davis has taught at San Francisco State University, Mills College, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. She spent the last 15 years at the University of California Santa Cruz and is now its Distinguished Professor Emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments. Davis received her B.A. from Brandeis University, her M.A. from the University of California, San Diego, and her Ph.D. from Humboldt University.

She last visited Williams in April 2001, when she spoke on the American prison system as part of a college Lecture Committee series.

This event is sponsored by the Davis Center and the Black Student Union.

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Published March 24, 2014