Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, author and social theorist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), running for Vice President in the 1980 and 1984 elections under that party. She is also a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She has been active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.
In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, she was held in jail for more than a year, before being acquitted of all charges in 1972. While in prison, she was often considered a political prisoner.
In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke away from the CPUSA to help establish the CCDS. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex.
Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize (since 2025 she is its last living recipient) and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Due to accusations that she advocates political violence and due to her support of the Soviet Union, she has been a controversial figure. In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" edition. In 2020, she was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2025, Davis was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of Cambridge.
Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was christened at her father's Episcopal church. Her family lived in the "Dynamite Hill" neighborhood, which was marked in the 1950s by the bombings of houses in an attempt to intimidate and drive out middle-class black people who had moved there. Davis occasionally spent time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City. Her siblings include two brothers, Ben and Reginald, and a sister, Fania. Ben played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Davis attended Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated black elementary school, and later, Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham. During this time, Davis's mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization influenced by the Communist Party aimed at building alliances among African Americans in the South. Davis grew up surrounded by communist organizers and thinkers, who significantly influenced her intellectual development. Among them was the Southern Negro Youth Congress official Louis E. Burnham, whose daughter Margaret Burnham was Davis's friend from childhood, as well as her co-counsel during Davis's 1971 trial for murder and kidnapping.
Davis was involved in her church youth group as a child and attended Sunday school regularly. She attributes much of her political involvement to her involvement with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She also participated in the Girl Scouts 1959 national roundup in Colorado. As a Girl Scout, she marched and picketed to protest racial segregation in Birmingham.
By her junior year of high school, Davis had been accepted by an American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. She chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village. There, she was recruited by a communist youth group, Advance.
Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her class. She encountered the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and became his student. In a 2007 television interview, Davis said: "Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary." She worked part-time to earn enough money to travel to France and Switzerland and attended the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland. She returned home in 1963 to a Federal Bureau of Investigation interview about her attendance at the communist-sponsored festival.
During her second year at Brandeis, Davis decided to major in French and continued her study of philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre. She was accepted by the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program. Classes were initially at Biarritz and later at the Sorbonne. In Paris, she and other students lived with a French family. She was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed; she had been personally acquainted with the victims.
While completing her degree in French, Davis realized that her primary area of interest was philosophy. She was particularly interested in Marcuse's ideas. On returning to Brandeis, she sat in on his course. She wrote in her autobiography that Marcuse was approachable and helpful. She began making plans to attend the University of Frankfurt for graduate work in philosophy. In 1965, she graduated magna cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
In West Germany, with a monthly stipend of $100, she lived first with a German family and later with a group of students in a loft in an old factory. After visiting East Berlin during the annual May Day celebration, she felt that the East German government was dealing better with the residual effects of fascism than were the West Germans. Many of her roommates were active in the radical Socialist German Student Union (SDS), and Davis participated in some SDS actions. Events in the United States, including the formation of the Black Panther Party and the transformation of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to an all-black organization, drew her interest upon her return.
Marcuse had moved to a position at the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed him there after her two years in Frankfurt. Davis traveled to London to attend a conference on "The Dialectics of Liberation". The black contingent at the conference included the Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael and the British Michael X. Although moved by Carmichael's rhetoric, Davis was reportedly disappointed by her colleagues' black nationalist sentiments and their rejection of communism as a "white man's thing".
She joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA named for revolutionaries Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, of Cuba and Congo, respectively.
Davis earned a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1968. She completed some work for a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, around 1970 but never received a degree because her manuscripts were confiscated by the FBI. Instead, two years later, she received three honorary doctorates: In August 1972 from Moscow State University, and from the University of Tashkent during that same visit, and in September 1972 from the Karl-Marx University in Leipzig, Germany. In 1981, she returned to Germany to continue working on her PhD.