🇺🇸 U.S. Badass: Angela Davis

Angela Davis was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1970 at the age of 26. The charge was murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. The actual story is that she legally purchased firearms that were later used by someone else in a courthouse escape attempt that went catastrophically wrong — and the state of California decided that was enough to send her to the gas chamber. President Nixon called her a dangerous terrorist before she was arrested. Governor Reagan called for her prosecution personally. She was acquitted on all charges by an all-white jury in 1972. None of the people who called for her execution ever apologized.

To understand why the American government wanted Angela Davis dead, you have to understand what she was doing before any of that happened. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944 — in a neighborhood so frequently targeted by white supremacist bombings it was known as Dynamite Hill — she grew up watching racial terrorism operate as standard civic infrastructure. She studied philosophy in Frankfurt under Herbert Marcuse, returned to the United States, joined the Communist Party, and became a professor at UCLA. The University of California Board of Regents, under pressure from Ronald Reagan, fired her for being a Communist. She sued. She won. They fired her again on different grounds. She kept going.

She had joined the Black Panther Party and become a public advocate for the Soledad Brothers — three Black prisoners charged with killing a guard at Soledad Prison under circumstances that were, to put it generously, contested. One of those prisoners was George Jackson, whose younger brother Jonathan carried out the courthouse action that put Davis in the crosshairs of the state. She had nothing to do with the planning of that action. The state prosecuted her anyway because she was the most visible radical Black communist woman in the country and someone had to pay for something.

The sixteen months she spent in jail awaiting trial produced one of the largest international solidarity campaigns in American legal history. "Free Angela" committees formed in over two dozen countries. John Lennon wrote about her. James Baldwin wrote about her. The Rolling Stones wrote "Sweet Black Angel" about her. The Soviet Union issued a postage stamp with her face on it, which the U.S. government found particularly infuriating. When the jury came back with not guilty on all counts, the courtroom erupted. The state had put everything it had into destroying her and come up empty.

She has spent the fifty-plus years since doing exactly what they were afraid she'd do when they tried to execute her. She developed one of the most rigorous philosophical frameworks for understanding mass incarceration as a continuation of slavery by other means — not as a metaphor but as a structural argument backed by historical evidence. Her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? asked a question the entire political establishment treated as self-evidently absurd and answered it with enough precision that the question became impossible to dismiss. The prison abolition movement that has grown significantly since the 2010s traces significant intellectual lineage directly to her work.

She has been wrong about some things. Her defense of the Soviet Union during her trial period, in particular, sits badly against the historical record. She has acknowledged as much. The difference between Angela Davis and most public intellectuals is that her mistakes happened under conditions where the state was actively trying to kill her, and her life's work still holds up to scrutiny in ways that her prosecutors' careers absolutely do not.

Reagan wanted her fired. Nixon wanted her imprisoned. California wanted her dead. She outlasted all three and kept writing.

"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept."

This week's U.S. Badass was put on the Ten Most Wanted list at 26, acquitted at 28, and has spent every year since making sure the system that tried to kill her gets examined in the most unflattering light possible.