Angela Davis Character Analysis in Stamped from the Beginning

Angela Davis is the last of the five figures Kendi focuses on and the only one to have embraced antiracism from the beginning of her life. A talented student from Birmingham, Alabama, Davis attended Brandeis University, where she studied with Herbert Marcuse. Her parents raised her with antiracist and socialist values, and she became involved in activism as a teenager. The Black Power movement began while Davis was completing doctoral work in Frankfurt, Germany, and she traveled back to California to complete her PhD there in order to take part in the movement. Davis was a member of the Communist Party and twice ran for vice president on the Communist Party ticket, although she eventually left the party due to frustrations over its racism and elitism. When Davis earned her first academic job at UCLA, California Governor Ronald Reagan attempted to have her fired. Shortly after, she was charged with involvement in the Soledad Brothers’ escape attempt and a warrant was issued for her arrest. Although she initially fled, she was eventually captured and incarcerated. While in prison, Davis developed an emergent “black feminist consciousness” and commitment to police and prison abolition. After being released in 1972, she continued her teaching and activism. In 1981, she published her most famous work, Women, Race, and Class, followed by Are Prisons Obsolete? in 2003. Now retired from academia, Davis continues to work in abolitionist activism.

Angela Davis Character Timeline in Stamped from the Beginning

The timeline below shows where the character Angela Davis appears in Stamped from the Beginning. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi senator who went on to become president of the Confederacy, used the phrase... (full context)

...views shifted from assimilationist to anti-racist over the course of his lifetime. Lastly is Angela Davis, a Black scholar who rose to prominence during the Black Power movement and has dedicated... (full context)

Angela Davis, a Brandeis Junior from Birmingham, Alabama, is on study abroad in Biarritz, France, when she... (full context)

At Brandeis, Davis becomes a student of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Her junior year is cut short... (full context)

...days after the report is leaked, six days of race riots begin in Los Angeles. Davis, meanwhile, is en route to Frankfurt, Germany. Around the same time, the Race and Color... (full context)

...Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Reading about the Black Power movement from Frankfurt is frustrating for Davis, who decides to travel back and finish her Ph.D. at UC San Diego in order... (full context)

Angela Davis is at the SNCC office in Los Angeles on April 4, 1968, when she learns... (full context)

...what leads the SNCC Los Angeles chapter to shut down in 1968. That same year, Davis joins the Communist Party and begins working on the campaign for the party’s presidential candidate,... (full context)

In 1969, Davis is due to start her first academic job at UCLA. However, after the FBI learns... (full context)

...the judge are killed. Police claim that one of the guns Jackson used belongs to Davis, and they charge her with counts of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Davis flees her arrest... (full context)

In October 1970, Davis is captured and incarcerated in New York. It is while she is in prison that... (full context)

The mode of antiracism Davis practices is different from the civil rights model still being enacted in the country at... (full context)

...of Nixon, the “law and order” president, evading a single day in prison. In 1975, Davis takes an academic position at Claremont College’s Black Studies Center and is disappointed to find... (full context)

...not vote, which earns them the ire of others within the community. In 1979, Angela Davis, now a member of faculty at San Francisco State University’s historic Black Studies department, joins... (full context)

...implying that racial inequities are rooted in Black people’s biology without ever explicitly saying so. Davis is one of a number of antiracist scholars who rebuke this new stream of segregationist... (full context)

...small fraction of the population view drugs as a political priority. Horrified by the move, Davis runs for vice president again on the Communist Party ticket in 1984. Basking in false... (full context)

...Black family with stereotypes of “young welfare mothers and estranged fathers.” In her own research, Davis points out that these stereotypes do not actually correspond to reality. They are in fact... (full context)

In a speech at California State University at Northridge in 1990, Angela Davis warns that “African Americans are suffering the most oppression since slavery.” This infuriates those who... (full context)

...1990s, HIV-positive individuals fight against demonization that often takes an anti-Black character. In 1991, Angela Davis and 800 other members of the Communist Party cosign a critique of the party’s “racism,... (full context)

...time in American history, Black women scholars come together to discuss their work and lives. Davis, who at this point is the “most famous African American woman academic,” gives the closing... (full context)

When Angela Davis is awarded a President’s Chair professorship at UC Santa Cruz in 1995, Republicans once again... (full context)

...political mobilization in Black American history takes place in Washington, D.C.: the Million Man March. Davis and other Black feminists critique the masculinism of the March and its organizers. Meanwhile, a... (full context)

...English language, and other white European customs would not all be the norm. In 1998, Davis publishes a landmark study of sexuality, gender, race, and class in Blues Legacies and Black... (full context)

In 2006, Angela Davis gives a talk at Syracuse University’s “Feminism and War” conference in the midst of widespread... (full context)

...the U.S. Meanwhile, Obama recites racist myths about absent Black fathers. At the election, Angela Davis—now 64 and retired from academia—votes for Obama, who wins the presidency. She recalls the jubilation... (full context)