Angela Davis interviewed by Julian Bond: Explorations in Black Leadership Series

dr davis welcome to explorations and black leadership we're glad to have you thank you so much for inviting me no it's our pleasure let me begin with the brown decision um do you remember much about it meaning anything to you when you heard about it first you were quite young i was about 10 years old i believe but of course intensely conscious of the system of segregation under which we lived um and i i remember um thinking that this probably is going to be the beginning of a new era and i say that because my mother constantly told us that the conditions under which we were living with which we were living weren't supposed to be that way and now of course i see myself as an activist as having been shaped by the fact that as young as uh when when i was as young as maybe three or four she emphasized that this is not the way things are supposed to be it it it's true that you can't go to this museum today but one day you will be able to go this is not the way things are supposed to be so i remember in my house and in our community there was a there was a major celebration and and because your parents are school teachers do you think they place special emphasis on this oh absolutely absolutely because the schools we attended the elementary schools we attended were not only segregated to black schools white schools but of course we were aware as pupils that we got the the textbooks that were cast off by the white students we were aware that uh that that this was uh um a hierarchical situation the we were definitely aware of the relations of power there and so uh each time there was a victory 1954 1955 it was a cause for great celebration in our household and in our communities in our church that everyone was talking about it and what it might mean there was a lot of community discussion about this absolutely yes i i remember all kinds of little resistances i can remember teachers my teachers being called by their first name by the white representatives of the board of education and some of them feeling very embarrassed and some of them speaking back and some of them are coming under attack because they dare to challenge the right of a white representative of the board of education to call them by their first name and and and i i've said this many times but i i can remember as a very young child games we used to play that actually challenged the system of segregation uh we lived uh in a neighborhood that was right on the border of the white neighborhood and so theoretically or legally we weren't allowed to cross the street unless we were working or whatever and so as children we used to play games where we dared each other to run across the street to the white you know neighborhood and sometimes um those who would not only run across the street but run up on someone's porch and ring their bell and run back and get to safety in time so i mean that was a normal game that we played so you were a protester and an agitator from the very first well you know then it was fun but but i i recognized that we were those were those were little daily resistances that we now when the brown decision occurred even though you're 10 years old do you recall thinking well in x number of years or in some period of time these things will change i know your mother your parents told you this would not always be the status quo do you remember predicting to yourself or others that over some period of time the things will get better i don't think i had a specific timeline in my mind but i do know that i thought about a different moment a different time i was able to imagine what it might be like not having to be confined to segregated schools now looking back from today's perspective how has this turned out what what's your feeling your opinion about how the the brown victory in 54 and the subsequent victories have played out in america that's a very complicated question because indeed the brown board of education victory was one of the most important legal victories in our recent history and the desegregation of the schools however it has played out has been important but there's a piece missing and i think we tend to assume that civil rights or legal rights will accomplish all that needs to be accomplished in the quest for freedom we don't always think about the the political the economic the larger you know social uh dimension there and now of course we inhabit a society where schools are more segregated than ever before particularly outside of the south and we inhabit a society where schools for young poor people of color particularly poor black kids are basically um prep schools for prison and so i think you know what i would say is that each victory that we win whether it be a legal victory or whether it be a victory a political victory or victory in the area of ideology creates a new terrain for us to rethink the possibilities of the future and so i see the brown v board of education victory as reconfiguring the terrain of our quest for freedom in fact the army of justice regroups and chooses another fight would you characterize it that way or knows another fight is is yet absolutely absolutely and sometimes we cannot even imagine uh the possible struggle until we've achieved victory in one area and then rather than resting which many people assume we do because of course you win and and it's over rather than resting we need to ask ourselves how does this change the possibilities of the future and what do we now know that we did not know then and what can we now imagine and struggle for but that's not always immediately apparent though i think i can remember when brown was designed a discussion in my family and the assumption that uh over time and it didn't know how what period of time over time these things would be swept away and we'd live in a different and better world and of course well let me ask you another question how has brown in retrospect looking back over your life how's it affected you what what's different about for you because of brown in 54 well i i would say that there are differences that are both positive and negative and not that i want to emphasize the negative but i will begin by saying that that in the process of desegregating the schools in birmingham alabama great damage was done uh to um the existing structures of education that is to say there was a tendency and i know this from my mother who uh uh complained a great deal about the reconfiguration the of the of the schools that um uh the the best black teachers were sent to the white schools and the worst white teachers were sent to the black schools and so um the predominantly black schools of course and so in the final analysis it was very difficult to to recoup in that respect now as an individual i think i benefited greatly from this decision although i'm not sure it was meant to benefit individuals per save but rather to lift up communities i had the opportunity to attend a predominantly white high school in new york and i don't know whether i would have whether i would have considered that possibility i don't know whether the program which allowed me to live in new york with a white progressive family and attend a private high school there i don't think that program would have been set in place during the pre-brown era it was a program established by the american friends service committee and i'm sure that organization was motivated to create a program that brought black students from the south to study in the north you know by all of the developments that surrounded brown and in your autobiography you write that you felt restless and exceedingly limited in birmingham and at age 14 you're the recipient of this program sponsored by the american print service committee and you find yourself in new york going to a progressive school in new york uh predominantly white school was this an adventure to you of course it was an adventure well i should also point out that i had been admitted in the early inter entrance program to fisk university at the same time so my choice was to go to fisk or to go to high school in new york and that was a difficult decision because i was inclined to want to go to fisk i at that point i wanted to be a doctor and i had my life all plotted out that you know i would graduate from uh fisk when i was 19 or 18 and then i would go to my hairy across the street and so forth but it was my father who actually persuaded me that i wasn't ready uh that i wasn't socially mature enough and it turned out do you think well oh absolutely absolutely any regrets about not being a doctor um no not really i i just wonder sometimes where i would be today had i chosen that trajectory but i had been to new york several times my mother attended graduate school at nyu during the summers so i had been to new york i think three or four times and and had friends there so it wasn't an entirely um new experience but yes once i arrived at elizabeth irwin high school i was the black girl the negro girl from the south right so i had a hard time uh trying to figure out you know how to understand all of the attention that was focused on me and students asking me to come to dinner and to come to their country houses and so forth and and some of them had black servants and would feel compelled to bring the servant to the table and you know exactly exactly because we didn't have the conceptual apparatus at that time to understand uh the extent to which you know racism so yeah and it was evident to you at that age that the new school you're in is so superior in many ways to the school you'd left behind i'm guessing oh absolutely although i should say that i learned a lot in segregated schools in birmingham i learned things i would have never learned so like what um a black history mm-hmm uh i can remember from the time i was a very young first grade celebrating black history uh negro history week history week that's right and and and using that time to think about the extent to which you know black people had made major contributions uh so that um that i i i i think i would never have uh received and i wouldn't have got that elizabeth irving oh absolutely not uh every time we sang the the the the uh you the american national the national anthem right we also sang the negro national anthem exactly so i uh i think that my teachers in elementary school and high school gave us all a sense of pride and gave us the tools with which to resist the imposition of racial inferiority let me switch a bit and talk about the people who've been significant in helping you develop your talents and who you are and begin with your parents what what role did your parents play in shaping you you've talked earlier about uh your mother explaining to you that things will not always be this way but what else do you recall well um it's taken me a long time to recognize the extent to which i walk down a path that was um carved out for me by my mother um because i always saw myself uh resisting my parents as children often do sure but my mother was was an activist she was a member of the southern negro youth congress she was a she was actually a an officer of the southern negro youth congress she was involved in the naacp she was involved in the campaign to free the scottsboro 9 and as a child i had the opportunity to um to to spend time with black communists who had come to birmingham to help organize there to help organize the southern negro youth congress so i i you know i often tell people that later when i joined the communist party it was a difficult decision because i always considered the communist party to be so conservative it was my parents friends you know i wanted to do something more interesting and more radical but i i do think that um both in terms of my career as an educator and in terms of my life as an activist i um i'm following in my mother's footsteps i wonder if your mother's political activity engaged you in some sort of way uh stopping envelopes the mechanics of organizing campaigns like that did did that happen um well yeah uh i you know a a lot of things i don't necessarily remember but i hear i remember the stories that that got told about uh about uh uh bull connor and and uh my my parents uh friends being run out of town uh this is pre-civil rights but i don't think i got a sense of the work that was done during that period because now i think that organizations like the southern negro youth congress really paved the way for the civil rights movement it really created that terrain you know i often talk to students today about the film the great debaters and the character that denzel washington plays a friend of my mothers who's still very much alive and very lucid ask me after she saw that film she said angela do you know what organization that was and i said no and she said well melvin tolson was in the southern negro youth congress they're these sort of mysterious scenes in which you see them organizing black and white tenant farmers so i don't think i got that sense early on because perhaps because of the anti-communism because of the extent to which people were forced to go underground and and when i was six years old i remember being followed by the fbi i do have those memories because they were looking for someone my parents knew who was a member of the communist party and who was underground so i remember this um i remember this kind of fear of the fbi and i also you know i i remember being learning that you never talked to the fbi you know when i was six years old if they ask you any questions you know don't answer at all were there particular people teachers particularly who had a influence on you who shaped you in some way or the other well i suppose during my career as a student the teacher who most influenced me was herbert marcuse what about earlier when you're still in birmingham oh when i was oh absolutely yes i i had a whole number of teachers as a matter of fact i had a teacher whose name was mrs robusky the mother of freeman robeske who is the president of the university of maryland yeah and yes we've done him in the series oh okay yeah so yeah i remember that that she and other teachers pushed us i mean i what i remember most about my time in birmingham and elementary school and the first few years of high school was how how exciting it was to learn and our teachers gave us us a passion for learning not just the mechanics of reading and writing but um they they gave you know all of us and of course my mother's a teacher so i have to count my mother as a as a part of that in influence in terms of education but they taught us how to love the whole process of acquiring knowledge and and that uh i i i will be forever grateful for what about other figures in the community neighbors ministers people you knew as political activists what what about them yeah the minister in my congregational church i which is now of course united church of christ i can remember reverend harold long who was a young minister and encouraged us to be involved in interracial discussion groups for example i was part of a relatively short-lived integration integrated discussion group for young people that took place at the church and who were the white children in this the white children you know i don't remember their names but um i assume that they came from homes uh i assume that they came from jewish homes for one because it's from um my memory it was uh jewish people in birmingham who first expressed solidarity with the the quest for black equality and i know my mother had a number of white friends which was at uh up until a certain point it was um a very there were clandestine relationships they were relationships that weren't supposed to exist but occasionally there would be white people in our home and and i can remember once even this was a person who i think who came to new york a friend of mine from new york a friend of my mother's uh my mother had to have her lie down in the back seat of the car while she drove because you're not supposed to you know have a black person driving a white person unless you are a chauffeur and so i can i can can can remember um remember those moments um and talk about your father for a minute you you wrote that you'd uh never seen your father afraid even when a white policeman pulled them over in tennessee in the middle of the night so he must have held a standard of behavior for you i think so i think so yes and my father was my father was quiet and i like to think that uh that that i inherited that that sense of calm and sense of quiet even though of course i've had to speak out in ways i never imagined i would have but yeah my father was a figure who spoke rarely but uh but when he did speak it was important and and you listened uh and i and and and this incident in which uh i was convinced that we were going to be killed i was convinced that we were going to be one of those stories in the newspaper of you know black people disappearing in the deep south and as i recount the story in my autobiography my father my my father liked to drink um i think it's canadian whiskey or something like that something like that yeah but you couldn't buy it in birmingham and so he had he had bought a case of it somewhere along the route from new york to alabama and we were nearing um alabama when we went through this dry county and was stopped by the sheriff who said that when he saw the whiskey he said you know this is illegal and and the judge is out of town so i don't have any choice but to put you in jail until the judge comes back and i have no idea when the judge is coming back and so finally he said i tell you what i'll treat you like i treat my boys and he said follow me and my father followed him to this old warehouse and an area of town that we were uh absolutely unfamiliar with uh and got out and asked my father to come into the warehouse and so my mother and i were sitting in the car they were driving me back from brandeis where my mother and i were sitting in the car trembling and oh my god what is going on what are they going to do to him and then finally he came out laughing and he said all he wants is the whiskey and a hundred dollars yeah but that that was a very frightening moment and and i i appreciated how my father you know dealt with that that situation tell us about the uh your sister and you pretending that you're from martinique and uh going into a downtown shoe store in birmingham yeah well you know we were so used to um this segregated um character of the of the city you know you go into a shoe store and immediately if you're black you know you have to go to the back and and hope somebody will wait on you they might not even wait on you so um my both my sister and i had learned french by this time i had been away for a while and so we decided to walk into the store speaking pretending that i could not speak english at all my sister spoke uh some english but she would have to translate for me and and so the people were so impressed that they asked us to take a seat in the front of the store and brought out all of the shoes uh we wanted and of course uh at the end we revealed that it was a big show we started to what was the reaction of the people in the store when you revealed who you were oh they were so angry they were they were they they they i mean they realized that they had been had and uh you know they uh we ran but we ran out of the store we knew that once we did that we were definitely not going to go to the back of the store so uh uh you mentioned her mark kuze again and you meet him at brandeis and what what effect did he have on you i mean how did he help shape you well he had a profound effect on um on my life and my work uh i attended his lecture course uh when i was a first year student freshman and i was drawn by the way he was able to put history and philosophy together in a context that allowed us to think about the future as history and so i watched him from afar for a while i can actually remember him speaking during the cuban missile crisis and james baldwin was also on the on the campus then in my second year he spent in europe teaching my third year i spent in europe at the sorbonne and then when i came back for my fourth year i was ready to move from french literature to philosophy which prince literature was my major and i went to him and and and told him that i was really interested in studying philosophy but i didn't know where to begin and i hadn't had any formal training i had read i had read satra and kami and i had read a lot of the french philosophers in connection with my french studies and so um i mean he didn't he didn't know me from whoever but he said okay well let's spend the first semester doing an independent study which will be an intensive engagement with the history of western philosophy so we started with the pre-socratics and and i met with him a couple of times a week and you know managed to uh get a sense of the history of of western philosophy uh and in one one semester and then at the end of that semester he says he told me that i had to take his graduate course on kant on the critique of of pure reason and and then he had me give the first paper in this graduate first of all i was an undergraduate and he was teaching graduate students who uh had um uh had a great deal of preparation and training and so by the time i finished that i was i was hooked uh it was because of his influence and i decided to go to germany and study with former colleagues of his theodore dorno and max horkheimer and i kept in touch with him during the period i was studying in germany and eventually he was um he was fired from his position at brandeis uh because he was considered to be too radical it's a little more complicated than that but in any event he was offered a position at the university of california san diego and i spent two years in germany and then i returned to this country and studied with him in san diego and i would say what what um influenced me most was the way in which he negotiated his um very close engagement with philosophical texts he was an incredible reader of of text and the way he engaged with those texts and made a connection between possibilities in the real social world and so i saw him um i s you know i took many seminars with him but i also saw him speak at rallies i also saw him speak out against the war i also saw him support uh the black struggle i also saw him support the student movement and so in that way it was an inspiration for me um watching him made it apparent to me that there didn't have to be a contradiction between academic research and social activism so you saw an example of someone who was both who could be a serious serious scholar and also a political activist absolutely a person out in the world more than just in the classroom absolutely why did you choose brandeis you're one of two black students at this overwhelmingly jewish school why brandeis well i think there were two black students in my class there were a few more uh but there was only a handful on the entire campus well i um i went to elizabeth irwin high school um the majority of the students there were jewish and everybody wanted to go to brandeis right but i was the one who got a full scholarship at brandeis and i i mean i i knew i wanted to go to college on in the east you know i had thought about western reserve i thought about mount holyoke and other places but brandeis seemed to be the best fit for me after visiting you know these schools and it seemed to be the right choice let me back up a bit in time and ask you about two people whom you mentioned one of them at least margaret burnham and bettina abdecker who became friends then and remain friends today what what has the relationship done to you well margaret burnham i've known um all my life i like to say we first met each other when we were in our mother's wombs because our mothers were pregnant together right and we have pictures of each other at birthday parties there's a wonderful picture at margaret's uh first birthday party and so uh and and i should say that they are the margaret's family the burnhams were literally chased out of birmingham by bull connor because of the work they were doing and later when my mother went to nyu to graduate school she took all of her children each summer and we stayed with the burnhams so this this uh really boggles my mind how my mother was able to get all of that work done in a house in which there were six children at first and then eight children by the time she was finishing uh um so we've had this kind of we we've had this this this life we were we were paired up in terms of uh kids because uh uh the burnham's had four four children and we were all about the same age uh so we each had our counterpart in in the other uh family and then of course margaret uh was the first person to show up at the jail in new york when i was arrested she was the first attorney to she wasn't able to get in because they didn't believe she was an attorney she she looked too young but she followed my case from the beginning to the end she was the only attorney who remained me with me from the moment of my arrest until the moment of my acquittal and then margaret and i have done a lot of political work together in various organizations we spend we spent our vacations together so this is a lifetime friendship oh absolutely that's connected through family but the family connected in turn i'm guessing through political activity yes yes that's the that's a good way to put it yeah and what about bettina absecker well bettina i i i think i met bettina when i was quite young probably about six or so but i remember um bettina most from my high school years when i joined advance which was the communist party's youth organization and bettina was the head of this youth organization um so my relationship with with bettina has been more of a political relationship we we marched together we let me interrupt how did you meet her when you were six oh because of the burnhams because i went to new york yeah and the burnhams and the abductor fighters and the africans and the divorces and you know there was there was a circle there so uh although i don't remember very much of that i remember her most from a later era when i was in high school and um so yes with the bettina and margaret and others we picketed woolworths every saturday uh because of the policies of segregation in the south woolworths on 42nd street in new york and we marched across the george washington bridge and yeah it was all it was all quite fun i bet um well i should perhaps say no that um strangely enough bettina and i teach on the same campus of the university of california and as a matter of fact are affiliated with the same department the feminist studies department so it's very interesting how people's lives intersect and indeed so indeed so um do you remember particular events historical or personal that you view as critical to your understanding of american society things that happened in the larger world that had had an impact on you that made you understand uh what your place was in the society or what your place was suspect expected to be in the society do you remember such things well i i um i remember the bombing of the 16th street baptist that had of course many people talk about the impact of that did you know any of those girls yeah i did i knew three of them one of them cynthia wesley lived practically next door and carol robinson was uh the younger sister of one of my very good friends and my sisters one of my sister's friends my mother was very close with uh alpha robinson who was carol's mother and as a matter of fact my mother drove alpher who's carol's mother to the church to pick her up after having heard about the bombing so i was studying in france at that time and i i mean i can remember and i don't have a lot of really vivid memories from that era but i remember the telephone booth in which i placed a long distance called transcon continental call or whatever you call it to my parents to find out you know what really happened and i can you know i can remember feeling so totally alone in um in paris because this was not an event that was widely reported it happened not too long before the assassination of kennedy and so those two events are kind of wetted in my mind yes i'm surprised this was not a more of an event in france i don't know why i guess i have stereotypes about the french and would have thought this would have been a bigger thing for them well i mean it was it was it was reported i believe maybe in limonene and but there was no sense in the streets that this had touched people um and so yeah i think that that made it impossible for me not to lead a life that would be dedicated to social justice i'm not saying that is what put me on that path but because i had always been there but that re-enforced the importance of building communities of struggle because i knew i needed to feel i needed some place to feel at home with people who had the same kind of emotional response that i did and i hadn't i you know i i i did i couldn't find anyone i think i was the only black student in this program junior year abroad so yeah that was a pretty devastating moment that was a really devastating moment in my life and you write about james baldwin speaking at brandeis and his speech being cut short by the announcement of the cuban missile crisis and your own feeling that uh people were um reacting to this in a bad way that they seem to say the end of the world is coming so i better go out and have a good time rather than seeing what i can do about the end of the world do you recall that yeah yeah i do i mean i do i remember people taking off driving to canada and and uh you know my response was you know what is that going to do how are you going to be any safer in canada than you are here it was um it was this panic this this collective panic that prevented us from talking about what was really going on and during your college years you also hear malcolm x and stokely carmichael and what did not stokely oh stokely came well stokely was later okay but i did hear malcolm x speak at brandeis and and yeah that was uh that was that was an evening when i felt um so proud to be black and because there weren't that many moments particularly attending a school that was overwhelmingly white but in that period we hadn't developed what we might now call a race consciousness so i can't uh describe it in those terms malcolm x was an incredible speaker and he held the whole audience it was spelled down and i i just remember you know being so feeling so good and uh yeah you were talking about the effect of the assassination of president kennedy uh what about the almost connected in time robert kennedy martin luther king assassinations what effect did they have on you okay in in my life these assassinations came much later even though only a few years because by that time i had finished i graduated from brandeis i had spent two years in germany being extremely active with the socialist student group there and i had decided to return to the u.s to study with herbert marcusa so i was a graduate student but i was also almost a full-time activist by that time when robert kennedy was assassinated in los angeles i was living in los angeles and as a matter of fact uh some of my comrades uh were directly investigated because sirhan sirhan's car was once outside of a meeting where that was called by communist or something like that so it was a very strange uh connection when when dr king was assassinated i was working with um an organization which we call los angeles snick of course and we immediately i mean i can remember exactly where i was i was i was mimeographing leaflets for another tell my students what a memory i know exactly you see i'm doing this i'm sorry and uh we realize being in la that if we did not move quickly that the los angeles police department would use that as an occasion for a massacre i mean we knew that because immediately after the assassination they set up machine guns on top of the the roof of the the downtown police station the parker center the parka center absolutely and so we decided that what we would do was we would organize a campaign to ask all of the merchants in the in south central to close in deference uh to the memory of dr king and then we put up picket lines at all of the stores that didn't including some of the large stores at the malls like the may company yeah and the we we were actually trying to prevent a riot prevent the outbreak of violence but the los angeles police department obviously wanted violence we didn't know then but we learned later that they had developed new technologies and they had new weapons and they wanted probably to try them out and so they actually dropped off a young black man whom they had severely beaten in front of the our offices and you know we had to get him to the hospital and so forth but we realized that it was provocative they wanted us to to riot and we were doing everything we could to involve people in uh and organized non-violent uh protests so by the time these events happen you're fully engaged in in i hate to call say a political career that's that's not what you've done and that's not who you are but you're fully involved in activity outside the scope of just being a university teacher yes yes but speaking of how did you decide that the academy was where you wanted to be what what made you think that this is what i want to do well you know i never really thought about it in that way um and now when i talk to you know graduate students who are trying to professionalize themselves and and have their the entire trajectory of their career mapped out when they're going to get tenure and all of that and i say that you know for a lot of us during that period we at least for for many of the politically conscious students with whom i studied philosophy we were studying not so much because we wanted to subordinate that to a career but because of because it allowed us to understand the world and we didn't necessarily think about the the professional side of it i was invited to apply for a position at ucla uh i didn't go out in search of a job as a matter of fact i i often say that had i known that by applying by accepting this job at ucla i would be the focus of so much media attention because of my membership in the communist party i probably would have said thanks but no thanks because that is not what i was looking for um so yeah i i think that my career as a teacher has occurred because that is the the way in which i can most affect and influence people and i'm not trying to say that i use the classroom to dictate how people uh what people think but i try to use it to encourage people to develop independent and critical modes of thinking that might lead them to the conclusion that they need to do something to make a difference in the social world and i'm guessing that your parents profession and their circle of friends who were also teachers and the interactions you've had with teachers over time both in the lower grades and at brandeis and and then uh with markusi and brandeis and markusi later that this set up a model for you of what a teacher a professor could be and should be i think so i think so i think so um but i i must admit that when i began to study um philosophy i did not necessarily imagine myself as a philosophy professor i studied philosophy for what it was able to uh give me in terms of tools and uh you know conceptual approaches and methodologies that would allow me to better understand the world that is what i was looking for and the uh ucla application or request was just fortuitous it was fortuitous it just came to me i mean i'm not saying that i wouldn't have no i had to find a job afterwards but that wasn't the the foremost uh issue in my mind and the natural job for you would have been in the academy having achieved this education as professional certification just naturally the next step well yes but i i must say that that i was very reluctant for many years to become so wedded to the academy that it would have an impact on my ability to teach elsewhere because i see teaching is something that happens not only in the institutionalized spaces but it happens you know also in the community it happens in movements and so for a long time i resisted of becoming so so involved that i would have to do administrative work and so forth and so on uh now you may dispute this characterization but what do you think in your both life experiences and your educational experiences prepared you for assuming a leadership role well i i like to think of leadership not as as a series of qualities that prepares one to lead or to give leadership to people in the world but i like to think of the best kind of leadership as emerging you know from social movements as as as as reflecting collective ideas and collective aspirations i had no individual aspirations to be a leader and and to a certain extent i still don't and i think that what i have learned how to do over the years is to accept responsibility for the vast campaign that developed around my case people probably never would have known my name had i not been fired from my job at ucla because of my membership in the communist party arrested and charged with murder kidnapping and conspiracy and it it it happened that at that particular historical conjunction but even prior to that even before people know the name angela davis the person angela davis is assuming leadership roles in a variety of ways in campaigns for the sailor who's having trouble with the navy in los angeles nick in a variety of ways you're assuming leadership roles before anybody outside of your friends and and colleagues know who you are but but it's also within a collective context yes of course of course and um and i i i it was a perhaps a kind of quiet leadership not an upfront uh leadership and good and you see even those examples that you mentioned happen in the aftermath of my um situation at ucla so i was a kind of minor celebrity because ronald reagan decided that i shouldn't be teaching exactly uh i i i think i imagine my role as being that of a of a teacher and so when i worked with snick i was the uh the head of the liberation school project when i worked with the black panther party i was uh working with the political education pod uh project i i always did work that involved teaching and i think that that would have been the role that i imagined for myself well in a way a teacher is is a leader he or she leads the students toward knowledge he or she um controls to a degree the classroom and so forth and so on so it i don't know if i'm stretching too far here but the fact that you become a teacher speaks to some level of acceptance of a leadership role well yes and no okay i think that the best teachers the best quality a teacher can have is the ability to assist someone to discover his or her own passion indeed and you know rather than concentrate on guaranteeing that this person knows this and that and and whatever i like to to teach my students how to formulate the kinds of questions particularly questions about that which they tend to take for granted that will lead to real change in the world what do you see is the difference between vision philosophy and style can you describe the interaction of these three for you vision philosophy style how do these if they do interact for you well um yes i i think they do um my vision has always been that of a a better uh more just more egalitarian world and of course i spent many years as an activist in the communist party i'm no longer in the communist party but i still imagine the possibility of moving beyond capitalism you know some kind of democratic socialist arrangement my um my i don't know if i can succinctly describe what my philosophical approach is but i will say that it uh is it if i were to try to succinctly describe it i would talk about a critical posture toward everything learning how to raise questions even even about that which one uh assumes is unquestionable and this is what i've i've learned from my philosophical studies from critical theory uh that we have to be willing to test even that which even those categories we use to try to understand the world and style that's the one i'm having problems with the uh i um i don't know whether it's possible to cultivate a style i can and i'll tell you a short story i can remember getting out of jail and people having these ideas about me from the photographs they had seen you know that i was supposed to be this uh uh you know militant revolutionary ranting and raving and so forth and so some people were disappointed when they heard me speak and they said what did they do to you and i said well you know this is the way i've always been uh this is the way i've always spoken and i i had to i had to finally um uh recognize that if uh if i was not true to myself if i did not have the kind of style that most reflected my upbringing and my my character my training then i definitely would not be able to make a difference in the world so no matter how much people wanted me to rant and rave i you know opted for my own you know sort of more quiet style what did jail do to you you said people thought jail had done something to you made you something that didn't fit their stereotype who you were what did it do to you well i fortunately i think i was able to use the time i spent in jail productively uh and i say this because even though i was behind bars for some 16 months there was an enormous movement on the outside i had family i had friends i had colleagues and comrades all over the world who were concerned about my uh predicament so i did not feel alone even though i was in solitary confinement practically the entire time i was behind bars i found ways of of dealing with that i you know one of the things i remember thinking was that being a graduate student was really good preparation for this because you know one spends a lot of time alone uh studying and that is what i did when i was in jail i i learned how to do yoga i practiced in my little cell karate so i you know i made um i made a life for myself uh and i can imagine uh that uh had i've been in jail longer than that it would have been a much greater challenge i'm not comparing my situation to anyone else's situation but i do remember being very um withdrawn when i got out uh you know over a year of solitary life can leave one in a an estate like that and i do know that i was profoundly affected emotionally and psychologically by that experience i was able to work through it i mean i can remember getting out and not wanting to go into places where there were large numbers of people and being you know going to going to a dance or something and of course there was all of this attention on me and and i would want to relax and party but everyone there assume that they have to have a deep political conversation with me so i spent a time not going out to the social events because it was just too difficult to negotiate but eventually eventually i learned that i had to talk about or think about that period in my life as representing something that was far more important than me as an individual and i had to be willing to to accept people's excitement and awe uh recognizing that it wasn't about me that but rather that it was about this vast movement that developed you know all over the country and all over uh the world and that managed to effectively challenge ronald reagan the governor of california richard nixon the president of of the u.s and so now i see it that way and i don't have any problems uh with the you know kind of uh um aw with which people approach me but don't you think in all honesty that it's both about the movement created around your predicament and you that's about both these things yeah but primarily about the movement after all i was in jail i'll give you that i was in jail yeah i mean you know that and as a matter of fact uh you assisted in the the the the um elaboration of this movement and i totally appreciate the work that you did uh for us in our first book if they come in the morning uh you know i left that book at home i want you to sign it later okay so i you know i've come to think of that moment as uh as a kind of collective empowering that that demonstrated to us that we had hope and that we could make change in the world so i have to be the beneficiary of that and i continue to see myself as the beneficiary of this amazing movement i just read the story uh an article rather about people who are put in solitary confinement and the devastating effect it has on them just awful awful effect and you're comparatively speaking yours is relatively short but still one thing just described in this story was the the con the person's inability to fit into a large space and that once released in a room this large for example they'd go to the corner yeah and uh did anything like that happen to you absolutely absolutely i i i remember that my um body had its habits that i had to try to undo getting into cars with my hands cuffed behind me it took a while for me to realize for my body to realize that i didn't have that i could use my hands to get into a car or you know being in large spaces with large numbers of people uh yeah absolutely and i don't think that we acknowledge the degree to which uh confinement and imprisonment uh creates mental disorders is it fair to say that this experience for you was a tremendous motivator for your current day interest and incarceration i understand that the interest preceded this but did this heighten and intensify your interest i suppose so i i guess the overwhelming majority of my life has been devoted to work around issues of prison and imprisonment and and of course when i went to jail it was around the campaign to free the soledad brothers so it was a i was already doing work around political prisoners and and around prison in general but i don't think i would have imagined then that this would have been my calling that that i would devote my life to this work but then i think of my mother working on the the scottsboro sure and and i think that this is just uh this is um a way in which to challenge injustice at its core people characterize making of leaders in three ways either a great people cause great events b movements make leaders or c the confluence of unpredictable events creates leaders appropriate for the time do you fit one of these three paths i think b and c i think you probably already know i would say b and c uh yeah exactly i i think that movements um give rise to the most effective spokespersons uh for those movements and you know i i like to talk about dr king and what an incredible leader he was precisely because he was able to give expression to collective aspirations and that that he didn't simply appear one day and the movement arose in response to his presence oftentimes we focus so much on him as an individual that we erase the the ground uh work the day-to-day unglamorous organizing work that was done by so many people especially women yes you know ella baker said the movement made martin more than martin made the move absolutely absolutely so yeah but did the movement in effect make angela davis well yes as much as angela davis made the movement and continues now to make the movement well yeah i think that that i was a creation of of the movement in many respects uh you know both in terms of who i am and my own passion for justice but also a creation of the movement that developed around the demand to free me in terms of the iconography that that movement created and that doesn't have very much to do with me you know i see young people today wearing t-shirts with my uh image on it and it used to really bother me at first it used to embarrass me and it would bother me and finally i asked a young woman you know why she wore that shirt and she said it makes me feel strong it makes me feel powerful it makes me feel like i can do anything i want to do and so my response was right on you know it does that for you must make you feel good about it well it does it does but but again i see that as the strength of the that movement do you see your legitimacy as a leader grounded in your ability to persuade people to follow your vision or in your ability to articulate the agenda of the movement or are these the same thing well actually increasingly i see whatever leadership capacity i have being expressed in the process of encouraging people to find their own way and and this this means encouraging people again to ask the kinds of questions that will lead them in progressive and radical directions i don't like the idea of simply persuading someone who will get involved for a moment until they burn out and then they'll go back to doing what they were doing in the first place but i like the idea of life trajectories you know how do you change people's lives how do you encourage people to think about future possibilities that they never would have imagined themselves and and how do you how do you encourage people to do this work no matter where they are and so i don't demand that people join a particular organization or go to a particular place i i say that you can be as dr king said a drum major for justice wherever you are regardless of what path you choose but i wonder if you don't think at the same time if you can convince um a hundred people that the issues you care about are important and therefore they should dedicate time to them knowing as you'll know that a portion of them will do it only for a short time does that have its own worthwhile it's not worthwhile in and of itself even if it's not the hope for engagement absolutely and i spend a lot of my time uh doing this current era trying to encourage people to think seriously about prison abolition right and i've discovered interestingly enough that this moment 2009 the aftermath of the election of barack obama has created a kind of receptivity to thinking about these issues that did not exist before so it's very exciting but i i do know that there has to be a particular historical conjunction a particular historical confluence of of of of events and in order to encourage masses of people to begin to think seriously about an issue such as the abolition of prisons you know at a dinner party last night i got into or listened to a debate by two people two psychologists who have studied whether or not there's an obama effect the obama effect if there was such a thing would be a diminution of racial prejudice not a disappearance diminution and one of them said of course there is and i can measure it and so forth and we've taken surveys and i can demonstrate is true and the other one said of course there's not i've measured it and there's no such effect there's only the slightest bit of difference among people who harbor racist feelings and so i wondered are you suggesting that one of the confluences that's occurred is the obama election and therefore that opens the possibility for people thinking because these two people one of them thought yes there is a chance now to do things we couldn't do before and the other said no we're the same people we were before well i would actually agree with both of them we are the same people we were before the problem still exists but there is a different kind of hope uh the emergence of new possibilities my my evaluation of the obama election is that it tells us more about who we are as a as as as a nation than it tells us about obama so the fact that it was possible at this moment to elect not simply an african-american president but someone who identifies with the radical black radical tradition of struggle that to me is what is most important and i do think that this has generated a sense of hope that did not exist during the bush administration sure the fact that young people played such an important role using the the new technologies of communication in this campaign tells us something else i i i don't think we should get into the situation where we say uh either everything has been achieved by the this election or nothing has been achieved and it seems like the the two um psychologists were having that yes they were they were rather let us think about it as announcing new possibilities and creating new terrain which we can use if we um are able to do the work that is required to build movements for change at the same time it's distressing to me that it after eight years of just an awful president an awful administration that it took this extraordinary person and i think obama is an extraordinary person it took this extraordinary person to turn the tide and extraordinary people don't come along that often in my experience and so i wonder about the future if we'll slip back into our old ways well um i mean i i'm willing to do everything i can to make sure we don't but i'm fearful we might but but you see my position is this yes um barack obama is extraordinary it's absolutely amazing but he has a lot of problems and i'm very critical of him i'm sure around a number of issues as well but we would never have gotten to know this extraordinary person had not it been for the work that was done uh in organizing the campaign so that is where i see uh the hope for the future i i i think that in this country we have a tendency to alienate our our own in our own power we like to give it up you know we like messiahs we like um you know leaders in in in the that sense of the word and we failed to take responsibility to finish what we start and so my argument would be this is precisely the moment when we have to build another you know vast movement for change this is precisely the moment to begin to talk about prison abolition it's the moment it's an auspicious moment to begin to talk about the crisis of imprisonment which has not really been on the obama agenda in very visible ways at least not during the last period well let me shift gears again how does race consciousness affect your work do you see yourself as a leader who advances issues of race or or or society or both or is there a distinction in your mind between these well i don't think we can talk about u.s society without talking about race um race is in our history it has affected all of us regardless of of what racial ethnic backgrounds that we we come from and i am very sad that we haven't found a language to talk about that and it's not about black people you know it's not about white people it's about understanding what made us all who we are and and i i i'm very interested nowadays in the ways race or racism is congealed in the structures of institutions so that it is um unhooked from any uh individual racist perpetrator or motivations of racism that exists in educational institutions it exist in the in the prison system and i think we all have to learn how to uh talk about that uh so this is you know my my um relationship to issues of race is somewhat different from what is usually meant unfortunately in this country the media assumes that that that that race the very mention of race opens up a pandora's box and there's always uh attempts to you know close it down uh you know let's uh let's not uh let this chaos overwhelm us and it will become more and more chaotic until we can find a language to talk about the degree to which race has influenced um our histories and our psychic why do you think we have such a resistance to talking about these things i think it's because the assumption is that that that it's it's it's about racial superiority and and it's conceptualized in terms of individuals and so people feel feel attacked when we you know talk about affirmative action for example white people often feel assaulted without seeing being able to see that something like an affirmative action strategy will make us all better will make us a better community because it's not about advancing one individual as opposed to another individual it's about advancing an entire community that has been so devastated by uh the consequences of slavery and i think that there's such a reluctance to talk about this because people don't necessarily want to learn how we continue to inhabit a history that is structured by slavery which affects all of us regardless of what racial uh or ethnic background we come from speaking of ethnic backgrounds do you have a different leadership style when you're talking to groups or you're dealing with groups that are all black or mixed or all white are you different before these groups no my message is the same my message is absolutely the same no i don't i i haven't developed a style that that is going to be different uh at a black audience i just recently spoke uh at um for emory at ebenezer baptist church and of course the audience there were 3 000 people there the place was packed and the audience was largely black but i talked about the same issues in the same way and the response was really incredible in uh challenging the civil rights establishment the authors quote william allen and he writes about the danger in continually thinking in terms of race or gender until we learn once again to use the language of american freedom in an appropriate way that embraces all of us we're going to continue to harm this country is there a danger of divisiveness when you focus on the concept of black leadership well as we do here well i i think the most effective black leadership will be leadership not simply for black people but leadership for all people and i i'm convinced that engagement with issues of race of gender which is a lot more complicated to date than it was because we not only have to talk about uh people who i identify as men or women but transgender expression and issues of sexuality what what has been so fulfilling i think in terms of my own history has been the awareness that we've developed ever more capacious visions of what it means to be free and so in the beginning if we thought about race as the barrier to freedom or racism as the barrier to freedom we had to learn that racism doesn't exist on its own that it's connected with and cross-hatched with sexism and gender discrimination and then we have to learn that it's more complicated than that there's class there and then we learn that gender is not binary uh uh you know that there's much more there than we ever thought and then we had to we learned about sexuality so it means that our sense of freedom becomes vaster and more interesting and you know rather than go backwards and talk in terms that excluded people of color that excluded uh women that excluded transgender people that had excluded lgbt uh communities uh then i think we have to find a language that that is all embracing do you think black leaders have an obligation to help other african-americans or is there some point when that obligation if it exists ends and you can pursue your own ambitions your own hopes and well i think black leaders have an obligation to help everyone who is down not just black people and it has um i suppose the election of obama as uh president helps us to understand the extent to which what we might call the black radical freedom tradition has had an impact on everyone it's not just about black people but it's helped to shape movements that lead to greater advances toward freedom and so i i don't think narrowly in terms of black people as a matter of fact i think it can be very dangerous to think narrowly in terms of only that because there are a lot of black people around who don't identify with uh collective community quests for freedom so i like to think about communities that are shaped using political standards and not simply racial standards i don't count every black person simply because she or he is black as a member of my community and you know i i often point out people responded to the barack obama election by saying i never thought that an african-american would be elected president in my lifetime but i don't think that is what they meant because had clarence thomas been elected president i don't think people would have gone around saying i never thought well i think yes i see what you're saying but i think they might have said the same thing where that to happen but they would i don't think that there would have been black people no who were just so emotionally uh awed by but of course you know there was a segment of the black population that when thomas was nominated to the supreme court that rallied to him because of his race and and assumed that his race meant that he uh was with them right on issues i absolutely remember that it was so distressing but i remember some people realized their mistake afterwards yes you know particularly after they forced him on us yeah exactly it's too late is it part of the historical obligation that the because we ourselves have come out of such intolerable conditions and achieved a modicum of change that we therefore have a responsibility to help others who are like us do the same i think that black americans do have a very deep historical responsibility to assist others who are subjugated or oppressed i don't think this happens automatically i don't think that there's a causal relationship between the uh quest for african-american freedom and solidarity with for example immigrant struggles i think that this has to be a point that our movements emphasize uh that justice is after all indivisible uh june jordan once said that and i i i never uh um uh liked i i never failed to repeat that justice is end of visible and so for example today the civil rights struggle involves civil rights for immigrants civil rights for prisoners civil rights for glbt communities and i think that this is one of the major challenges of of the moment to persuade such leaders as ministers black ministers to recognize this and to communicate this message to their congregations yes it's a frustrating part of the struggle what do you see as your greatest contributions as an african-american leader well i think that my greatest contribution probably was not my contribution i i mentioned before that the campaign that was organized in 1970 in the aftermath of my arrest that reached people all over the world is stands as a as a as a remarkable testament to what is uh possible today uh the more i think about that campaign the the more extraordinary uh it it appears to me even much more so that at the time i was in the you know right in the middle of it so that i would say is my greatest contribution my involvement in the production of a massive transnational global campaign that demonstrated that collective empowerment can can work then i would say that um well i was listening to someone introduced me um as i spoke in a class and and and this professor said something that it never occurred to me that every decade that i've actually managed to raise some new issues you know issues of the relationship between gender and race and i can't remember what you'll have to ask her uh uh this was claudina harrell exactly how she would she had a very neat way of of talking about uh that and i suppose i would summarize that by saying that that i feel i feel most vital when i am most present and when i don't depend on laurels of the past when i am listening to and engaging with young people in the moment and attempting to contemporize my ideas and my quests and my aspirations what kind of leaders does contemporary society demand how future problems demand different leadership styles or will they well yes i think there will be different leadership styles so my response to the campaign that led to the election of barack obama that was largely an internet campaign that involved email and facebook and myspace and i don't know whether twittering had uh really started then but texting i don't know okay and my response is this uh if in the 60s and 70s we had had those technologies of communication we could have we could have made a revolution you know because i think about how difficult it was to be in touch with people uh in in in other parts of the country and in in the cities where we worked and organized that so i'm really excited about uh the possibilities of of the future and i think that leadership is going to have to listen to youth to the imagination and the creativity and the vision of of young people who who take for granted that which we had to struggle for and i know that oftentimes older people are are very distressed by the fact that young people just they just don't know uh you know what it meant to struggle to get this far and in a sense it's good they don't know because it's good that they can take for granted they can take for granted what we had to fight for because that way their vision can be much more far-reaching they stand on our shoulders and they can reach much higher and i think leadership no matter how crazy young people might sometimes sound leadership leadership has to learn how to listen to the voices of the youth you mentioned what others have have said that younger people don't know the history of the struggles that brought them to where they are do they have to know do they need to know and if they do how can we make sure they know well i think there has to be a sense of history you know we live in a country that encourages historical amnesia there has to be a sense of that history but young people cannot know it in the same way that we who experience it know it and oftentimes we demand a relationship to that history on the part of young people that reflects our relationship as people who experienced it and so my sense is that uh i am very happy oftentimes when i hear people not simply not questioning what we had to struggle for uh not not you know perhaps they they know that there was a time when it would not have been possible for a black person to be at an institution like this but they can't you know they can't um spend so much time reflecting on that that that they forget about what they need to do now that they're here so they this is where they are this is where they begin this is what we offered them from the past and they have to take us somewhere else how can we foster the most effective leaders for the future i think we can foster effective leaders by encouraging people to think independently to think critically to learn how to follow their own passions to to develop languages that allow us to talk about the continued need for justice whether it be racial justice or gender justice or economic justice i think i think the question of developing new vocabularies is so important we are often stuck with old concepts old categories that reflect a particular historical moment and we see that we are now at another historical conjuncture where that no longer works but then we throw the baby out with the bath water i mean i think this is the one of the issues that we're confronting with the failure to develop a conversation around race this is why i think eric holder um said that we're a nation of cowards uh and of course obama didn't exactly like the fact that he said that uh and i think lead the effective leaders have to encourage that kind of bowl imaginative creative engagement with the present and the future there was a time when the communist party helped you to define your own ideas and to develop your vision of the world and how it was and how it could be why are you no longer connected to the party well i left the communist party not because i felt differently about um criticizing capitalism and socialist futures but because at the time there were constraints against the further democratization of the internal structure of the organization so much so that a number of us who signed a petition who circulated a petition about the need for democratization of the structures of governance of the party were not allowed to run for office national office and so in a sense we were invited to leave and many of us became involved in another organization called committees of correspondence for democracy and socialism um but now of course a lot of time has passed there have been some revelations about the past leadership of the communist party and and i'm still close to uh people who are in the party i still work with members of the party i have no bad feelings and i certainly hope that we can encourage a vibrant conversation particularly during this moment about the nature of capitalism and about possible socialist futures you know i've thought or and i've also read other scholars talk about how the exclusion of suspected communists and actual communists this red-baiting era that the civil rights movement went through resulted in creating a movement that looked to the sermon on the mount instead of instead of and gandhi instead of marx for a critique of american society and that we've suffered tremendously because of that because the absence of this critique or the absence of the prevalence of this critique just created a different kind of movement which had different kinds of aims and goals i think i think you're right that although despite the red baiting uh despite the anti-communism i think that uh some of those ideas uh that in involved the importance of looking at the economic structures continued to influence people of course when um when martin luther king was assassinated he was working with the sanitation workers in memphis uh tennessee so this is an indication of a move from a sense of civil rights being the final answer and more substantive questions of economic freedom but i i i absolutely agree with you and i i think it's just such a disgrace that so many of the people who have given so much to movements for justice and equality in this country have been completely eradicated from the historical record of course now we're just beginning to see interest in paul robeson and for a long time nobody knew who w.e.b du bois uh was precisely uh because of the fact that these were two people who did maintain uh that marx did offer us something productive for thinking about uh change whether it be radical change in the area of race or or class so yeah but this is where we have to start playing catch-up i think well dr davis thanks for being with us and thank you very much it's been a pleasure our pleasure

Channel: University of Virginia

Views: 531,491

Rating: 4.3901505 out of 5

Keywords: civil, rights, activist, justice, equality, history, black, leadership, Black, Panther, Party, SNCC, Communist, USA, democratic, socialism, acquittal, prison, abolition, philosophy, Birmingham, Alabama

Id: roXCuwrELHM

Length: 101min 49sec (6109 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2009