Quotes About Angela Davis

#1. The image by Barry Blitt of Barack Obama and Michelle in the White House with him dressed as a terrorist, her dressed as an Angela Davis character, a flag burning in the chimney, a portrait of Bin Laden on the wall is an image I'm extremely proud of.

Francoise Mouly

#2. What is invaluable about Angela Davis' work is that she does not limit her politics to issues removed from broader social considerations, but connects every aspect of her scholarship and public interventions to what the contours of a truly democratic society might look like.

Henry Giroux

#3. Angela Davis's legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights.

Henry Giroux

#4. Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life.

June Jordan

#5. As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.

Angela Davis

#6. We wear the global sweat of women and girls on our bodies" - Angela Davis, lecture at UC Davis, Sponsored by the Women's Resources and Research Center

Angela Davis

#7. Angela Davis offers a cartography of engagement in oppositional social movements and unwavering commitment to justice.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

#8. In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

Angela Davis

#9. Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.

Angela Davis

#10. Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was - 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within - internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.

Angela Davis

#11. Often young black people are looking towards the alternative economies. They are looking towards the drug economy ... the economies that are going to that apparently will produce some kind of material gain for them.

Angela Davis

#12. When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.

Angela Davis

#13. We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible.

Angela Davis

#14. I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.

Angela Davis

#15. We have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.

Angela Davis

#16. The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results.

Angela Y. Davis

#17. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals

Angela Davis

#18. I'm a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.

Angela Davis

#19. We must always attempt to lift as we climb

Angela Davis

#20. The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?

Angela Y. Davis

#21. Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

Angela Davis

#22. We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.

Angela Y. Davis

#23. I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom.

Angela Y. Davis

#24. Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

Angela Davis

#25. It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.

Angela Davis

#26. I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.

Angela Davis

#27. I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.

Angela Davis

#28. If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.

Angela Y. Davis

#29. When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Angela Davis

#30. But at the same time you can't ...

Angela Davis

#31. When Obama was elected president, a prisoner said one black man in the White House doesn't make up for one million black men in the Big House.

Angela Y. Davis

#32. First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

Angela Davis

#33. I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.

Angela Davis

#34. I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.

Angela Davis

#35. Defining oneself is a revolutionary act, and, as described in her memoir, Janet Mock fiercely fought to free herself with exquisite bravery and sensitivity. Redefining Realness is full of hope, dreams, and determination. It is a true American girl story.

Michaela Angela Davis

#36. The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

Angela Davis

#37. I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

Angela Davis

#38. I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

Angela Davis

#39. [Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

Angela Y. Davis

#40. The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

Angela Davis

#41. I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Angela Davis

#42. It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement.

Angela Davis

#43. Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

Angela Davis

#44. We must begin to create a revolutionary, multiracial women's movement that seriously addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women.

Angela Y. Davis

#45. Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

Angela Davis

#46. I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

Angela Davis

#47. Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Angela Davis

#48. Radical simply means grasping things at the root.

Angela Y. Davis

#49. I don't just want to be a cute girl in a comedy or the actress who just does the same thing over and over again. I want to play roles that are distinct. I want to have a more varied career like actresses Viola Davis or Angela Bassett - those are the people that I grew up watching and admiring.

Naturi Naughton

#50. I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.

Angela Davis

#51. Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

Angela Davis

#52. We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.

Angela Davis

#53. Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings ...

Angela Davis

#54. You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Angela Davis

#55. That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

Angela Davis

#56. You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.

Angela Davis

#57. the struggle for an abolitionist democracy is aspiring to create the institutions that will truly allow for a democratic society. What

Angela Y. Davis

#58. This is central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal".

Angela Y. Davis

#59. I try never to take myself for granted as somebody who should be out there speaking. Rather, I'm doing it only because I feel there's something important that needs to be conveyed.

Angela Y. Davis

#60. I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world,

Angela Davis

#61. We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community.

Angela Davis

#62. I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.

Angela Davis

#63. Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women's roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies. Though

Angela Y. Davis

#64. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.

Angela Davis

#65. Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.

Angela Davis

#66. As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.

Angela Davis

#67. Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.

Angela Davis

#68. Obviously there are some organizations that go out on the street and say we want an end to the capitalist system. But obviously that is not going to happen as a result of just assuming that stance.

Angela Davis

#69. But there's a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory. The

Angela Y. Davis

#70. Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.

Angela Davis

#71. If Black people had simply accepted a status of economic and political inferiority, the mob murders would probably have subsided. But because vast numbers of ex-slaves refused to discard their dreams of progress, more than ten thousand lynchings occurred during the three decades following the war.

Angela Y. Davis

#72. even when police are indicted, we cannot be certain that change is on the agenda. There

Angela Y. Davis

#73. I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.

Angela Davis

#74. We are never assured of justice without a fight.

Angela Davis

#75. I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

Angela Davis

#76. The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Angela Davis

#77. I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.

Angela Davis

#78. Walls turned sideways are bridges.

Angela Davis

#79. Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

Angela Davis

#80. We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.

Angela Davis

#81. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

Angela Davis

#82. To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Angela Davis

#83. As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

Angela Davis

#84. Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.

Angela Davis

#85. I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

Angela Davis

#86. We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

Angela Y. Davis

#87. Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.

Angela Davis

#88. We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.

Angela Davis

#89. Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that's my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the country and other parts of the world.

Angela Davis

#90. No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step.

Angela Davis

#91. Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

Angela Davis

#92. And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

Angela Davis

#93. Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.

Angela Davis

#94. Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.

Angela Y. Davis

#95. Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

Angela Davis

#96. Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Angela Davis

#97. Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.

Angela Davis

#98. I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change ... I'm changing the things I cannot accept.

Angela Davis

#99. What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Angela Davis

#100. I feel that if we don't take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist who is the perpetrator, then we won't ever succeed in eradicating racism.

Angela Y. Davis