National

Angela Davis Still an Activist

Published

10 years ago

February 4, 2015

Oakland Post

A current photograph of Angela Davis, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Courtesy photo)

At 71, the Freedom Fighter Battles On

by Stacy M. Brown

Special to the NNPA from the Washington Informer

Say the name Angela Davis and, depending upon with whom you speak, a range of opinions, emotions and thoughts automatically ensue.

But, to hear the famed political activist speak, it’s easy to understand why she has become one of the most prominently known fighters against oppression in America and around the globe.

“A lot of civil and human rights activists of the ’60s and ’70s are no longer with the movement but that’s not the case with Angela Davis. She’s still on the front lines,” said David Leonard, chair of the Washington State University’s Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, where Davis recently spoke to a sold-out audience.

Davis, who turned 71 on Monday, Jan. 26, holds the title of professor emerita in the Humanities Division at the University of California Santa Cruz. However, 45 years ago, she held the dubious distinction of being on the FBI’s notorious “Most Wanted” list.

It turned out the charges didn’t hold and Davis, now a noted scholar, continued her work as the face of the 1970s black power movement.

In her mid-20s when she gained the national spotlight, Davis in 1969, lost her job as an assistant philosophy professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) because the state Board of Regents cited her membership in the Communist Party.

“The dismissal sparked large-scale student protests in support of Davis’s right to teach and academic freedom. Then, roughly a year later, she became a nationally hunted fugitive after the FBI linked her to the shooting deaths of four people in a Marin County courthouse,” said Linda Weiford, a writer for the Washington State University Press.

Captured and tried, an all-white jury eventually acquitted Davis of all charges.

“I wasn’t seeking fame. I wasn’t seeking notoriety. I just wanted to be a teacher and activist,” said Davis in a recent interview with UCLA News.

Even in her personal biography, Davis focused on activism as perhaps her sole motivation in life. Over the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, activist and organizer. She’s also a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era.

“She is someone whose name jumps out at you, whether you are black, white, Asian, or whatever,” said Kenyon Moore, a junior at Howard University in Northwest. “I think her story is worth telling and I think she’s definitely worth listening to,” Moore said.

Like many educators, Davis said she’s especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions.

Having helped to popularize the notion of what she called a “prison industrial complex,” Davis now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

She’s lectured in all of the fifty United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Davis also has written articles and essays for numerous journals and she’s authored nine books, including, “The Meaning of Freedom and other Difficult Dialogues.”

Following the shootings of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Missouri and other incidents of alleged injustices against young blacks and police brutality, Davis said America had reached a time of transformation.

“There is such potential for change. All over this country from Ferguson to New York City to Washington and indeed, in other parts of the world, people are absolutely refusing to assent to racist state violence,” Davis said.

“Rather, we are saying that black bodies do matter. And our work must be to continue taking to the streets and standing together against the routine actions of police and the district attorneys who collude with them; and continue saying, ‘No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police,’ until there is real change on the agenda for us.”

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Activism

Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

Published

3 hours ago

December 26, 2024

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

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Activism

OPINION: “My Girl,” The Temptations, and Nikki Giovanni

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame. The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.” That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

Published

2 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Nikki Giovanni. Courtesy of Nikki-Giovanni.com

By Emil Guillermo

The Temptations, the harmonizing, singing dancing man-group of your OG youth, were on “The Today Show,” earlier this week.

There were some new members, no David Ruffin. But Otis Williams, 83, was there still crooning and preening, leading the group’s 60th anniversary performance of “My Girl.”

When I first heard “My Girl,” I got it.

I was 9 and had a crush on Julie Satterfield, with the braided ponytails in my catechism class. Unfortunately, she did not become my girl.

But that song was always a special bridge in my life. In college, I was a member of a practically all-White, all-male club that mirrored the demographics at that university. At the parties, the song of choice was “My Girl.”

Which is odd, because the party was 98% men.

The organization is a little better now, with women, people of color and LGBTQ+, but back in the 70s, the Tempts music was the only thing that integrated that club.

POETRY’S “MY GIRL”

The song’s anniversary took me by surprise. But not as much as the death of Nikki Giovanni.

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame.

The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.”

That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

I’ll always see her as the Black female voice that broke through the silence of good enough. In 1968, when cities were burning all across America, Giovanni was the militant female voice of a revolution.

Her “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” is the historical record of racial anger as literature from the opening lines.

It reads profane and violent, shockingly so then. These days, it may seem tamer than rap music.

But it’s jarring and pulls no punches. It protests Vietnam, and what Black men were asked to do for their country.

“We kill in Viet Nam,” she wrote. “We kill for UN & NATO & SEATO & US.”

Written in 1968, it was a poem that spoke to the militancy and activism of the times. And she explained herself in a follow up, “My Poem.”

“I am 25 years old, Black female poet,” she wrote referring to her earlier controversial poem. “If they kill me. It won’t stop the revolution.”

Giovanni wrote more poetry and children’s books. She taught at Rutgers, then later Virginia Tech where she followed her fellow professor who would become her spouse, Virginia C. Fowler.

Since Giovanni’s death, I’ve read through her poetry, from what made her famous, to her later poems that revealed her humanity and compassion for all of life.

In “Allowables,” she writes of finding a spider on a book, then killing it.

And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened

For Giovanni, her soul was in her poetry, and the revolution was her evolution.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator, and solo performer. Join him at www.patreon.com/emilamok

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Black History

Book Review: In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World

It’s a tale of heroes: the Maroons, who created communities in unwanted swampland, and welcomed escaped slaves into their midst; Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”; Marème Diarra, who walked more than 2000 miles from Sudan to Senegal with her children to escape slavery; enslaved farmers and horticulturists; and everyday people who still talk about slavery and what the institution left behind.

Published

2 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Book cover. Courtesy of Smithsonian Books.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Ever since you learned how it happened you couldn’t get it out of your mind.

People, packed like pencils in a box, tightly next to each other, one by one by one, tier after tier. They couldn’t sit up, couldn’t roll over or scratch an itch or keep themselves clean on a ship that took them from one terrible thing to another. And in the new book “In Slavery’s Wake,” essays by various contributors, you’ll see what trailed in waves behind those vessels.

You don’t need to be told about the horrors of slavery. You’ve grown up knowing about it, reading about it, thinking about everything that’s happened because of it in the past four hundred years. And so have others: in 2014, a committee made of “key staff from several world museums” gathered to discuss “telling the story of racial slavery and colonialism as a world system…” so that together, they could implement a “ten-year road map to expand… our practices of truth telling…”

Here, the effects of slavery are compared to the waves left by a moving ship, a wake the story of which some have tried over time to diminish.

It’s a tale filled with irony. Says one contributor, early American Colonists held enslaved people but believed that King George had “unjustly enslaved” the colonists.

It’s the story of a British company that crafted shackles and cuffs and that still sells handcuffs “used worldwide by police and militaries” today.

Today, discussions about cooperation and diversity remain essential.

Says one essayist, “… embracing a view of history with a more expansive definition of archives in all their forms must be fostered in all societies.”

Unless you’ve been completely unaware and haven’t been paying attention for the past 150 years, a great deal of what you’ll read inside “In Slavery’s Wake” is information you already knew and images you’ve already seen.

Look again, though, because this comprehensive book isn’t just about America and its history. It’s about slavery, worldwide, yesterday and today.

Casual readers – non-historians especially – will, in fact, be surprised to learn, then, about slavery on other continents, how Africans left their legacies in places far from home, and how the “wake” they left changed the worlds of agriculture, music, and culture. Tales of individual people round out the narrative, in legends that melt into the stories of others and present new heroes, activists, resisters, allies, and tales that are inspirational and thrilling.

This book is sometimes a difficult read and is probably best consumed in small bites that can be considered with great care to appreciate fully. Start “In Slavery’s Wake,” though, and you won’t be able to get it out of your mind.

Edited by Paul Gardullo, Johanna Obenda, and Anthony Bogues, Author: Various Contributors, c.2024, Smithsonian Books, $39.95