WOMEN, RACE & CLASS
Angela Y Davis
'A classic whose power and prescience never fail to astound'
Bonnie Greer
One of the most brilliant and courageous women of our generation, Angela Y Davis here shows that both sexism and racism are deeply rooted in class oppression, and that neither can be eradicated without destroying the dominant patriarchal economic system. by analysing both the differences and the similarities between the experiences of black and white women in our culture, she casts new light on the past and present struggle for human rights.
Angela Y Davis
was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University and pursued graduate studies at the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt and the University of California, San Diego. She has been a member of the Communist Party, USA, since 1968 and has twice run as its presidential candidate. Acquitted on conspiracy charges in 1972, follwing one of the most famous trials in US history, Davis has energed as an internationally regarded writer, scholar, lecturer and fighter for human rights.
Professor Davis' long-sanding commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, and is currently working on a comparative study of women's imprisonment in the US, the netherlands, and Cuba.
Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of five books, including Women, Culture and Politics; Angela Davis: An Autobiography and Blues Legacies and Black feminism: Gerturde "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. The Angela Y Davis Reader, a collection of Professor Davis' writings that spans nearly three decades, was published in 1998 by Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.
Today, Angela Y Davis is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the university of California, Santa Cruz.