Angela Yvonne Davis, an American political activist, philosopher, scholar, and novelist, was born on January 26, 1944. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, she teaches. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and a Marxist and feminist (CCDS). She has written more than ten books about class, gender, racism, and the American criminal justice system.
Starting in 1969, Davis served as an interim assistant professor in the University of California, Los Angeles’ philosophy department (UCLA). She had been courted by Princeton and Swarthmore, but she chose UCLA because of its metropolitan setting.
Hilton Braithwaite: Who is Angela Davis’ ex-husband?
Davis was wed to Hilton Braithwaite from 1980 to 1983. In an interview with Out magazine in 1997, she came out as a lesbian. By 2020, Davis was openly cohabitating with academic partner Gina Dent, an intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz and a fellow humanities scholar. They have worked together to promote Palestinian solidarity, black freedom, and the abolishment of the police and jails.