December 12, 2012

Angela Davis

Davidson College is announcing that noted political activist and academic Angela Davis will present its annual Wearn Lecture on Tuesday, February 12, 2013.

Davis will speak on the subject "Political Activism and Protest from the 1960s to the Age of Obama" beginning at 8 p.m. in Duke Family Performance Hall.

Her talk is open to the public, but there are no seats left in Duke Family Performance Hall. However, it will be simulcast into the Alvarez College Union Smith 900 Room, and viewers may take a seat in that venue with no ticket necessary, and at no charge.

During her time at Davidson, Davis will also conduct a podium discussion on "Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s, Black GIs, and West German activists." That presentation is also free, with the time and place to be determined. The podium discussion supports the award-winning multimedia exhibition "The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany" that will be on display in the Brown Atrium of Alvarez College Union during the month of February 2013.

Through her activism and scholarship, Davis has been deeply involved in the quest for economic, racial, and gender justice. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration, and the generalized criminalization of communities affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as a person who was placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List" and spent eighteen months on trial and in jail before being acquitted of all charges.

She is a founding member "Critical Resistance," a national organization dedicated to dismantling the prison system. She is 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 a "prison industrial complex," she urges audiences to consider the possibility of a world without prisons, and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

The author of nine books, she has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Her most recent studies - The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues, Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? - concern the abolition of the prison system.

Davis taught for the last 15 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, and of Feminist Studies. She has also taught at San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley, UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University.

For more information on her talk at Davidson, call 704-894-2284.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,900 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
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