Activist Angela Davis‏

Angela Davis was born in 1944 in the state of Alabama and is most famous for her activities as a communist campaigner during the civil rights movements and a member of the Black Panther movement. Angela’s Marxist and revolutionary activism saw her name figure on the FBI’s most wanted list in the 1960s, on the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. And in 1972, she was sentenced to death for having participated in a fatal shooting.

Because of international mobilization, she was finally acquitted and she became an icon of the struggle for black people’s rights.  After her arrest, she was openly supported by Aragon, Sartre, Prévert, The Rolling Stones (who dedicated the song Sweet Black Angel to her) and John Lennon who wrote her the song Angela.

Davis soon learned that equality between white and black people would only exist if there was also equality between men and women, and she quickly became the leading figure of black feminism.

Today she is a professor of feminist studies at the University of California Santa Cruz.