Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Davis matriculates at Brandeis University in fall of 1961. She is one of only a few Black female students, which causes her to feel isolated.

The Cuban Missile Crisis happens during Davis’s first year, while Black writer James Baldwin is visiting the campus. Students and faculty organize a campus rally at which Baldwin speaks. Davis is heartened to participate in activism again. She befriends a student from India. This friendship helps Davis begin to comprehend the connections between global movements for liberation. Davis and a friend from Elizabeth Irwin also plan a trip to Helsinki to attend the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students.

Before getting to Helsinki, however, Davis spends some time in Paris, where she observes the blatant bigotry and violence directed at Algerian immigrants: “Bombs were exploding in cafés frequented by North Africans, bloody bodies were discovered in dark side streets, and anti-Algerian graffiti marred the sides of buildings” (105). The Parisian police, arriving to break up a demonstration in support of Algerians, behave no differently from the white supremacist police Davis saw in Birmingham.

The festival in Helsinki fosters Davis’s global perspective on liberation, and she is particularly impressed with the Cuban delegation. The FBI, which has agents at the festival, questions Davis upon her return to the United States, insinuating that her communist leanings could put her in danger.

She returns to Brandeis with new confidence engendered by the festival experience and decides to major in French because it will facilitate her involvement with global activism. She is immersed in her studies when Malcolm X arrives on campus. In his speech, he criticizes the predominantly white liberal audience for perpetuating racist violence. Davis observes that many of her white liberal classmates become defensive at this criticism rather than engaging in actions to combat racism.

Davis wins a scholarship to spend a year studying in France. In Biarritz, Davis is affronted by the detritus left behind by rich tourists as the summer season concludes: “I could see them squandering enormous amounts of wealth without the vaguest feeling of compassion for those whose slavery had created that wealth” (110). One day after class, Davis and friends see a newspaper headline about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Davis knows the victims and feels deep sadness and anger at their deaths. Her companions cannot share in her feelings:

No matter how much I talked, the people around me were simply incapable of grasping it. They could not understand why the whole society was guilty of this murder—why their beloved Kennedy was also to blame, why the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder (113).

Davis and her American companions go on to study in Paris in fall of 1963. Davis studies contemporary French literature at the Sorbonne. When President Kennedy is assassinated, Americans in the city converge on the US Embassy, weeping openly. Davis wonders if these same people shed any tears for the four young girls murdered at a church in Alabama. Later, she attends a Vietnamese Tet celebration, where she learns about the brutality visited upon the Vietnamese people by the US military.

Once she returns to Brandeis, Davis approaches the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose work she read during her sophomore year, to request a reading list. She is increasingly drawn to the study of philosophy, especially Marxist thought, and plans to pursue a graduate degree in the subject. Instead of simply giving her a bibliography, Marcuse invites Davis to weekly discussions with him on the writings he recommends. Under his direction, Davis also applies to enter the graduate program in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt.

Davis travels home to Birmingham with her family after her graduation from Brandeis. In Tennessee, they are pulled over by a police officer, who discovers several bottles of unopened alcohol in the trunk. He threatens to arrest them because it is a dry county, and he extracts a bribe from her father: “It was a small-time racket that he probably pulled whenever he caught up with Black people driving through town. The alternative to giving him the twenty dollars would probably have been much more terrible than the thirty days in jail” (118-19).

Davis has difficulty finding a room to rent upon her arrival in Frankfurt because of her race. In West Germany, in contrast to the German Democratic Republic in the east, there is little collective effort to fight racism and fascism.

Davis finds community with other Black people who have come to study in Frankfurt. Davis and other exchange students are given a trip to Berlin, in East Germany, during her first spring. Excited to experience the German socialist republic, she crosses through Checkpoint Charlie quickly, unlike the white tourists waiting in line: “This was [the East Germans’] way of showing solidarity with Black people” (121). She spends time with old friends from the United States, including James Jackson, who is international affairs director for the Communist Party in the US. Police detain Davis when she returns to the West German side, claiming it’s because she did not register at the nearest police station when she moved residences in Frankfurt earlier in the year, as is required of foreigners. However, Davis feels sure her trip to East Germany sparked the reprisal.

Davis takes part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and other social justice issues, organized by the German Socialist Student League. Simultaneously, mass demonstrations like the Watts Uprising are occurring in the United States: “While I was hidden away in West Germany, the Black Liberation Movement was undergoing decisive metamorphoses” (125). She longs to be involved with the liberation movement at home and thus transfers to the University of California in San Diego (UCSD), where her former mentor, Marcuse, agrees to direct the remainder of her graduate work.