Angela Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis became one of the most recognizable faces of radical politics in America when, at 26, she appeared on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1970. A scholar, activist, and Communist Party member, Davis was charged with conspiracy in connection with a courthouse siege in Marin County, California. Her arrest, imprisonment, and eventual acquittal by an all-white jury in 1972 made her an international symbol of resistance.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944 — in a neighborhood so frequently bombed by white supremacists it was called "Dynamite Hill" — Davis grew up surrounded by the violence of Jim Crow. She studied philosophy at Brandeis under Herbert Marcuse, then at the University of Frankfurt, before returning to teach at UCLA, where Governor Ronald Reagan tried to have her fired for her Communist Party membership.

Davis has spent the decades since her trial as one of America's most important public intellectuals, writing extensively on race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex. Her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? helped launch the modern prison abolition movement. Now a distinguished professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz, she continues to insist that freedom is a constant struggle.