Content Warning: This section references systemic racism, including segregation and mass incarceration.

Angela Davis (b. 1944) is a Black liberation activist, prison abolitionist, feminist, and academic. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she was a child during the Jim Crow era and came of age during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Her father ran a service station, and her mother was a teacher who instilled a love of learning in Davis from a young age. Her family resided in a middle-class neighborhood that was segregated. Davis recalls that white residents refused to allow their Black neighbors to cross the street and bombed homes of Black residents who dared to move into the parts of the neighborhood claimed by white people. This racism led a young Davis to resent white people, though her politically active mother recognized that white people could be allies in the movement against anti-Black racism, something that Davis later advocated too.

Davis’s family had friends in New York City, where she spent time as a child and where she later attended Elizabeth Irwin High School. Her time in the North, however, was not free from racism. She quickly realized that even though the North was not segregated, racism was still pervasive there.