“I  am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept,” wrote Angela Yvonne Davis—political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author.

Davis gained national attention in 1969 when she was fired from her teaching position in the philosophy department of UCLA by the University of California Board of Regents. Why? Because of her membership in the Communist Party. “While I think this membership requires no justification, I want [the Board] to know that as a black woman I feel an urgent need to find radical solutions to the problems of racial and national minorities in white capitalist United States.” A judge reversed the Board’s decision as illegal. A few months later, the Board fired her again due to her inflammatory language: “Hell, yes, we are subversive…and we’re going to continue to be subversive until we have subverted the whole damn system of oppression.”

This was the beginning of Davis’s life-long dedication to civil rights alongside economic, racial, and gender justice—commitments she continues to this day. In 1970, three people were murdered using guns belonging to Davis. She was arrested and spent more than a year in prison until she was acquitted in 1972. In 1980, she was the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party.

Angela Y. Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned a BA from Brandeis University, a Masters from UC San Diego, and a PhD from Humboldt University in Germany. In 1991, she joined the feminist studies department at UC Santa Cruz, retiring in 2008. She’s dedicated to the abolishment of the prison-industrial complex, political freedom, and women’s rights. In 1995, Davis came out against the Million Man March for its exclusion of women. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2019 and is considered one of society’s most iconic women.

Her many books include: Angela Y. Davis: An Autobiography, Are Prison’s Obsolete?, Women, Culture & Politics, Abolition Democracy, and Abolition. Feminism. Now.