Davis, Angela (1944-)

Education

Angela Davis was born and raised in the “cradle of the confederacy,” Birmingham, Alabama, during the end of segregation in the 1940s and 1950s. Although she attended segregated schools through junior high, she came from a privileged Black middle-class family. Davis then received an American Friends Service Committee scholarship to attend Elizabeth Irwin High School, a private school in Greenwich Village, New York. At Irwin High, she was exposed to Marxist-Leninist socialist ideology through conversations with teachers who had been blacklisted for their Communist membership. After having graduated from Irwin High School, Davis received a scholarship to Brandeis University, where she was one of only a few Black students. Extensive international travels while at Brandeis gave Davis a worldview of oppression, which she maintains to this day. During the summer of 1962, she attended the Eighth World Youth Festival in Helsinki, Finland, and met Cuban students with whom she was enthralled. For her third year at Brandeis (1963–1964), Davis studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. There, she engaged in political dialogue [Page 178]with Algerian students who were protesting French colonialism. Davis returned to Brandeis for her senior year and arranged an independent study in philosophy with the famous Herbert Marcuse, a radical philosopher of the Frankfurt school of critical theory who was teaching at Brandeis. Davis decided to pursue her graduate studies in philosophy. Upon graduation from Brandeis, she returned to Europe to do graduate work in philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt, Federal Republic of Germany. In 1967, she returned to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where she received her master's degree in philosophy in 1969, again working with Marcuse, who had come there from Brandeis. During her international travels and while pursuing her degrees, she was always politically active and often arranged her classes so that she could have full days to work in the Black Liberation movement.

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