Angela Davis to Discuss Women and the Criminal Justice System September 22

Internationally known activist, scholar, writer, and teacher Angela Y. Davis will speak at Mount Holyoke Friday, September 22, at 7:30 pm in Chapin Auditorium. Her lecture on women and the criminal justice system is titled “Jailing Democracy: Women, Civic Participation, and the Prison Industrial Complex.” The following evening, as part of Marxism 2000: The Party’s Not Over, a conference on Marxism at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Davis will be a plenary speaker.

Angela Davis has been an activist/ organizer since she was a young woman in Birmingham, Alabama. She first came to national attention in 1969 when she was removed from her teaching position at UCLA (by then-Governor Ronald Reagan) because of her political activities and her dual membership in the Black Panther and Communist parties. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground for two months before her arrest in October of that year. She spent sixteen months in jail, most of it in solitary confinement, before her release on bail. An international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized during her incarceration and trial. In June 1972, a jury acquitted Davis on all charges. Author of five books and professor in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California-Santa Cruz, she remains a strong advocate of prison abolition in the United States.

The lecture is sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College Program in African and African American Studies, the Purrington and Mary Lyon Lecture Funds, and the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership.