For Immediate Release
September 5, 2000

South Hadley, Mass.–Internationally known activist, scholar, writer, and teacher Professor Angela Y. Davis will speak at Mount Holyoke College, 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 event is free and open to the public.

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 16 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 College’s Purrington and Mary Lyon Lecture Funds, and the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership.

The following evening, as part of a conference on Marxism at UMASS/Amherst, Professor Davis will make another public appearance in the region. The conference is titled "Marxism 2000: The Party’s Not Over," and Davis will be a plenary speaker.

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