i am sassa

I have an embarrassing confession to make. When I was younger, I had a yellow t-shirt that said Power to the People. It featured a silhouette of Angela Davis. I wore that thing until it was threadbare, and at the time I never even knew who she was. I got the impression while I painted her today that I might not be the only one who ever sported her image without really knowing about her. John Lennon and The Rolling Stones wrote songs about her. She’s on countless murals. One article I read referred to her as a “pop-culture reference point”. But she wasn’t being used as a poster girl without the cred to back it up. Behind her status as a revolutionary icon is a serious academic with an intense history.

Angela Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama in a neighborhood that was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill”. Its’ homes were frequently targeted by the KKK. Several of her friends were killed in the Birmingham Church bombing in 1963. You’d think the police would have their hands full with all the racial violence at the time, but they still managed to break up the interracial study groups Angela organized.

Probably wanting to learn what the bloody hell was wrong with people, she studied philosophy in college. After she received a PhD in Berlin, she moved to California and became a professor of philosophy at UCLA. She was a radical feminist, a Black Panther, and a member of the Communist Party. When UCLA began enforcing a policy preventing the hire of those affiliated with the Communist party, they fired her. After a judge decided this move to be bologna, she resumed her job, only to be fired shortly after for using colorful language in her speeches. She spoke about this time in an interview I listened to today. She reported receiving hundreds of death threats which led her to purchase firearms.

In 1970, guns belonging to Angela were used in an insane courtroom shoot-out that resulted in several deaths, including the judge. She was charged with murder, and she ran. Angela became only the third woman ever to be on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List, and when she was caught she spent over a year in prison. Aretha Franklin’s public offer to post bail for Angela brought her situation to light, and a massive movement for her freedom began. Ultimately it was a white dairy farmer who put up her bail, which is so weird and so awesome. Angela was found innocent on all charges.

Angela later became an activist for the prison abolition movement, among a million other things, and even ran as the Communist Party’s Vice President in the 80s. She has since cut ties with the party, but has not slowed down a bit as an activist. She is the author of several books, and still makes regular appearances. She was co-chair of the Women’s March after Trump’s inauguration, and I bet she had the biggest, pinkest hat there.

Thank you, Angela Davis.