Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Content Warning: This section contains discussion of systemic racism, including the police murders of Black Americans, mass incarceration, Jim Crow laws, white supremacist terrorism, and the history of enslavement in the US.

Angela Davis’s life has been devoted to Black liberation, not only in the period covered in this 1974 autobiography, but afterward too. Liberation for Davis means not only an end to systemic racism but also to classism, sexism, anti-gay bias, and all other systemic injustices. For Davis, communism is a solution to these systemic problems. She reaches this conclusion after reading The Communist Manifesto in high school:

What had seemed a personal hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern whites to confront their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks to acquiesce, became the inevitable consequence of a ruthless system that kept itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition, and the oppression of one group by another. Profit was the word (96).

According to Davis, racism is the natural result of capitalism, a system that relies on exploitation and oppression to function. It follows that capitalism must be replaced by another system if racism is to be overcome and Black liberation achieved.

Davis’s autobiography also draws attention to the tie between Black men’s liberation and Black women’s liberation, something that her male comrades in the struggle do not always acknowledge.