14 Vintage Photos Of Angela Davis, Firebrand Activist And Feminist Powerhouse

“This moment holds possibilities for change we have never before experienced in this country,” activist and academic Angela Davis has said of the global protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd on 25 May. And Davis should know, she’s been fighting for the rights of the black community in the US for decades.

Davis, who grew up in segregated Alabama, was part of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party. The world at large learned of her and her work in 1970, when she became the world’s most famous “political prisoner” after being charged by the state of California with crimes connected to an armed takeover of a courthouse. Her friend Jonathan Jackson, to whom Davis was accused of supplying weapons, as well as two inmates and a judge lost their lives in the incident in Marin County. Davis, knowing it was a set up, fled California. Two months later, the then President Richard Nixon told the world the FBI had captured “the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis”. She subsequently spent 18 months in jail before finally being acquitted of all charges in 1972. Millions of Americans had defended Davis’s innocence, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono even penned a song about her, “Angela”.

Now 76, Davis is a professor emerita at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and still fighting for the causes she believes in. Below, 14 vintage photos of an icon of feminism and the civil rights movement.