Angela Davis at Pomona: ‘It’s always been about collaborations, communities, and collectives’

Renowned activist and scholar Angela Davis drew crowds of students, faculty and staff to Bridges Auditorium Tuesday and Thursday evening as she delivered the 2021 Ena H. Thompson lectureship. 

Hosted by the Pomona College history department, history professor Tomás Summers Sandoval joined Davis for Tuesday’s interview-style discussion of her life. Davis presented her lecture on Thursday, entitled “Radical Agendas and Possible Futures.” 

The event had been postponed from its original April 2020 date and was Davis’s first in-person speaking engagement since the pandemic began. 

Aside from her two lectures, Davis spent her week in Claremont engaging with students in Africana Studies classes and an Inside-Out class, in which 5C students study alongside incarcerated individuals. 

Davis was well received at the Claremont Colleges this week as hundreds of students lined up for photos and autographs after her various sessions around campus. But her time teaching at the Claremont Colleges in 1975 took place under very different circumstances. 

Her brief tenure was marred with backlash from alumni and trustees, forcing faculty and administrators to minimize her presence on campus. 

Yet, at Tuesday’s event Sandoval introduced the significance of Davis’s presence in regard to the monumental revolutionary work she has done with both her activism and within academia. 

“We have somebody before us who has been consistently a genius at analyzing structures of oppression,” he said. “She’s done so in ways that are always interdisciplinary and intersectional even before those were named.” 

Sandoval added that Davis’s work in academia has been pivotal to the development of critical race studies and approaches. 

But Davis responded, “I can’t really claim that. I want to challenge you on that.” 

Davis pushed back against the idea that academic scholarship is ever individual. 

“I think I just had the opportunity to be among people who developed those approaches. I don’t think there’s a single idea that I have written about that I can claim as exclusively as my own. So I’m going to have to say that it’s always been about collaborations, communities, and collectives,” she said. 

Tuesday’s event offered a glance into Davis’s revolutionary upbringing, the events that led to her winding up on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive list and her career advocating at the forefront of the prison abolitionist movement. 

The interview highlighted how resistance has long been a core tenet of Davis’s life. It was during childhood games of ding-dong-ditch at white supremacists’ houses, across the street from her own in Birmingham, Alabama, that she learned to “create joy,” even in spaces where Black families’ very existence was threatened.  

She credited her mother for teaching her to imagine the world differently, telling a young Davis, “This is not the way things are supposed to be.” Davis said she feels like she “literally followed in [the] footsteps” of her mother, who was an activist herself. 

Davis’s early education, she recalled, was also instrumental to the way she understood and appreciated her Blackness within a segregated education system. 

“Our teachers did everything they could to guarantee that we developed a sense of ourselves that did not correspond to the definitions that were forged within the institutionalized white supremacy that prevailed at that time,” she said.

At just 25 years of age, Davis landed her first professorship at UCLA, which was highly contested with public opposition from then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan, President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. 

Her affiliation with the Communist Party — which she made no secret of when accepting the position — got her fired from UCLA the first time, in 1969, before she even began teaching. 

Although she was reinstated, Davis never wavered in her commitment to activism and was once again fired from UCLA one year later for expressing her solidarity with the Soledad brothers when she spoke at rallies. 

“I recognized then that I could not simply focus on myself and my predicament,” she said. “They were about to lose their lives because of their political beliefs and because of their politics and all I was about to lose was my job.” 

But within that year, Davis ultimately ended up in prison in connection with the widely publicized Marin County courtroom shooting and faced the death penalty, although it was outlawed before her trial.  

Her time inside prison shaped her later work regarding prison abolition and global solidarity, she said during Thursday’s lecture. 

“[Abolition is] about clearing space, so that we can imagine new institutions, new strategies of addressing issues that have been so overdetermined by structural racism that it is not possible to remove the racism without the entire institution collapsing,” she said. “Abolition is not primarily about the negative process of elimination and dissolution and dismantling. But it’s about getting rid of those institutions, not only in reality, but in our minds.”

Davis added that often people of color are considered equal only when they’re equal to white people. 

She posed a question to the audience: “Why is whiteness always the measure of equality?” 

Davis emphasized the power of community building, especially during her time in prison, as something that drove her work far past her eventual acquittal of all charges, adding that “if you didn’t create community you did not survive.”

She said that she has been particularly inspired by and supportive of the Palestinian liberation movement, especially after she received letters of solidarity from incarcerated Palestinians while she was in prison. 

“We need to recognize the extent to which Palestinian resistance and Palestinian activists have helped us move towards this moment of reckoning, and so supporting BDS is the very least we can do,” she said. “It really should be just the first step.”

Despite a lifetime of advocating for prison abolition, Davis never thought she would see what she believes is a third wave of abolition, ushered in in part by the “lynching of George Floyd [and] the murder of Breonna Taylor” along with the “recognition of structural racism.” 

“21st century abolitionists’ discourses have emerged as the most radical calls for a better democracy and their significance resides not simply in the fact that we want to dismantle prisons and get rid of police,” she said. “But we see these institutions as profound impediments to the emergence of radical democratic futures.”

Davis expanded on the calls for a radical democracy to include an anti-racist and anti-capitalist approach to feminism that can work hand-in-hand with the abolition movement. 

However, Davis cautioned activists to be cognizant of pushes for reform.

“At some point we have to realize that reform itself is a myth — that reform actually has been the very glue that has held these institutions together,” she said. “Reform has been responsible for the development of more repressive strategies within the institutions that are supposed to become more humane as a result of the work of reformers.” 

Davis said incremental changes and reforms have seemed the only option to many, but that abolition must be a collective effort to radically change our society. 

“If you go slow you will probably forget what you wanted in the first place. If you water down your demands, you forget what you are fighting for,” she said.

Davis encouraged students to translate their “technical vocabularies” into messages that can reach their wider community outside of academia. 

“I’ve encountered students who say, ‘When I get home I can’t talk to my family anymore. I can’t talk to people in my community,’” she said. “And I look at them and say, ‘You can’t talk to your family, just because you’ve learned some big words?’”

Davis also encouraged students to be wary of elitism, an inherent aspect of studying at schools like the Claremont Colleges.  

“These institutions want to make you feel as if you’re better than everyone else who hasn’t had the opportunity to attend. That’s what they’re designed to do, to produce and reproduce elitism,” she said. “Even when you think you might be resisting you have to be really careful because you have incorporated some of those impulses.”

When asked to speak on the legacy she hopes to leave behind, Davis said, “I’d rather not be remembered as an individual. I’d rather be remembered as one of many who came together to engage in the work for justice.”