Controversial Activist/Author Was on FBI’s Wanted List in ’70
BROOKLYN — Pratt Institute will host activist, writer, philosopher and teacher Angela Davis as Scholar in Residence for Spring 2008 on Tuesday, April 22, and Wednesday, April 23. As part of her residency, Davis will participate in a series of events that are free and open to the public.
Davis will give a keynote address titled “Identifying Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 22, following a 5 p.m. screening of “The Farm: Angola.” On April 23, Davis will participate in roundtable discussion, “Urban Artists and the Politics of Visibility,” with New York-based artists Dread Scott, Hank Willis Thomas, Alain Maridue and Amy Sananman. All events are to be held in Memorial Auditorium on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus.
Davis was associated with the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was a member of the Communist Party until the early 1990s. Educated at the Frankfurt School, Davis first came to national attention when she was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 10 Most Wanted List on charges of helping a radical fugitive escape, driven underground, arrested, and incarcerated for 16 months.
Davis ran for vice president on the Communist Party ticket in 1980, and in 1997 helped found Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to dismantling what she calls the prison-industrial complex.
Today, she holds the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies in the History of Consciousness Department at the Santa Cruz campus. She is the author of eight acclaimed books, including “The Autobiography of Angela Davis,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” and “Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture.”
Her residency is sponsored by the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the Department of English and Humanities; and the Initiative for Art, Community, and Social Change with support from the Office of the Provost, the Critical and Visual Studies Program, and the Pratt Film Society.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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