Posted on 09/16/2004 7:26:48 PM PDT by scan58
Prisons says author and long-time activist Angela Davis. They don't rehabilitate. They exist to keep companies in business, building penitentiaries and keep troublesome minorities away. The responsible thing to do, she says, is get rid of them.
Davis will speak in the Twin Cities Friday, September 17, hosted by the Givens Foundation for African American Literature. Her address, “Education not Incarceration: Protecting the Future of Black America,” will draw from her latest book, “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
The book was written, according to Davis, to encourage readers to question their assumptions about prison, in the same way that many have come to question the death penalty.
“During my own career as an anti-prison activist, I have seen the population of U.S. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in black, Latino, and Native American communities now have a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent education,” she writes in the introduction. “When many young people decide to join the military service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in prison, it should cause us to wonder whether we should not try to introduce better alternatives.”
Davis’ long strange career as an activist began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights movement. In 1969, she rose to national prominence after being fired from a teaching position at UCLA, when then-Governor Ronald Reagan vowed that Davis would never again teach anywhere in the University of California system. He was wrong.
In 1970 she made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for charges most legal experts believed were false. She was hunted down in one of the most famous cases this country has ever brought to trial. She served 16 months in prison, by which time, a global “Free Angela Davis” campaign led to her 1972 acquittal.
Davis currently teaches at the University of California in Santa Cruz, is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center and currently is working on a comparative study of women’s imprisonment in the U.S., the Netherlands and Cuba. She has lectured in all 50 states, Africa, Europe and Asia, and is the author of “Angela Davis: An Autobiography,” “Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday” and “The Angela Y. Davis Reader.”
The Givens Forum NOMMO Lecture Series brings in high-profile authors to talk about their take on issues of pressing importance to African-Americans. Past guests include Randall Robinson, author of “Quitting America” and “The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks” and Ebony executive editor Lerone Bennet, Jr “Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream.” ||
Angela Davis speaks on Fri., Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. at the Minneapolis Marriott Hotel City Center, 30 South 7th Street. Her appearance is part of the Givens Forum NOMMO Lecture Series. The lecture is free and open to the public.
who let her back into the country???
"Angela, she's one of the million, of political prisoners in the world..."
John Lennon
B S then, B S now.
I agree.
I say we start by letting the most violent, agressive inmates live out in society.
At angela davis's house.
If she thinks they're ok, then she shouldn't have a problem trusting them in her home, right???
They use "progressive" instead.
Yes, I know. Funny that none of the articles I've seen about her in several years mention that she was the vice-presidential candidate with Gus Hall for president for the communist party.
What if they won't go to school?
I thought that old Communist was dead already. Who brought her back from the dead?
Angela Davis IS a communist but you'll rarely see that word used to describe real communists. Now they're called progressives or activists or environmentalists.
She needs to convert to Islam, put on a burkha and shut the heck up!
One of her boyfriends used guns that belonged to her to kill 4 people. She got off at trial, but I believe that she is just another in the long list of radical lefties who have escaped justice.
It would "raise the specter of McCarthyism" to mention she at least once ran on a CPUSA ticket with Gus Hall. Therefore I won't.
... and currently is working on a comparative study of women’s imprisonment in the U.S., the Netherlands and Cuba.
I'm sure she'll find in her study that, of course, women in American prisons are more lonely, tortured and oppressed than those in Cuba's fine establishments.
I think she is teaching at UC Santa Cruz now.
Black Panthers Studies and How to Avoid Capture When you try to Kill A Judge 1-A. .000001 credits, fee $2,000
Well, whatever happened to John Sinclair, "It ain't fair."
Then again, maybe his fate is the same as Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon----he evaporated.
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