Angela Davis was born on this day in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s probably one of the shittiest times and places for a black woman to have been born in the past 72 years. But despite the odds stacked against her, Davis definitely made the world a less shitty place for us all—even for a white-male-body-having person like myself.
It’s nearly impossible to list all of Davis’s accomplishments in academics and activism, but she’s been eloquently outspoken and proactive in everything from the antiwar movement to the Black Panther Party. She’s the godmother of Black Feminism; helped found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism; connected the dots between environmental injustice, the prison-industrial-complex, and imperialism; and was one of the first champions of gay liberation and animal rights. She’s been to jail and a PhD program. She made hair a political statement. Angela Davis is 72 and still fucking badass.
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