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Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

Angela Davis

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Angela Davis
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 29
Autobiographer
Feminist
Human Rights Activist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Politician
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Angela Yvonne Davis
Angela Y. Davis
Become
Problem
Imprisonment
Firsts
Resort
First
Resorts
Many
Prison
Response
Problems
Social

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I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.
Angela Davis
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No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step.
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I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.
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As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.
Angela Davis
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I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.
Angela Davis
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My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.
Angela Davis
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Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'
Angela Davis
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What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
Angela Davis
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I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.
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The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.
Angela Davis
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Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.
Angela Davis
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When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.
Angela Davis
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Often young black people are looking towards the alternative economies. They are looking towards the drug economy.... the economies that are going to that apparently will produce some kind of material gain for them.
Angela Davis
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Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
Angela Davis
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I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
Angela Davis
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I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have - particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as [ Martin Luther] King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility.
Angela Davis
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A fair trial would have been no trial at all.
Angela Davis
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I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.
Angela Davis
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If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.
Angela Davis
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There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.
Angela Davis