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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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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
Mean
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Question
Kidnapped
Time
Persons
Violence
Shores
People
Ideas
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Africa
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Incredible
First
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Country
Black
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More quotes by Angela Davis

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Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.
Angela Davis
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Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.
Angela Davis
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Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.
Angela Davis
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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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We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
Angela Davis
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You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.
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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We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Angela Davis
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As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.
Angela Davis
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Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
Angela Davis
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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.
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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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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Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.
Angela Davis
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As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.
Angela Davis
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But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life
Angela Davis
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Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.
Angela Davis
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We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community it was never a homogeneous community.
Angela Davis
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That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.
Angela Davis
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We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.
Angela Davis