TENNESSEE--A world-renown scholar, author and political activist, Angela Davis, urged students to ask questions when she spoke to a crowded room Tuesday night in the James Union Building.
The lecture was part of National Women's History Month observance.
Davis spoke on topics ranging from her mother's involvement in activism and her own contribution to the Civil Rights Movement to her current cause of abolishing prisons, but her emphasis was on women's history and feminism and its effects on American culture.
Davis presented a central theme of her lecture by inviting the audience to name women who refused to ride busses after Rosa Parks initiated a boycott.
"We don't know how to value the contributions of ordinary people, women, black women and humans," Davis said. "Civil rights is too narrow a rubric. It is not always people making history that we remember but the results of their actions."
Many people assume the Civil Rights Movement ended, but the truth is that the one movement has left out a lot of people, Davis said. When it began in the mid-20th century, it was known as the "freedom movement."
"It was an attempt to achieve that which the movement to abolish slavery had failed to achieve," Davis said.
She said she grew up in the South during the 1960s, and from childhood, understood how segregation affected the black community.
"At a very young age, I developed the capacity to imagine beyond what was happening and what could be," Davis said.
She said she came from a mother who had to fight in order to have a high school education and knew that her passion came from somewhere. Davis said she imagines communities that provide inspiration to youth beyond the family unit.
Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1944, Davis is best known for her role during the 1960s and early-1970s as a member of the Black Panthers and the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party. In 1980, she ran for vice president on the Communist Party ticket alongside presidential candidate Gus Hall.
She encouraged students to be inquisitive, adding that when people come together to struggle for justice, equality and freedom they create a community of struggle, a community of triumph.
She also said that it took her a while to identify as a feminist. After she adopted the train of thought that feminism is available to everyone, it made more sense to her, Davis said.
"Feminism is available to men, to transgendered persons and to anyone," Davis said. "Feminism allows us to put things together we may not ordinarily
put together."
The connection to gender, class, race and s*xuality allows people to think about and understand how these things connect, influence and hinder one another,
she said.
Another concern Davis presented was the issue of rapid privatization.
The privatization of education has moved schooling from being a right to a commodity. The issue of privatizing the military, prison systems, food production and farming are all connected and indivisible, Davis said.
"Food is no longer about creating nourishment but generating profit,"
Davis said.
She made references to the farmer's loss of control over the purchase of seed from year to year and noted that all of the industries connect, regardless of race or gender.
"We cannot assume that because blacks have earned some rights somewhere that the global struggle for freedom is over," Davis said. "Let us not assume that the struggles for freedom are behind us."
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Thursday, March 24th 2011 at 12:02PM
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