Political activist Angela Davis to visit U-M

October 20, 2003
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EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

Political activist Angela Davis to visit U-M

DATE: 7:30 p.m., Nov. 21, 2003

EVENT: Angela Davis, internationally renowned political activist, will discuss “How Gender Structures the Prison Industrial Complex,” during the Vivian R. Shaw Lecture – presented by the Women’s Studies Program and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

The event is free and open to the public.

Davis, a professor in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is known for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad. She serves as an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system.

Davis’s political activism began as a youth in Birmingham, Ala., and continued through her high school years in New York. In 1969, she received national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the UCLA philosophy department as a result of her social activism and membership in the Communist Party.

A year later in 1970, she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground. This culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her 16-month incarceration, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.

PLACE: Rackham Auditorium, 915 E. Washington St. (Central Campus map: http://www.umich.edu/news/ccamp.html)

SPONSOR: Co-sponsored by the University of Michigan Martin Luther King, Jr., César Chávez, Rosa Parks Visiting Professors Program, the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, the departments of English, history, psychology and sociology, and the Program in American Culture.


WEB LINKS: For more information, see http://www.lsa.umich.edu/women/

http://www.umich.edu/news/ccamp.html