UNCG to hold MLK Celebration - Activist Angela Davis to speak
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Angela Y. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Over the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar and activist/organizer. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era. Davis’ political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, AL, and continued through her high school years in New York. But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. 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 and culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her sixteen-month incarceration, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972. Davis’ long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today, she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. In 1997, Prof. Davis helped found Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), a topic that is central to her current scholarship and activism. During the last twenty-five years, Davis has lectured in all of the fifty United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the former Soviet Union. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race & Class; and the recently published Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday; The Angela Y. Davis Reader, a collection of Davis’ writings that spans nearly three decades, was published in 1998. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Davis would never again teach in the University of California system. From 1994 to 1997, she held the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. Today, she is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.====== Too bad the University doesn't do anything to officially recognize any of the LGBT community's slain leaders and heroes. UNCG has a serious lacking of official University-sponsored programs relating to LGBT students and the LGBT community. Shame. I wish I would be able to attend the MLK Celebration next week. As always though, duty calls; I will be spending my evening in Student Senate and with my committee. Technorati Tags: gay youth, gay, lgbt, gay rights, martin luther king, mlk, angela davis, greensboro, uncg
2 Comments:
But I agree with you that, as far as official university events they seem to do very little. Of course most of the work of the Multicultural Affairs office - the most radical of which would be less controversial than an arm of the university seeming to embrace homosexuality - gets shit from a lot of conservatives as it is.
Can you imagine the Mike Adams column if the university had an official day honoring gay rights activists?