Angela Yvonne Davis was born, in 1944, into a middle-class neighbourhood of Birmingham, Alabama, that was nicknamed Dynamite Hill because the Ku Klux Klan regularly bombed the homes of the African Americans who lived there. As a young woman she had something of a split existence. In Birmingham, where her father, Frank, owned a service station and her mother, Sallye, was a teacher, Black people were expected to sit at the back of the bus. In New York, where Davis lived with a white family for a while (as part of a project to give Black children from the south a better education), she attended an integrated high school and African Americans could sit where they liked.
It was at Elisabeth Irwin high school that Davis was taught about socialism in history classes and joined a communist youth group. The Communist Manifesto, she explains in An Autobiography (first published in 1974 and now reissued with a new introduction), was a revelation. “Like an expert surgeon, this document cut away cataracts from my eyes… Once the emancipation of the proletariat became a reality, the foundation was laid for the emancipation of all oppressed groups.”
