The night before Angela Davis speaks in Indianapolis at the Madam Walker Legacy Center, visit, revisit, and/or discuss her life’s work and organizing with comrades at the Indy Liberation Store. We’ll discuss Angela Davis: A critical primer, a short reader produced by volunteers at the Center for this occasion (no prior reading is necessary).
In addition to her time as a political prisoner in the early 1970s, Angela Davis is best known today as a leading figure in the prison abolition movement, asking us to envision a society without the racist mass incarceration system.
As this critical primer demonstrates, Davis has generally maintained her intellectual and political commitments since the mid-1960s when, as a PhD student in the German Democratic Republic, she took a qualitative leap forward in her radicalization process. Returning to the U.S., she joined the Communist Party USA and remained a member until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. She also was briefly a member, and later a close friend, of the Black Panther Party, one of the key forces organizing the “Free Angela” campaign in 1971.
Along with a preface by Imani Luellen, an organizer with the Indianapolis Liberation Center, this primer includes three pieces spanning from 1972 – 2024. While far from comprehensive, the essays and interviews nonetheless represent different moments in her activism and serve as flashpoints for the evolution in her ideological beliefs.
The primer provide an excellent entry-point for those not yet familiar with Davis and supply a host of material for robust discussions about the struggle today and the struggle to come.