American political philosopher, longtime professor at UC Santa Cruz, and for sixty years one of the most visible American theorists of race, gender, and what is now called the prison-industrial complex. Born in Birmingham, Alabama — in the neighborhood the Black community called "Dynamite Hill" for the frequency of Ku Klux Klan bombings, one of which killed four girls she knew — Davis came north for high school, studied at Brandeis (where she encountered Herbert Marcuse), did graduate work at Frankfurt with Adorno, and returned to the United States in 1967 to a country in which her political formation was going to be both academic and not.
Fired from UCLA's philosophy department in 1969 on account of her Communist Party membership, Davis became internationally famous in 1970 when she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list after guns registered in her name were used in a Marin County courthouse shootout involving George Jackson's brother Jonathan. She was captured, held for eighteen months, and acquitted in 1972 after a trial that mobilized one of the largest international solidarity campaigns of the era. She returned to academic philosophy and has taught continuously since; her chair at UCSC, endowed in her honor, is her own.
Women, Race & Class (1981) is her most influential book — a historical analysis of the American women's movement that documented how the first-wave suffragist leadership had repeatedly subordinated the interests of Black women and working-class women to middle-class white women's claims, and that laid crucial groundwork for the intersectional Black feminism that hooks, Murray, and the Combahee River Collective elaborated. Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Abolition Democracy (2005) advanced the prison-abolitionist argument — that the carceral state is not a response to crime but a mechanism of racialized social management with roots in slavery and convict leasing, and that its dismantling is the necessary precondition for genuine democracy. The position was marginal when Davis first argued it; it is now one of the recognized contemporary positions on mass incarceration, and much of the subsequent scholarship — from Ruth Wilson Gilmore to Michelle Alexander — draws on it.
Davis's politics have been consistently to the left of American liberalism — Communist Party member in the 1970s and 1980s, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism thereafter — and her work has insisted on a common frame for race, gender, class, and carcerality that the academic division of labor was long reluctant to accommodate.