(b. January 26, 1944) Activist.

Black activist Angela Davis became disillusioned with the progress of civil rights in the 1960s. She joined the Communist Party in 1968, pursuing a militant course against racism and poverty. In a period of Cold War tensions and social unrest produced by opposition to the war in Vietnam, she became a symbol of the radical outlaw—revered by some, reviled by others. Her accusations of injustice leveled against American capitalism and democracy, in part fueled by the antiwar movement, further inflamed public debate and deepened social and racial divisions during the 1960s and 1970s.

Davis was the first of four children in a middle-class African-American family living in a section of Birmingham, Alabama, that had been bombed so often by the Ku Klux Klan that it was known as Dynamite Hill. While in elementary school, Davis stole money from her father to give to...