More than 50 years ago, Angela Davis became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and has been pushing for change ever since — even acting as an honorary co-chair and featured speaker at 2017’s Women’s March on Washington.
Now, Harvard is home to the 74-year-old’s personal archives.
Connecting Point’s Adam Reilly takes us through the more than 150 boxes of papers, photos, and other details that shed new light on one of the most radical and controversial women in American history.
Read the full transcript:
Adam Reilly, Connecting Point: If you hunker down with Angela Davis’s personal papers without knowing anything about her life, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the hair.
Kenvi Phillips, Schlesinger Library at Harvard: Her wearing her hair natural in the sixties and the seventies gave Black love fever across the world.
Adam Reilly: Kenvi Phillips is the curator for race and ethnicity at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, she says Davis’s unapologetic afro had a profound social effect.
Kenvi Phillips: Listen to women from other parts of the world and they’re like, you know, all of a sudden, there’s this kind of thing where I can see myself and I love myself because I can see the beauty in being who I am in this other woman who’s being who she is.
Adam Reilly: But that hair is just one part of Davis’s complicated legacy. In 1969, Davis was fired from her teaching post at UCLA after then-Gov. Ronald Reagan objected to her membership in the Communist Party. The following year, she was accused of facilitating a lethal courthouse kidnapping, but in prison, Davis’s profile only increased.
Angela Davis (archived footage): You have to completely revolutionize the entire fabric of society.
Kenvi Phillips: She received support from all over the world. There’s the Free Angela Davis campaign that goes international. And so she received letters while she was in the Marin County Jail.
Adam Reilly: Including a huge number from the Communist bloc, where supporting Davis doubled as a way to embarrass the U.S. After Davis was acquitted, she made triumphant visits to Cuba and the Soviet Union —
Angela Davis (archived footage): Long live international, working class…
Adam Reilly: — cementing an ideological bond that still enrages many conservatives.
Rush Limbaugh (archived footage): And an avowed communist. And Harvard has proudly accepted her papers.
Adam Reilly: After that jab from Rush Limbaugh, Schlesinger director Jane Kamensky says she received several testy emails and she wrote back, explaining that academic archives don’t work the way Limbaugh seems to think.
Jane Kamensky, Schlesinger Library at Harvard: Archives are not allies of the people whose collections we acquire. If you had to build an archive of only people you absolutely agreed with, you know, we could fit it in my office.
Adam Reilly: What these materials will do, Kamensky says, is give future researchers a chance to examine how Davis blended Black liberation, feminism, and communism while sizing up her role in the broader story of American radicalism.
Jane Kamensky: A life and times biography that takes the canvas of American history and of global liberation struggles and looks through her eyes will be a fantastic book. Nobody will be able to write that book without these papers.
