Castingfox101

I was a little daunted when I first received this book given that it is approximately 400 pages long with relatively small sized print, but once I started I could not put Angela Davis: An Autobiography down. Having completed Angela Davis: An autobiography Inow feel I know and understand Dr Davis very well. 6 hours ago  Leftist lawyer Michael Tigar has spent his life in courtrooms defending a wide range of names big and small on the Left, from Vietnam War draft resisters to Bobby Seale and Angela Davis. He captures them all in a new memoir. Michael Tigar arrives at. Her memoir similarly reveals her elite status: It was published because a book editor heard her speak at a panel on Martha’s Vineyard with Hollywood stars Danny Glover and Issa Rae. Cullors has also received numerous honors, including a Fulbright Scholarship and an honorary doctorate from Clarkson University.

1. Angela Davis Memoir
2. Angela Davis Memoir Excerpt
3. Angela Davis Young
4. What Did Angela Davis Achieve
5. Angela Davis Autobiography Book

Description

Angela Davis Memoir

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.
New York Times Editor's Pick.
Library Journal Best Books of 2019.
TIME Magazine's Best Memoirs of 2018 So Far.
O, Oprah's Magazine's '10 Titles to Pick Up Now.'
Politics & Current Events 2018 O.W.L. Book Awards Winner
The Root Best of 2018

This remarkable book reveals what inspired Patrisse's visionary and courageous activism and forces us to face the consequence of the choices our nation made when we criminalized a generation. This book is a must-read for all of us. - Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow

Angela Davis Memoir Excerpt

A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America--and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free.Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin's killer went free, Patrisse's outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin. Championing human rights in the face of violent racism, Patrisse is a survivor. She transformed her personal pain into political power, giving voice to a people suffering inequality and a movement fueled by her strength and love to tell the country--and the world--that Black Lives Matter. When They Call You a Terrorist is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele's reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.

Product Details

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.

Become an affiliate

About the Author

Patrisse Khan-Cullors is an artist, organizer, and freedom fighter from Los Angeles, CA. Cofounder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and Founder of the Los Angeles-based grassroots organization Dignity and Power Now, she is also a performance artist, Fulbright scholar, popular public speaker, and a Sydney Peace Prize recipient. For 20 years, Patrisse has been on the front lines of criminal justice reform and is currently leading Reform L.A. Jails, a ballot initiative that will be voted on in March 2020. Patrisse is currently the Faculty Director of Arizona's Prescott College new Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA program, which she developed nesting a curriculum focused on the intersection of art, social justice and community organizing that is first of its kind in the nation.

asha bandele is the award-winning author of The Prisoner's Wife and several other works. Honored for her work in journalism and activism, asha is a mother, a former senior editor at Essence and a senior director at the Drug Policy Alliance.

Reviews

Entertainment Weekly's '13 Books to Read in January,' Cassius' 'Black Books to Add to Your Reading List,' Vogue's 'The Most Anticipated Books of January 2018,' Paste's '10 of the Best Books of January 2018,' Bitch Magazine's 'Bitch Reads: 13 Books Feminists Should Read in January,' ELLE's '19 of the Best Books to Read This Winter.'

'Strikingly beautiful.. Patrisse Cullors' story is a moral example to the nation.'--Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

'This book is a must-read for all of us.'--Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow

'This is a story of perseverance from a woman who found her voice in a world that often tried to shut her out. When They Call You a Terrorist is more than just a reflection on the American criminal justice system. It's a call to action for readers to change a culture that allows for violence against people of color.' - TIME Magazine, named one of the Best Memoirs of 2018 So Far

'Impassioned, direct, inspiring and unsparing.' - Entertainment Weekly

Angela Davis Young

'This powerful book by Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors reminds us American racism is pervasive..the mission of Khan-Cullors and her fellow activists has never been more important - or more urgent.' The Guardian

'[A] fierce, intimate memoir.' - O Magazine

'A thoroughly modern, fre-quently poetic take on the black-freedom-struggle narrative.'- Ms. Mag

'With great candor about her complex personal life, Khan-Cullors has created a memoir as compelling as a page-turning novel.' - Booklist Starred Review

'This searing, timely look into a contemporary movement from one of its crucial leading voices belongs in all collections.' - Library Journal Starred Review

An eye-opening and eloquent coming-of-age story from one of the leaders in the new generation of social activists.' --PublishersWeekly, starred review

'An important account of coming of age within today's explosive racial dynamic.' - Kirkus Reviews

'When They Call You a Terrorist deals with the incarceration and disenfranchisement of black men like her father, but it also explores facets of Cullors' personal identity -- black womanhood and sexuality,
as well as spirituality.'--TIME

'One of 2018's most important nonfiction books.' - The Root

'[A] meditative, meaningful work .. Cullors beautifully expresses empathy, honesty and hope' --Shelf Awareness

'Responsible, awakening and powerful.'- Nick Cannon

'It was when I read your book, 'When They Call You A Terrorist'--when Trump was elected--that I realized that white supremacy is closer to the surface than I had ever realized, and I thought, 'Man, I better understand this more.' - Jane Fonda

'Patrisse Khan-Cullors is a leading visionary and activist, feminist, and civil rights leader who has literally changed the trajectory of politics and resistance in America.' --Eve Ensler, bestselling author

What Did Angela Davis Achieve

'This book tells why we all share the responsibility to move those three words from an aspiration into a new reality.' - American Book Award Winner Jeff Chang

'With grace and vulnerability, she recounts in When They Call You a Terrorist an upbringing plagued by interlocking oppressions and generational trauma, and illustrates the gut-wrenching power of her movement's message: Black lives must be recognized as worthy in this world.' - Teaching Tolerance Magazine

In 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin, a black teenager. This was the spark that lit the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). Three self-described “radical black organizers” responded: Alicia Garza coined the phrase in a “love letter” to black people, Patrisse Cullors turned the phrase into a hashtag, and Opal Tometi started organizing followers online and building BlackLivesMatter.com.
Drivers yulong audio.

Tometi, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, was raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She attended the University of Arizona, where she earned her bachelor’s in history and her master’s in communication and advocacy. Before BLM, she served for eight years as executive director at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Angela Davis Autobiography Book

According to her BlackLivesMatter.com biography, Tometi “is a student of liberation theology and her practice is in the tradition of Ella Baker, informed by Stuart Hall, bell hooks and Black Feminist thinkers.” Furthermore, as a “transnational feminist,” Tometi “supports and helps shape the strategic work of Pan African Network in Defense of Migrant Rights, and the Black Immigration Network.”

Patrisse Cullors is now the executive director of the Black Lives Movement Global Network Foundation. This foundation's financial support initially flowed through a nonprofit co-chaired by Susan Rosenberg, a co-founder of the May 19th Communist Organization, a domestic terrorist group active in the 1980s. In a 2011 memoir, An American Radical, Rosenberg stated: “I pursued a path that seemed to me a logical step beyond legal protest: the use of political violence. Did that make me a terrorist? In my mind, then and now, the answer is no.”

Cullors wrote a 2017 memoir that expresses similar sentiments. She titled it When They Call You a Terrorist. For its epigraph she chose lines penned by Assata Shakur, another domestic terrorist, that echo Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. / It is our duty to win. / We must love each other and support each other. / We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

According to When They Call You a Terrorist, Cullors was born in Van Nuys, California, and raised in the San Fernando Valley in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood. Her mother became pregnant at 15 and was thrown out of the house by her family, who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Later, she had several more children, including Patrisse. The father, who worked at a GM plant, was able to support them until the plant closed. When Cullors was six, he ceased to live with the family, though he didn’t “disappear entirely from our lives.” At age 12, Cullors discovered an upsetting truth: “Alton is not your father, [mother] says. He’s Paul’s and Monte’s and Jasmine’s. But in between Monte and Jasmine, we broke up and I fell in love with Gabriel and we had you.”

In high school, Cullors entered a magnet program with a humanities curriculum “rooted in social justice.” In this program, the students studied “apartheid and communism in China. We study Emma Goldman and read bell hooks, Audre Lorde. . . . We are encouraged to challenge racism, sexism, classism and heteronormativity.” She began to question “the Jehovah’s Witnesses world I had come up in.”

“I always knew I wasn’t heterosexual,” she writes, and describes how she came out in high school. By senior year, she and a friend were “completely on our own, couch surfing” or sleeping in cars. After graduation, an art teacher let the girls live with her. This experience inspired her ideas about “intentional families,” she says, as opposed to biological ones.

She earned her bachelor’s in religion and philosophy from UCLA and an MFA from USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. She and a boyfriend read together: “bell hooks continues to be a North Star but Cornel West’s work, as well, takes center stage.” They also loved the feminist anarchist Emma Goldman. Cullors especially admired how the Russian émigré was the first American to defend homosexuality publicly, and quotes Goldman’s disdain for monogamy.In her memoir, written with Asha Bandele, the acknowledgments praise others on the left:

We do this work today because on another day work was done by Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Miss Major, the Black Panther Party, the members of the Black Arts Movement, SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], the RNA [Republic of New Afrika, a violent black separatist group with ties to Rosenberg’s May 19th Communist Organization], Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, and so many others.

Cullors asked Angela Davis to write the memoir’s foreword, in which Davis scoffs at the fact that “Assata Shakur was designated by the FBI one of the world’s ten most dangerous terrorists.” Davis applauds the way Black Lives Matter “has encouraged us to question the capacity of logic—Western logic—to undo the forces of history, especially the history of colonialism and slavery.” Davis twice ran for vice president on the Communist Party USA ticket during the days when it was controlled by the Soviet Union. Her short book Are Prisons Obsolete?, which predates BLM’s founding by over a decade, is praised in Cullors’s memoir.

In an article for the Harvard Law Review, Cullors also praises Franz Fanon, the pan-Africanist who famously advocated violence against colonial rule. Few non-lawyers ever receive space in such elite pages. Her memoir similarly reveals her elite status: It was published because a book editor heard her speak at a panel on Martha’s Vineyard with Hollywood stars Danny Glover and Issa Rae. Cullors has also received numerous honors, including a Fulbright Scholarship and an honorary doctorate from Clarkson University. She has been Glamour’s Woman of the Year and was selected as one of the World’s Greatest Leaders by Fortune.

There is one more major influence on Cullors worth noting, which began at the “social justice camp” she attended after high school. There, an activist group, Strategy Center, recruited her for a year’s training where “I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx and Lenin to my knowledge of hooks, Lorde and [Alice] Walker.” The Center’s founder, Eric Mann, “takes me under his wing.”

You may have heard his name. In the 1960s Mann joined the Weather Underground, whose members included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Arrested for several violent offenses, though often released by authorities, Mann did spend 18 months in prison. His punishment stemmed from a 1969 shooting at a police building, for which he was charged on four counts, including conspiracy to commit murder and assault with intent to commit murder.

Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation reports that Mann remains a radical who calls America “the most dictatorial country in the world” and describes his work as training “young people who want to be revolutionaries.” The sort of revolutionaries he means is clear when he praises the university as “the place where Mao Zedong was radicalized, where Lenin and Fidel were radicalized, where Che was radicalized.”

Alicia Garza may be the most radical of the BLM founders. When Verso Books decided to publish a third edition of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, they asked Garza to write the foreword. She read the book “as a young organizer,” she admitted, but couldn’t properly grasp it: “I hadn’t yet studied much of the origins of the Marxist-Leninist tradition that I was loosely trained in.”

SFWeeklyreports Garza grew up in San Rafael, California. Her parents later moved the family to “Tiburon, a tiny and tony Marin County town” whose median household income was more than double the state’s average—“one of the whitest places in the Bay Area.” Activism began in middle school, when she protested abstinence-only sex education. According to the Weekly, her parents are “solid liberals” who aren’t especially political, yet her mother inspired this first activist venture.

Like Cullors, Garza identifies as queer and found her way into a “training program for social justice organizers,” entitled SOUL (School of Unity and Liberation). There she went well beyond the academic Marxism of today’s typical undergraduate leftist into authentic Marxism-Leninism. “When I trained in sociology, we would read Marx, and we would read de Tocqueville, and we would read all these economic theorists, but in a void,” she says. “It never got mentioned in those classes that social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people.”

Her summer with SOUL in Oakland taught her community organizing and encouraged “analysis around capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity.” She held organizing jobs at such places as the UC Student Association and POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), and in 2014 joined the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a union front group underwritten by the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and the Ford, MacArthur, and Open Society foundations. The Alliance sent her to Ferguson after the Michael Brown shooting, which led BLM to “the next step in its transformation from a hashtag to an organization by mobilizing 600 black activists from around the country to embark on ‘freedom rides’ to Ferguson for a weekend of protests,” according to the profile in SFWeekly.

She says she wants to ensure that “Black Lives Matter doesn’t get co-opted by the Democratic Party or by black activists who want to reform policing but balk at more radical action.” BLM activists disrupted Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail in 2016 because, Garza explains, he is a “social democrat” who offers “not socialism” but only “democratic capitalism.” In other words, he’s too conventional. She wants “more voices saying, ‘This is not actually socialism, and socialism is actually possible in our lifetime.’”

This is the formation of the BLM founders. They envision change far more radical than what their many liberal supporters mean by “racial justice.” Having more African Americans in the professional ranks doesn’t satisfy them, nor does sensitivity training for police officers. They want a transformation of society, including liberal institutions. The stakes are clear for Garza, who has tattooed on her chest six lines from June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights”:

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life

Scott Walter is president of the Capital Research Center.

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click hereto subscribe to First Things.