Top 160 Angela Y. Davis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “If Black people had simply accepted a status of economic and political inferiority, the mob murders would probably have subsided. But because vast numbers of ex-slaves refused to discard their dreams of progress, more than ten thousand lynchings occurred during the three decades following the war.”

— Angela Y. Davis

102. “Whoever challenged the racial hierarchy was marked a potential victim of the mob. The endless roster of the dead came to include every sort of insurgent – from the owners of successful Black businesses and workers pressing for higher wages to those who refused to be called “boy” and the defiant women who resisted white men’s sexual abuses. Yet public opinion had been captured, and it was taken for granted that lynching was a just response to the barbarous sexual crimes against white womanhood.”

— Angela Y. Davis

103. “First of all, I didn’t suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.”

— Angela Y. Davis

104. “The lawbreaker is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair.”

— Angela Y. Davis

105. “Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that’s my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the country and other parts of the world.”

— Angela Y. Davis

106. “And I guess what I would say is that we can’t think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can’t necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.”

— Angela Y. Davis

107. “I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.”

— Angela Y. Davis

108. “Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was – 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within – internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.”

— Angela Y. Davis

109. “Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage.”

— Angela Y. Davis

110. “Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.”

— Angela Y. Davis

111. “Yes, I think it’s really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.”

— Angela Y. Davis

112. “Perhaps most important of all, and this is so central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as “normal.” Prisons are constituted as “normal.” It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars, and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.”

— Angela Y. Davis

113. “That’s true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.”

— Angela Y. Davis

114. “The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one’s contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.”

— Angela Y. Davis

115. “It’s true that it’s within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it’s not going to solve the problems.”

— Angela Y. Davis

116. “I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.”

— Angela Y. Davis

117. “The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs – it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

— Angela Y. Davis

118. “What I do want people to remember is the fact that the movement around the demand for my freedom was victorious. It was a victory against insurmountable odds, even though I was innocent; the assumption was that the power of those forces in the US was so strong that I would either end up in the gas chamber or that I would spend the rest of my life behind bars. Thanks to the movement, I am here with you today. My.”

— Angela Y. Davis

119. “In the case of the United States, Black and Native lives are systematically choked by an enduring white supremacy that thrives on oppression and settler colonialism, and is backed by drones, the dispossession of territory and identity to millions, mass incarceration, the un-peopleing of people, and resource grabs that deny that indigenous lives matter and that our planet matters.”

— Angela Y. Davis

120. “Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.”

— Angela Y. Davis

121. “I’m involved in the work around prison rights in general.”

— Angela Y. Davis

122. “In the final analysis, that state of abstraction turns out to be a very specific set of conditions: white middle-class women suffering and responding to the sexist attitudes and conduct of white middle-class men and calling for equality with those particular men. This approach leaves the existing socioeconomic system with its fundamental reliance on racism and class bias unchallenged. It.”

— Angela Y. Davis

123. “I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.”

— Angela Y. Davis

124. “Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators. But how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism?”

— Angela Y. Davis

125. “Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.”

— Angela Y. Davis

126. “We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn’t happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.”

— Angela Y. Davis

127. “Imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems – racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.”

— Angela Y. Davis

128. “I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.”

— Angela Y. Davis

129. “But at the same time you can’t...”

— Angela Y. Davis

130. “When Black women stand up – as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott – as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.”

— Angela Y. Davis

131. “Moving beyond merely responding to partner violence and sexual assault, this more expansive approach led to the inclusion of immigrant rights, Indigenous treaty rights, and reproductive justice, as well as the violence of incarceration and militarism.”

— Angela Y. Davis

132. “In Victoria, prison and police officers are vested with the power and responsibility to do acts which, if done outside of work hours, would be crimes of sexual assault.”

— Angela Y. Davis

133. “The more appropriate question was how to understand the intersections and interconnections between the two movements. We are still faced with the challenge of understanding the complex ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability are intertwined – but also how we move beyond these categories to understand the interrelationships of ideas and processes that seem to be separate and unrelated.”

— Angela Y. Davis

134. “Just as the struggle to end South African apartheid was embraced by people all over the world and was incorporated into many social justice agendas, solidarity with Palestine must likewise be taken up by organizations and movements involved in progressive causes all over the world.”

— Angela Y. Davis

135. “Yes, I am a Communist. And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.”

— Angela Y. Davis

136. “The majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them.”

— Angela Y. Davis

137. “The freedom movement was expansive. It was about transforming the entire country. It was not simply about acquiring civil rights within a framework that itself would not change.”

— Angela Y. Davis

138. “Black history is indeed American history, but it is also world history.”

— Angela Y. Davis

139. “Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.”

— Angela Y. Davis

140. “Because the Grimke sisters had such a profound consciousness of the inseparability of the fight for Black Liberation and the fight for Women’s Liberation, they were never caught in the ideological snare of insisting that one struggle was absolutely more important than the other. They recognized the dialectical character of the relationship between the two causes.”

— Angela Y. Davis

141. “The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.”

— Angela Y. Davis

142. “This is central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as “normal”.”

— Angela Y. Davis

143. “I’m part of a righteous people who anger slowly but rage undamned. We’ll gather at his door in such a number that the rumbling of our feet will make the earth tremble.”

— Angela Y. Davis

144. “The labor that slaves performed for their own sake and not for the aggrandizement of their masters was carried out on terms of equality. Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations.”

— Angela Y. Davis

145. “To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.”

— Angela Y. Davis

146. “Local issues have global ramifications.”

— Angela Y. Davis

147. “Deprivation of ancestry affects the present and the future.”

— Angela Y. Davis

148. “During the commentary on Ferguson, someone pointed out that the purpose of the police is supposed to be to protect and serve. At least, that’s their slogan. Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.”

— Angela Y. Davis

149. “What can we do? How can we do it? With whom? What tactics should be used? How should we define a strategy that is accessible to everyone, including a general public that has reached levels of depoliticization that can make atrocities seem acceptable? What is our vision? How can we make sure “we” are talking to “everyone”?”

— Angela Y. Davis

150. “As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.”

— Angela Y. Davis