“It often happens that men pull in a certain political, social, or familiar harness simply because they never have time to ask themselves whether the position they stand in and the work they accomplish are right; whether their occupations really suit their inner desires and capacities, and give them the satisfaction which everyone has the right to expect from his work.”
— Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (via philosophybits)
On this day, 26 January 1944, Angela Yvonne Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama. A communist, civil rights organiser and the third woman to feature on the FBI’s most wanted list, for a time Davis was also closely associated with the Black Panther Party.
Davis worked at University of California, Los Angeles until being fired for her political views on the orders of governor Ronald Reagan. Soon after, Davis was arrested following the Marin county courthouse incident on bogus charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy of which she was later all acquitted at trial.
Davis has also been a consistent advocate of feminism which takes into account factors like race, class, capitalism and transgender rights, and highlights the vital historical contributions of Black women: “When we speak of feminism in this country, there almost always is the tendency to assume that this is something that was created by white women… Women like Ida B. Wells, women like Mary Church Terrell, women like Anna Julia Cooper, are responsible for the feminist approach today that we generally call intersectionality… What I want to argue is for a feminist perspective that understands that we cannot simply reform institutions like prison and the police, because they are so embedded with racism and violence that, if we’re ever going to extricate ourselves from that, we have to abolish prisons”.
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The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon’s six-volume work is that the fall of the RomanEmpire was due to the rise of Christianity with its negative effects on the people and politics of Rome.
