Author, academic and counterculture activist Angela Davis has been an outspoken advocate for the rights of the disenfranchised since the ’60s. Her 1974 autobiography traces a life of discrimination and imprisonment during America’s Black Power and McCarthyism movements, and paints a powerful portrait of one of the period’s most iconic revolutionary figures.
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
A tireless activist for civil rights, Davis’ primary research interests include feminism, African American studies, Marxism, social consciousness and America’s prison-industrial complex. Gathered from her writings and conversations by Revolutionary Science, read on for a list of books that influenced Davis. Complement with the reading lists of Malcolm X, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Gloria Steinem.
The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (also rec’d by Joan Didion)
What Is to Be Done, State and Revolution and Imperialism by Vladimir Lenin
The Nature of Fascism by Roger Griffin
The Academic Rebellion: A Marxist Critique by Bettina Aptheker
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
On the Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt by Claudia Jones
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Frederich Engels
Das Kapital by Karl Marx (also rec’d by Nick Cave)
American Negro Slave Revolts by Herbert Aptheker
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin
(via Revolutionary Science)
Books by Angela Davis
Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974)
Women, Race and Class (1981)
Women, Culture and Politics (1989)
Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)