Renowned civil rights and women’s rights leader Angela Davis will speak about women, privilege and prisons at Ebenezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta on Tuesday, March 24 at 7 p.m. for the keynote address of Emory University’s Women’s History Month. The free community event, presented by the Emory University Center for Women and Department of Women’s Studies, is the culmination of a landmark series developed by the newly formed Atlanta Consortium of Colleges and Universities (ACCU). The ACCU series, “Motherhood at the Intersection of Race and Class: Resilience in the Face of Adversity,” seeks to generate awareness, discussion and action surrounding the special challenges that less privileged mothers, families and incarcerated women face.
Davis’s long-standing commitment to prisoners rights dates to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment in 1970. On the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List,” Davis spent 18 months in jail before her acquittal in 1972. The event catapulted Davis to international fame and since that time, she has been one of America’s most well-known critics of what she refers to as the prison industrial complex.
Davis has conducted extensive research on issues related to race, gender and imprisonment and is Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the University of California chair in African American and feminist studies from 1994-1997. Davis also remains a community organizer through her work with the Women of Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes popular education of and about women who live in poverty, and Justice Now, which provides legal assistance to women in prison and advocates for the abolition of imprisonment.
Formed in 2008, the ACCU is comprised of faculty, staff and administrators from several Atlanta area institutions. Members are interested in providing ways for Atlanta colleges to engage in public scholarship – to bring scholarship into the city – and foster multi-school dialogue about important community issues.
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