Angela Davis: An Autobiography

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (2021)

At the time I wrote this book, I could not really imagine myself as an author, especially of an autobiography. Almost a half century later, I have retained my suspicion of the underlying individualism that defines the genre. Today, as we witness the perilous repercussions of neoliberal individualism, I am more convinced than ever that we need to engage in relentless critique of our centering of the individual. As was the case fifty years ago, I believe that if we fail to emphasize how our lives are precisely produced at the many junctions of the social and the individual, we fundamentally distort the ways we live and struggle in community with one another and with our nonhuman companions on this planet.

Revisiting this text almost fifty years after I wrote it, I might call it something like memoirs of a life dedicated to the quest for freedom, or I could emphasize the subtitle of the first paperback edition: With My Mind on Freedom. I was indeed hesitant to write an autobiography then, but today I can say unequivocally that I am very glad that I undertook the challenge to write a collective story that, in light of the passage of time, may be more important than I then suspected. The significance I now perceive resides precisely in the many flows and ruptures of left anti-racist movements over the last decades. In this sense, I am eternally grateful to Toni Morrison, my editor at the time, who insisted on the importance of a political autobiography, and without whose assistance and persistence this book would not exist. As I dwell in the memories of this political past, I am reminded of how much I owe Toni, not only for this work and others she edited and wrote, but for her decades-long friendship and the many ways she transformed our planetary consciousness.

As I write this preface, many narratives are emerging that center the uprisings and organizing efforts related to the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, which helped to define a period that will be remembered for the collective awareness of structural racism that crystallized during the Covid-19 pandemic. My contribution, like the work of others who have attempted to narrate aspects of the anti-racist struggles of the late twentieth century, will hopefully help us better understand where we are today. In apprehending the ways in which the practices of the history I wrote about and the theoretical insights embedded in them are situated on a continuum of courageous struggles against racist police violence, against the deeply embedded racism of the carceral system, and against racial capitalism more broadly, we can begin to recognize the long-term outcomes of struggles that are sustained over generations. Even if these movements have not produced the structural transformations we know we need in order for the masses of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Middle Eastern, Asian, and working-class white people to begin to enjoy the material and intellectual benefits of life in an advanced industrial society—or even life on this planet, regardless of the level of development in a particular region—they help us to envisage concrete possibilities of such revolutionary changes in the future.

This account of radical movements—as well as others of the last decades of the twentieth century—pivots around state violence: the violence of the police, the violence of jails and prisons, and the complicated ways these forms of violence infuse the communities they target, sometimes also further enacted by the very individuals who are its victims. Just as the names of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor will always be etched into the memories of politically conscious contemporaries today, my Southern California comrades of the late 1960s will never forget the names of Leonard Deadwyler, Gregory Clark, and, of course, Jonathan and George Jackson. Of course, the name of Emmett Till still looms large. During the period covered by my autobiography, we were fully aware that we could not treat these cases as isolated instances of racist state violence, and each time we took up a particular case, we were cognizant of the need to understand it as an example of the structural racism that defined the very nature of policing and the racist vigilantism it generated. While we did call for the prosecution of the specific perpetrators—for example, we demanded that Warren B. Carlson be compelled to answer for the murder of Gregory Clark before the existing judicial system—we did not believe that we could root out the deep problems of the racist police and prison system simply by using the existing judicial and penal systems to address issues inherent in their own structures. We nonetheless relied on those systems, so it is true that our strategies had conspicuous contradictions. But because we were also convinced that our work was linked to global efforts to overturn capitalism, we were not especially concerned about these inconsistencies. In fact, we were absolutely convinced that in our own lifetimes we would experience the end of capitalism and witness the inauguration of new modes of creating security in our communities.

Now, from the vantage point of the present, our political naïveté seems obvious. But then, our collective aspirations were emboldened by revolutionary struggle all over the world—from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the Mozambique Liberation Front, and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde in Guinea-Bissau to the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and the successful revolutionary overthrow of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. And not only was there the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, along with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, but also China, the most populous country in the world. Despite the internecine conflict within the socialist camp, the Second World—and the difficulties within what were then known as the non-aligned countries, or the Third World—no one could have convinced us that the immediate future of the globe resided outside existing possibilities of socialism. This was, I believe, the larger context of our failure to attend to the contradictions in our assumption that we could call on the existing judicial system to prosecute official agents of the state for committing acts that were actually extensions of the logic of the systems they represented. But this sense of connectedness to larger revolutionary struggles also generated the kind of collective passion that could only thrive in such a context. Moreover, the relative political maturity and abolitionism of early twenty-first-century struggles against racist police violence and against what we later came to call the prison industrial complex was clearly erected on the defeats and victories of those late twentieth-century efforts.

In 1988, when the second edition of this autobiography was published, I was still a member of the Communist Party. Along with my sister, Fania, friends and comrades Kendra Alexander and Franklin Alexander, and others who had been active in the campaign for my freedom in the early 1970s, I had decided to remain in the San Francisco Bay Area after the conclusion of my trial in 1972. Those of us who already were members of the Party, and some who had recently joined in conjunction with their efforts on the campaign, worked with various clubs affiliated with the Party. Because of my philosophical and activist interests in the ways music and other art forms help to shape social consciousness, I joined the Billie Holiday Club, whose members were musicians, artists, and people with interests in aesthetics more broadly. By that time Kendra, a major figure in this story, was in the leadership of the Northern California district of the Party, and her husband, Franklin, continued to be involved locally in union struggles, as well as in the leadership of the National Anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity with African Liberation. Most of us left the Communist Party in 1991, after failed attempts to develop strategies of internal democratization. A number of us who had joined a collective effort to render the internal structure more amenable to egalitarian decision-making were barred from running for leadership positions. Our coordinated response was to leave as a group and to establish another organization, Committees of Correspondence, which eventually became the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. In recent years, though, I have participated in events organized by the Communist Party and remain on good terms with a number of people who retained their membership, despite its dwindling influence as an organization.

My autobiography provides an account of a number of activist organizations with which I was affiliated after my return from studying in Europe in the late 1960s and before my incarceration. Over the years—both before and after I left the Communist Party—I have continued to join various organized efforts to challenge racism and state violence, as well as feminist organizations that have also been anti-racist (and, at least aspirationally, anti-capitalist). For example, after the 1985 United Nations conference on women in Nairobi, Kenya, where I became acquainted with the work of the National Black Women’s Health Project (now the Black Women’s Health Imperative), founded by Byllye Avery, I was invited to join the organization’s executive board. My time with the project was extremely fruitful. I appreciated the fact that it was headquartered in Atlanta, where I could reconnect with my own Southern roots. Aside from having the opportunity to directly engage in campaigns around reproductive justice, as well as physical and sexual abuse, I also learned how new vocabularies, especially in connection with the interrelationalities of physical, mental, and spiritual health, could further our larger struggles for equality and justice. Even after my term on the board ended, I continued to draw on the knowledge I acquired during that crucial experience.

Some years later my partner, Gina Dent, and I joined the international advisory board of Sisters Inside, an abolitionist and service-based organization focusing on the needs of women in prison, founded by Debbie Kilroy, who became the first formerly incarcerated person to be admitted to practice law in Australia after successfully mounting a legal challenge. Gina has brought her expertise on visual culture to many academic and activist abolitionist efforts, from Critical Resistance and the University of California Humanities Research Institute to her current project Visualizing Abolition. Our involvement in Sisters Inside, alongside other U.S. abolitionists, has yielded many crucial insights drawn from ongoing struggles against racism and patriarchy led by aboriginal women and their allies.

At the end of the first edition of this autobiography, I described the preparatory work for the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which began in the days following the conclusion of my trial. The Alliance was created to extend the broad national and international support that forged the political environment that enabled my own legal victory into other campaigns. In the 1980s, the Alliance was still a robust organization, with supporters in many countries throughout the world, and it continues to be a force for change in such cities as Chicago and Louisville. We were actively focusing on such cases as Leonard Peltier, who, sadly, is still in federal prison, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, who also remains behind bars, although, thanks to global movements, no longer on death row. In 2003, Mumia was named an honorary citizen of Paris by then Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, becoming at that time the only person other than Pablo Picasso to be distinguished in this way. It was a major honor to have been asked to accept this award on Mumia’s behalf. A few years later, the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis dedicated a street in his name: Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal. Today, we are reenergized by the fact that ideological citadels ensuring that the credibility of the police always remains intact and unquestioned are beginning to crack, and that the possibilities of freeing Leonard and Mumia are greater now than ever.

My autobiography traces a trajectory from an era characterized by an abundance of campaigns to free political prisoners—from the Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón to the South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela—toward a more fundamental contestation of the carceral state. In the United States, numerous members of organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground were incarcerated during the 1960s and 1970s, and a sizeable number of them remain incarcerated. Many of them helped us to theorize the practice of what is now referred to as mass incarceration and to conceptualize the prison industrial complex. These efforts undertaken by prison intellectuals such as George Jackson, and former prisoners such as Linda Evans, greatly assisted those of us residing in the so-called free world who wanted to amplify the call for prison abolition that echoed from the ranks of the 1971 Attica rebels.

Many people have asked me over the years how I managed to combine a vocation of radical activism with a career of university teaching. This is a question that is not frequently posed today, as the university itself has once again emerged as an important arena of struggle. After my trial ended, I initially decided that I did not want to engage in full-time teaching. But I knew it would be important for me to continue learning in a way that required me to maintain ties to academic institutions, so I investigated teaching possibilities at various schools. Following my release, my former colleagues in the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, issued a unanimous invitation to me to rejoin the department. But I was not prepared to take on an academic position that would severely curtail my work with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. And so, despite my gratitude, I declined their invitation, which—if memory serves—was a response to then Governor Ronald Reagan’s announcement that I would never again teach in the University of California system. I did teach for short periods of time at the Claremont Colleges and Stanford University and for longer periods at the San Francisco Art Institute and at San Francisco State University. In 1991, I was invited to apply for a position in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and ended up teaching there for almost twenty years. Working primarily with graduate students, my seminars examined evolving feminist theories and methodologies that attended to class, race, sexuality, and nation. Early on, I also taught seminars on theories of prison abolition and welcomed students whose doctoral work addressed related topics.

I have maintained my affiliation with History of Consciousness as an emerita professor, and it bears mentioning that this period of my teaching was also characterized by official attacks on my politics and my activism. In 1994, when I was awarded a University of California Presidential Chair, I was once again the target of conservative members of the Board of Regents and the State Legislature. Many of my graduate students spoke out on my behalf, and as an indication that things had actually changed, the university did not capitulate to what appeared to be potentially a replay of the events of 1969 at UCLA. In fact, when I had the opportunity to speak with the president of the University of California during an unrelated event at UC Santa Cruz, he joked that when his office had received a telephone call from a woman protesting the fact that I had been appointed to the presidency of the university, he responded, While Angela Davis has not been designated president, there is indeed a campus named after her—UC Davis. Not only was this an occasion for hearty laughter, it revealed we were not exactly in the same place as we were in 1969.

In 1996, I was teaching a graduate seminar on prison abolition. One day I was talking to Cassandra Shaylor, one of the students, who was also an attorney working with a Bay Area organization focusing on legal services for incarcerated parents. We were lamenting the fact that there had been no national gathering bringing together individuals and organizations interested in radical approaches to the increasingly expanding imprisoned population. We began to explore the possibility of organizing such a meeting, and eventually created a diverse organizing committee of academics, activists, former prisoners, artists, and attorneys that met regularly at my house in Oakland over the following two years. Interestingly, this committee consisted of twenty-three women and nonbinary people and only five men. Everyone agreed that our approach should incorporate feminist insights and methodologies, regardless of the gender identities of the people behind bars we were concerned about. Early on, we arrived at a title for the conference: Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex. In deciding that the conference would take place under the rubric of Critical Resistance, we meant to convey not only that resistance was critical—that is, crucial and important—but also that the forms of resistance we called for would encourage critical thinking, analyses, and engagements. We centered Mike Davis’ newly coined term prison industrial complex, expanding his reference to the California prison boom to cover prison expansion within and beyond the United States in the era of global capitalism, to inspire others to recognize incarceration as a form of racist and capitalist state violence. From the outset, we planned an abolitionist conference, but recognizing that many people might balk at the idea that imprisonment should be relegated to the past, we decided that we needed first to create new contexts and to propose new vocabularies that would encourage broader numbers of people to be more receptive to abolitionist ideas.

In May 2020, when the massive demonstrations took place across the country and throughout the world in the immediate aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, many assumed that these were spontaneous responses to the viral video recorded by Darnella Frazier. As shocking as it may have been to watch Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, and as much as this mediated participation in a modern-day lynching may have pricked the collective conscience of people globally, the spur to action should not simply be understood as a spontaneous response. The police lynching of George Floyd was not so much the cause of the enormous surge of marches, rallies, and demonstrations that gathered steam as they moved around the world as the catalyst for these mass actions. In order to provide a conscientious assessment of the reasons so many people felt compelled to collectively protest that act of blatant and violent racism, a much longer view of history is required. The movements of the late 1960s and the early 1970s did not simply fall away after they ceased to command the attention of the mass media. Not even those of us who continued to work through that era—people, like myself, who were then in their thirties and forties, but also younger activists who joined us—were necessarily aware of all the grassroots work that continued to unfold throughout the country. But I know that I was far from alone in continuing to work in one capacity or another in campaigns to free political prisoners in the United States and abroad, movements to abolish the death penalty, and eventually abolitionist movements that insisted on linking struggles against racist prison repression to feminist and anti-capitalist agendas. The anti-capitalist dimension had been there all along, but radical feminist formations that were opposed to racism, homophobia, capitalism, and other modes of oppression helped to revolutionize abolitionist movements in crucial ways that would eventually become evident in the Black Lives Matter movement in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

While I do want to evoke some of the organizations of that era that helped to propel these movements forward, especially because there are clear lines of connection between them and the organizations I discuss, I feel compelled to pause here to point to a cluster of as yet unacknowledged issues that permeated the arenas of struggle in which I was involved both fifty years ago and in these current times, issues we would designate today as feminist concerns. Over the years, I have been repeatedly asked whether there is anything I would change if I were endowed with the miraculous power to rewrite my own history. I inevitably respond that there is nothing I would want to change, because I learned as much—or more—from the mistakes we made as I learned from the steps we took where the outcome seemed to confirm the correctness of our analysis. But as I reread this book, there were myriad moments when I wished I could have shaken some sense into my younger self. Why did I fail to perceive the glaring evidence of the way we were influenced by patriarchal and misogynist ideas? If I could so clearly recognize the imprint of capitalist ideology, why was I so undiscerning when it came to sexism and homophobia? And why was it that I found ableist metaphors so readily available? Reflecting back now, I think of the pervasiveness of ideology, which inevitably escapes all efforts we make to avoid it. Fifty years from now, if I were able to sustain the same level of critical engagement over the passing time, I am certain I would have the same reaction to my ideas from today.

At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, within and beyond activist and scholarly circles, we repeatedly and conveniently summon an almost self-evident notion of intersectionality that is supposed to reveal our capacity to think in complex ways about the continuous and reciprocal interactions that create the fields on which race, class, gender, sexuality, and other axes of oppression play out. During the period I write about here, not only did we lack access to such vocabularies and such ways of thinking, we often attempted to express what would eventually turn out to be entirely new forms of understanding within the framework of old paradigms, using vocabularies that would in fact militate against what we were attempting to express. I am only too aware of the ways in which masculinist assumptions prevented me from understanding the impact of prison regimes on women. And worse, even as I attempted to apprehend modes of resistance within the women’s jails where I spent time, I uncritically embraced homophobic premises that impeded the insight that would have allowed me to more profoundly grasp the nature of resistance.

In revisiting the era described in my autobiography as a person with the good fortune to survive and to continue my activist and scholarly work well into the twenty-first century, I am profoundly aware of the vastly different discursive frameworks that enable understandings that would have been far beyond our capacity at that time. While I have expressed chagrin at recognizing how intellectually and politically immature I was, I realize that this was, in many ways, an unavoidable historical immaturity characteristic of our engagements with the world we wanted to transform. At the same time, I also realize how happy I am that many of us continued to press forward, which required an acknowledgement of our past capitulations to prevailing misogynist, ableist, and homophobic and transphobic ideas and vocabularies. Even as I fantasize about the work we might have accomplished if only we had understood, for example, the extent to which focusing on issues of gender might have opened the doors to a far more interesting and far more productive consciousness of structural racism, I also recognize that history cannot be ignored. Only by taking history seriously could these immensely important insights have eventually become accessible to us. This recognition also means that our work to imagine possible futures will give rise to new insights that will render some of our current ideas and vocabularies obsolete.

My own story as a target of repression—first within the university, then for my community activism—coincided with the early development of what we then called the women’s liberation movement. Like other individuals and collectives of that era, I was exceedingly suspicious of the employment of the universal category women without any qualifier. Strangely enough, its very abstractness was the most concrete conveyance of whiteness. I did not know then what I know now—that very serious groups of women of color were thinking and acting in ways that were subverting the equation of woman and whiteness. Unfortunately, even though I was an especially active member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Los Angeles in 1968, I did not know that Fran Beal and others had created the Black Women’s Liberation Committee until 1970, when I had already been arrested and members of its successor organization, the Third World Women’s Alliance, were photographed with banners calling for my freedom.

On August 26, 1970, I was underground with my friend David Poindexter, who had agreed to help me evade the FBI and the police. During my trial, we referred to this underground period as my making myself unavailable to the FBI. Because I was out of touch with everyone, except through an occasional secure phone call (telephone booth to telephone booth) to my friend and comrade Charlene Mitchell, I was entirely unaware of movement happenings. Therefore, I did not know that a major march was taking place in New York on that date, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting (white) women the right to vote. The National Organization for Women, whose president at that time was Betty Friedan, had called for the march. Tens of thousands of women were in the streets that day. According to the New York Times,

Every kind of woman you ever see in New York was there: limping octogenarians, braless teenagers, Black Panther women, telephone operators, waitresses, Westchester matrons, fashion models, Puerto Rican factory workers, nurses in uniform, young mothers carrying babies on their backs. (New York Times, August 30, 1970)

Fran Beal and a substantial delegation from the Third World Women’s Alliance were planning to march under a large banner bearing the slogan Hands Off Angela Davis and the Alliance’s logo—the biological glyph for female with an added clenched fist bearing a rifle. As the Alliance was checking in with the organizers of the march, Lucy Komisar, the coordinator of the demonstration and the vice president of NOW, told them that my case had nothing to do with women’s liberation and that they would not be able to join. But these words did not deter Fran and her sister comrades. They proudly hoisted the banner and joined the march toward Bryant Park, proclaiming with their presence and their banner that women’s liberation was not a narrow and exclusive concern about gender but centrally involved race, class, and imperialism.

At the time I was arrested, I was not yet aware of the need to identify with and engage critically with the emergent women’s movement. Although my sister comrades and I were constantly forced to defend our rights as women to participate on a basis of equality in movements against racist and political repression, we did not, unfortunately, link our own gender struggles with the women’s liberation movement, which we generally dismissed as having nothing to do with our concerns. While I was in jail, I began to realize that there was an immense void in my own political consciousness. Even though I was quite proficient at recounting the content of Frederick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and other Marxist texts addressing the woman question, I had a great deal to learn from the Third World Women’s Alliance and similar organizations. Serendipitously, Linda Burnham—the sister of my childhood friend and lawyer Margaret Burnham, who appears in these pages—was one of the key figures in the Third World Women’s Alliance, along with Fran Beal. Linda worked in the Bay Area chapter and was one of the major leaders of the effort to free me. The women involved in the Bay Area chapter of the Alliance kept alive the legacy of this movement by creating two successor organizations, the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression and the Women of Color Resource Center, which Linda led. Years later, when I was teaching at Santa Cruz and involved in the Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict, I joined the Resource Center’s board.

The Third World Women’s Alliance helped to expose how sterilization abuse targeted women in Puerto Rico as well as Black women in the South. Fran Beal’s well-known article Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female (first published in connection with the Black Women’s Alliance, then later in two widely circulated anthologies, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman and Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful) had insisted on incorporating a broad formulation of women’s reproductive rights, including not only birth control and abortion rights but, using this same rights framework, the right to be free of sterilization abuse. This approach to reproductive rights was one the most salient examples of the many ways radical Black women and women of color distinguished their analysis of women’s oppression from that of the mainstream women’s liberation movement. The developing abortion rights movement tended to present its analysis and demands within a single-issue framework. But, prefiguring the contemporary insistence on intersectionality, the Alliance and other radical groups insisted that the right to be free of forcible sterilization was constitutively tied to the right to have access to birth control and abortion. Forthrightly denouncing the forcible sterilization of women in India and Puerto Rico, as well as Black women in the Southern United States, Fran simultaneously argued that women should absolutely be accorded the right to make their own decisions regarding whether and/or when to have children.

I have devoted so much space to the discussion of the issue of reproductive rights because, during the time I was in jail, this is what persuaded me that I could not continue to ignore gender issues. This turn toward gender on my part, this attempt to apprehend how gender also shaped the conditions we wanted to subject to revolutionary change, was reinforced by the fact that the legal case against me centered my own female status. The prosecution’s argument rested firmly on some of the most widely held ideological assumptions about women’s constitution: despite the fact that I was an educated person and, having studied philosophy, relatively proficient in the use of logic, I was also a woman, they argued, and therefore so enthralled by my love of a man, George Jackson, that I was incapable of rational judgment. Thus, even as I was in the process of revising my ideas, in order to give gender deserved attention, I—along with my attorneys—had to counter the prosecution’s exploitative invocation of heteropatriarchal stereotypes.

As I think back to that period, I realize now just how much issues of gender were thoroughly consuming my attention. While in jail, I followed the pioneering work of Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías, who founded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse. As a direct result of her work, I learned not only about the use of Puerto Rican women as subjects in experimentation by pharmaceutical companies that led to the development of and widespread use of oral contraceptives, but also about the governmental imposition of sterilization surgery. In later researching this issue, I discovered that the effort to persuade Puerto Rican women that sterilization was the most effective form of birth control was associated with a larger imperialist plan to industrialize the island, creating the most suitable conditions for the pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and other industries that were seeking to develop businesses there. This meant targeting what they considered the overpopulation of the island through a two-pronged policy that encouraged Puerto Ricans to immigrate to New York and other cities on the mainland and to reduce the number of childbirths on the island. By the 1970s, approximately one-third of the women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized, many of them against their will and without their knowledgeable consent. The sterilization procedure became so commonplace that it was simply known as la operación. After becoming aware of these issues, while I was still in jail, I was asked to write a statement to be read at a major reproductive rights rally in San Francisco. Organizers refused to read my statement, however, arguing that it reached beyond the central issue of abortion rights.

During the time I was in jail, I wrote two long articles that recorded my efforts to think through questions of gender: Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves, which appeared in the Black Scholar in December 1971 and Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation, which was presented by my friend and comrade Bettina Aptheker at a symposium (also in December 1971) in New York on Marxism and Women’s Liberation, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism. The first article was an attempt to consider the various ways in which Black women’s histories had been ideologically misconstrued to validate the widespread efforts to relegate Black women to the background of the liberation movement—under the pretext that we were historically guilty of undermining Black men’s natural leadership role within the family, the community, and the movement for liberation. It was, in part, an attempt to blunt the influence within movement circles of the 1965 official report authored by Daniel P. Moynihan entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which argued that the historical circumstances of slavery had fostered conditions reversing what he considered to be the natural gender relations within the family and the community, leading to what he designated as a pathologically matriarchal structuring of the Negro family. I was finally beginning to understand the ideological roots of the pronounced efforts to institute male supremacy within what were supposed to be the liberatory ranks of our movement. I dedicated this first piece to George Jackson who, by the time I finished it, had met his demise at the hands of San Quentin guards, just a little more than a year after his younger brother, Jonathan, was killed by guards from the same institution. The second piece, a more academic paper, was inspired by my studies with Herbert Marcuse. He and his wife, Inge Marcuse, had visited me on a couple of occasions at the Marin County Jail, and I had become excited about using some of the theories and methods I had learned from him and his philosopher colleagues with whom I had studied in Frankfurt, Germany.

Now, as I reflect on the many ways in which that period behind bars shaped my later intellectual and activist trajectories, I must confess that I do not really know whether my interests in the intersection of race and feminism would have developed in the way they did if I had not been incarcerated at that crucial period. In this sense, my time behind bars was immensely fruitful, as has been the case for other prison intellectuals. It was not only critical in shaping my political journey; it helped me to discover my intellectual vocation as well. I certainly do not think that I would have done the research that led to Women, Race, and Class (published in 1981, continuing the work of the Black Scholar piece), and many of the books and articles I wrote later on, without the influences I experienced in my jail cell.

Over the years, many people have thanked me for my sacrifices, for what I relinquished as an activist in revolutionary movements. I often respond by telling them that they should also ask me about the extraordinary experiences that I might never have had under other circumstances. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to hear Ericka Huggins—our friendship has now surpassed the half-century mark—speak at a conference on restorative justice in Toledo, Ohio, organized in part by my sister, Fania, who has worked as a practitioner of restorative justice for many years. When Ericka spoke of her own incarceration as a gift rather than an injury or deprivation, I thought to myself, Yes, precisely. This is what I have been trying to say all along. At the same time, I remain eternally grateful to everyone involved in the worldwide campaign that resulted in my freedom and which gave me the capacity to work toward the freedom of others.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1988)

This new edition of my autobiography appears nearly fifteen years after its first publication. I now appreciate the prodding of those who persuaded me to write about my experiences at what I thought was far too young an age to produce a comprehensive autobiographical work of significant value to its audience. Were I to contemplate today the preceding forty-four years of my life, the book I would write would be entirely different in both form and content. But I am glad that I wrote this book at age twenty-eight because it is, I think, an important piece of historical description and analysis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also my own personal history up to that time, comprehended and delineated from that particular vantage point.

During that period of my life when, like many others, every moment of the day was devoted to the quest for activist solutions to the immediate practical problems posed by the Black Liberation Movement and for appropriate responses to the repressions emanating from the adversarial forces in that drama, I did realize how important it was to preserve the history of those struggles for the benefit of our posterity. Nevertheless, for the participants in those movements, the frantic pace of events seemed to preclude the kind of contemplative attitude necessary to chronicle and interpret those struggles from the standpoint of history.

When I expressed my initial hesitancy to begin working on an autobiography, it was not because I did not wish to write about the events of that time and generally in my lifetime, but rather because I did not want to contribute to the already widespread tendency to personalize and individualize history. And to be perfectly candid, my own instinctive reserve made me feel rather embarrassed to be writing about myself. So I did not really write about myself. That is to say, I did not measure the events of my own life according to their possible personal importance. Rather I attempted to utilize the autobiographical genre to evaluate my life in accordance with what I considered to be the political significance of my experiences. The political manner of measurement emanated from my work as an activist in the Black Liberation Movement and as a member of the Communist Party.

When I was writing this book, I was vehemently opposed to the notion, developed within the young women’s liberation movement, which naïvely and uncritically equated things personal with things political. In my mind, this idea tended to render equivalent such vastly disparate phenomena as racist police murders of Black people and the sexist-inspired verbal abuse of white women by their husbands. Since I personally witnessed police violence on a number of occasions during that period, my negative response to the feminist slogan The personal is political was quite understandable. While I continue to disagree with all easy attempts to define these two dimensions as equivalent, I do understand that there is a sense in which all efforts to draw definitive lines of demarcation between the personal and political inevitably misconstrue social reality. For example, domestic violence is no less an expression of the prevailing politics of gender because it occurs within the private sphere of a personal relationship. I therefore express my regrets that I was not able to also apply a measuring stick that manifested a more complex understanding of the dialectics of the personal and the political.

The real strength of my approach at that time resides, I think, in its honest emphasis on grassroots contributions and achievements, so as to demystify the usual notion that history is the product of unique individuals possessing inherent qualities of greatness. Many people unfortunately assumed that because my name and my case were so extensively publicized, the contest that unfolded during my incarceration and trial from 1970 to 1972 was one in which a single Black woman successfully fended off the repressive might of the state. Those of us with a history of active struggle against political repression understood, of course, that while one of the protagonists in this battle was indeed the state, the other was not a single individual, but rather the collective power of the thousands and thousands of people opposed to racism and political repression. As a matter of fact, the underlying reasons for the extensive publicity accorded my trial had less to do with the sensationalist coverage of the prisoner uprising at the Marin County Courthouse than with the work of untold numbers of anonymous individuals who were moved to action, not so much by my particular predicament as by the cumulative work of the progressive movements of that period. Certainly the victory we won when I was acquitted of all charges can still be claimed today as a milestone in the work of grassroots movements.

The political threads in my life have remained essentially continuous since the early 1970s. In 1988, I remain a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party and I continue to work with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. I have also become an active member of the executive board of the National Black Women’s Health Project.

This is a time when increasing numbers of people find themselves attracted to progressive causes. During the past eight years of the Reagan administration, even as conservative forces in power have brought about the erosion of some of our previous victories, we have also witnessed a powerful surge of mass activism within the labor movement, on the campuses, and in the communities. Extensive and influential movements against apartheid in South Africa, against domestic racism, against intervention in Central America, and against plant closings at home have compelled the political establishment to seriously address these issues. As more labor activists and women of color have begun to give leadership to the women’s movement, the campaign for women’s equality has acquired a much-needed breadth and has accordingly matured. As a direct result of grassroots activism, there are more progressive Black elected officials than ever before. And even though he did not win the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Jesse Jackson conducted a truly triumphant campaign, one that confirmed and further nurtured progressive thought patterns among the people of our country.

As I write this introduction, I join many friends and comrades in mourning the untimely death of Aaron Boye. Aaron was the nephew of Charlene Mitchell, of Franklin and Kendra Alexander, and the cousin of Steven Mitchell—all of whom are frequently mentioned in the pages of this autobiography. When Aaron graduated from UCLA two years ago, he invited me to speak at the Black students’ graduation ceremonies. In my remarks, I urged the students to remain cognizant of the struggles that had carved out a place for them at that institution and to be willing, in turn, to add their own contributions to the ongoing quest for justice and equality. Surrounded in his childhood by relatives and friends who had dedicated their lives to these causes, Aaron was keenly aware that he had reaped the fruit of their contributions. And he had begun long ago to sow the seed for future struggles.

As this autobiography was originally dedicated to comrades who gave their lives during an earlier period, I add Aaron Boye’s name to the roster of those who, were they still among us, would