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In Conversation: Angela Y. Davis

A Women's History Month Special Event

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library is excited to host renowned political activist, scholar, and author Angela Y. Davis for a dynamic conversation with Jenn White, Host of 1A on NPR.

Tickets for this event are currently sold out. This event will be streamed LIVE on DC Public Library's Youtube page. See the embedded video below for details. To get notified when this stream goes live subscribe to DC Public Library's Youtube page. 

For reasonable accommodations, please contact the Center for Accessibility at 202-727-2142 or DCPLaccess@dc.gov. For ASL or tactile interpretation, please allow at least seven (7) days notice.

About Angela Davis

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world.  Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.

Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley.  She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University.  Most recently she spent fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness – an interdisciplinary Ph.D program – and of Feminist Studies.

Angela Davis is the author of ten books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America.  In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.  She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.”  She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.  Her books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?, and two books of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom, and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her most recent books include a re-issue of Angela Davis: An Autobiography and Abolition. Feminism. Now., with co-authors Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie.

Angela Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex.  Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions.  Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

About Jenn White

A seasoned journalist and podcast host, she has worked in public radio since 1999. She joins us from Chicago’s WBEZ where she has held several on-air positions, as host of the station’s local two-hour midday show, Reset with Jenn White, and before that as host of The Morning Shift. 

She is also a familiar voice on several WBEZ podcasts, including Making Oprah, Making Obama and 16 Shots,which chronicled the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. Before WBEZ, White was the local host of All Things Considered at Michigan Radio.

Jenn is also skilled as a public speaker and has moderated numerous on-air gubernatorial and mayoral debates. A native of Detroit and graduate of the University of Michigan, she moved to Washington, D.C. with her husband and two dogs in 2020.

Women's History Month at DC Public Library

The DC Public Library is celebrating women's history month based on the theme "Celebrating the Women Who Tell Our Stories." This theme honors all women, trans women and femme individuals who have made it their life's work to capture our stories and reflect them back to us with their words, their art or their actions. Stories are one of our most important tools of resistance. Stories help us reflect on our past for a better understanding of our present. Stories shine a light on the changemakers and glass ceiling breakers. Stories inspire us to join hands in solidarity to pursue justice. There is infinite power in stories, in who gets to tell them, who they are told about and who gets to hear them.

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