Image: courtesy Cayuga County Convention and Visitor Bureau.
School is out for the summer, but Angela Davis is already thinking about the upcoming semester. The iconic activist, feminist and acclaimed author advocated for a radical transformation of America’s school system at an event funded, in part, by the NYS Equal Rights Heritage Center and the Historic and Cultural Sites Commission for the City of Auburn, New York.
“Education should be free, at every level. It should not be a commodity,” she shared with EBONY after speaking at “An Evening with Angela Davis”, held in the chosen hometown of abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
During her symposium, Davis explained how students of color often experience an educational structure that constantly depicts the epitome of humankind as a white, affluent cisgender male. “What if we decided to conceptualize that human as an indigenous person or a Black woman—those who have spent their entire lives struggling for freedom of democracy and equality,” she theorized.
Education should be designed for young people to see and understand the circumstances of their own lives, according to Davis, and to “assist them in combating the really dangerous ideologies that circulate those notions,” she declared.
Davis prefers an educational approach and methodology that favors independent and critical thinking. She credits EBONY for encouraging its readers to do just that over its seven-decade existence. The publication played a crucial part in presenting her 16-month jail sentence to the masses.
In 1970, Davis became the third woman ever placed on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list for her alleged involvement in the deadly armed seizure of a Marin County Courthouse in California.
“EBONY played a major role in getting the word out about my case and producing a kind of journalism that was designed to make people think more deeply and critically,” she shared. “So I always value this platform.”