Reasons I'm glad we brought Angela Davis to the College of Charleston

On Monday Angela Davis came to speak at the College of Charleston, invited here by the Women's and Gender Studies Program (truth be told, by me--I wrote her a letter last February telling her how much we need her voice in Charleston). She is a highly sought-after speaker, and we were lucky to get her. The reason she's so sought-after, of course, is because she's an incredibly important public figure--both as an activist and as a scholar.

I'm not going to detail her history here. You can read about it on the University of California Santa Cruz site, where she teaches in the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program and the Feminist Studies Program. What I will say is that she has achieved a kind of iconic status, but her significance is not defined by that iconography--the "Free Angela Davis" campaigns that arose while she was in prison and the Afro that's the ubiquitous visual image of her (just type "Angela Davis" into a Google image search and you'll see what I mean). She's an important historical figure because of her involvement in the Civil Rights movement and the feminist movement. In addition, she's an influential intellectual, having written eight books, including the widely-taught Women, Race, and Class. She's been one of the activist and scholarly voices arguing consistently for a feminist analysis that's intersectional (a term I've discussed here before). Her life's work speaks to the divisions that define Charleston: she addresses race, gender, sexual orientation, and class, and she thinks (and writes and speaks) in complex yet accessible ways about the multiple levels on which oppression operates.

I invited her to the College in part because I thought she would be a speaker who would appeal to a broad cross-section of the campus and community--and I was right about that. Hundreds (perhaps 500-600) of people came to her talk, and she noted from the stage that it was a truly diverse crowd--in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender as well as other categories. I know that many faculty members and students came to hear her speak, but you sort of expect that at a university talk. What doesn't always happen is that the staff came out in large numbers, which I was so happy to see. And loads of people from the community were there, too.

What I hoped for--and I wasn't disappointed--was that she'd say things that many people would agree with, but that she might also push at the borders of certain audience members' comfort zones. She started by talking about the history of the Civil Rights movement, but she made the point repeatedly that the history we don't hear is that of the women who did much of the grunt work of Civil Rights--women who were savvy enough that they knew they needed a male leader in order to be taken seriously. She certainly lauded MLK as a great figure, but she questioned his status as the singular symbol of Civil Rights, suggesting that we needed to look to the women. I think people were open to this, but it may not have been what they were expecting. When she spoke about the serious problems with the US prison system (the fact that we have both the highest number of people in prison and the highest percentage of our population in prison of any nation in the world), people nodded their heads in agreement. And then when she said that she wanted to talk in particular about the difficulties faced by transgender prisoners, some of the head nodding turned to squinty-eyed scrutiny.

It's the job of colleges and universities to bring in speakers who will push the envelope, who will be provocative and ask us to think about things we might not have explored before, who will introduce us to new ideas. Angela Davis did that. And she did it not just to the insular CofC community but to a sizeable group of Charlestonians.

One thing that struck me after her talk was the fact that so many people wanted to talk to her--to have her sign their books, yes, but more so just to make contact with her, to tell her what she meant to their lives. "My mother always called me Angela Davis cause I made trouble!" one woman said as we walked by. "You're the reason I got a Ph.D. and started teaching college," another woman told her. Because of all these folks wanting to connect with her, it was fairly challenging even to move--here's a picture of me trying to guide her through the crowd to her book signing table. But she was incredibly gracious and generous with every person who wanted to connect with her. Look at her radiant smile in this picture--the woman hasn't eaten since her afternoon cookies with the students and has just been lecturing and answering questions for more than an hour, and yet she's ready to give time and attention to each of the probably 150 people who waited in line to talk with her. I know that the students were inspired, and I hope the community folks were, too.

One final--admittedly petty--reason I'm glad we brought her to the College is that her visit puts us in good company. She's spoken at Harvard, Brown, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt--along with loads of other places. So even though local talk radio decried "state money" being used to pay for "a Communist and a criminal" speaking at the College, the fact that she came here improves the College's reputation.