Posted on 09/16/2004 7:26:48 PM PDT by scan58
Prisons says author and long-time activist Angela Davis. They don't rehabilitate. They exist to keep companies in business, building penitentiaries and keep troublesome minorities away. The responsible thing to do, she says, is get rid of them.
Davis will speak in the Twin Cities Friday, September 17, hosted by the Givens Foundation for African American Literature. Her address, Education not Incarceration: Protecting the Future of Black America, will draw from her latest book, Are Prisons Obsolete?
The book was written, according to Davis, to encourage readers to question their assumptions about prison, in the same way that many have come to question the death penalty.
During my own career as an anti-prison activist, I have seen the population of U.S. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in black, Latino, and Native American communities now have a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent education, she writes in the introduction. When many young people decide to join the military service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in prison, it should cause us to wonder whether we should not try to introduce better alternatives.
Davis long strange career as an activist began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights movement. In 1969, she rose to national prominence after being fired from a teaching position at UCLA, when then-Governor Ronald Reagan vowed that Davis would never again teach anywhere in the University of California system. He was wrong.
In 1970 she made the FBIs Ten Most Wanted List for charges most legal experts believed were false. She was hunted down in one of the most famous cases this country has ever brought to trial. She served 16 months in prison, by which time, a global Free Angela Davis campaign led to her 1972 acquittal.
Davis currently teaches at the University of California in Santa Cruz, is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center and currently is working on a comparative study of womens imprisonment in the U.S., the Netherlands and Cuba. She has lectured in all 50 states, Africa, Europe and Asia, and is the author of Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday and The Angela Y. Davis Reader.
The Givens Forum NOMMO Lecture Series brings in high-profile authors to talk about their take on issues of pressing importance to African-Americans. Past guests include Randall Robinson, author of Quitting America and The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks and Ebony executive editor Lerone Bennet, Jr Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincolns White Dream. ||
Angela Davis speaks on Fri., Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. at the Minneapolis Marriott Hotel City Center, 30 South 7th Street. Her appearance is part of the Givens Forum NOMMO Lecture Series. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Now they're called progressives or activists or environmentalists or democrats.
How about "get a job"?
"I guess her sympathy is only for certain kinds of prisoners:"
Well, certainly you must be a victim of the oppressive Capitalist/Corperate mindset that has corrupted society.
Only Euro-centric capitalists pigs or their ignorant criminal stooges were in the Soviet penal system, awaiting to be "reeducated" with the gentle guidance by the leaders of the proletariat.
Or die, which ever came first.
Communism is the Workers Paradize, doncha know? (sarcasm)
That's not actually her is it?
Her parents were communists, too, and fairly well off financially. They sent her to school in Germany and France in her teens. Some are more equal than others, I suppose.
Is this ol' bag still around?!
Thanks. One more reason to love RR.
How come nobody ever says "communist" anymore?
It would "raise the specter of McCarthyism" to mention she at least once ran on a CPUSA ticket with Gus Hall. Therefore I won't.
Isn't this the same CPUSA which now endorses Kerry for President?
How come nobody ever says "communist" anymore?
Kind of pales next to "judge murderer." But they didn't say that either.
Ah, for the day in the late 70s when Red Angela came to speak at the University of Miami and almost got blown up by former Bay of Pigs veterans...
All those old commies. Nostalgic for the good ol' days before their pals the Dems were in the descendancy, they're looking for new causes all the time. But they've only got the old media to pay serious attention. They need to hurry up bfore it's too late. After we win the Terror War they will really become obsolete, running out of Dictators to falsify and love.
John Lennon's sound was extremely intimate, hugely innovative and at the same time, unreproducible. There was something great there. Yoko was the death of Lennon's music and the control he needed to cope with a violent streak that becomes evident in even the most cursory examination of his early years. I wanted to say that I don't believe John Lennnon was politically naive. Rather, he had no personality of his own. This combined with Yoko's reptillian talent for self-promotion afforded Lennon sleazy ground in which to apply his musical imagination. I'm tempted to say the immensely musical and verbally
intuitive Lennon was simply born under a bad star. That he would be murdered so violently around his fortieth birthday fits in with the sad chaos that was his life from its very beginning.
Addendum: The courage of the great Angela Davis was just another big lie of the American left. The bi**h belongs in the same gallery of traitors with Kerry and Rather. This is not mere hyperbole. They hate America and militate for the Communist cause. Middle America is being heard in the cases of Rather and Kerry. Angela Davis, a lunatic in her own right, is simply ignored, but not by the FBI, I hope.
That's how I understood it, but I could well have been wrong.
I'd like to see the country lose the Culture of Victimhood and go back to the Culture of Responsibility.
LOL no sorry...
Should have posted a disclaimer!
LOL no sorry...
Should have posted a disclaimer!
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