Sažetak | The Civil Rights Movement was a fight for the equality and justice of African Americans which took place in the 1950s and 1960s. Many African Americans were standing up for themselves and the rights they were not given, due to the systematic racism of the US. An active member of this movement was Angela Davis, who witnessed the oppression and racial injustice firsthand, growing up in an area very much affected by segregation. Angela Davis became known for her radical activism. As a proponent of revolution and influenced by The Communist Manifesto and other communist work, she denounces passivity and advocates
for the active fight for one’s rights and equality. Being that she is an intersectional feminist, Davis’s ideas apply to everyone. There is no exclusion based on gender, sexual orientation, social status, race, and physical abilities. During the Civil Rights Movement, Davis got involved in numerous cases revolving around racial injustice in the prison system, mostly about
false accusations of black people, their imprisonment, and the sentences they would receive. This involvement also led to her imprisonment. After years of witnessing how the prison system affected her peers and experiencing imprisonment herself, Angela Davis is to this day a vocal advocate for prison abolition. In her eyes, the system is not doing what it is supposed to do and is even doing more evil than good. Functioning in a capitalist society, the main purpose of prisons nowadays is to transform
prisoners into sources of income and exploit their labor to the advantage of the companies and governments who are constantly opening new facilities to cultivate even more profit. This symbiotic relationship between the government and the prison system is known as the prison industrial complex. Davis offers alternatives to the prison system, focused on reforms of other systems and the rehabilitation of offenders. |