Page 16 - BCALA Winter 2018

16 | BCALA NEWS | Volume 45, Issue 1
Angela Davis Donates Papers to Schlesinger Library
By Sarah J. Hong, The Harvard Crimson
(Editor’s note: This story is reprinted with permission from “The Harvard Crimson”. The link to the original
story is http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/2/14/schlesinger-acquires-davis-papers/ )
Angela Y. Davis, a famed political activist and scholar of African American, Marxist, and feminist studies, is donating her papers
to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library.
Davis, a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
studies race in the criminal justice system and is an advocate for prison abolition.
She is also famously known for her radical activism in the 1960s as
a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A., and for her support of the Soledad Brothers, three prison
inmates charged with killing a guard in Soledad Prison in 1970. Her involvement in the case resulted in her being charged with conspiracy. She was later acquitted.
The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America is a research library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, dedicated to housing archives documenting women’s lives and activities in the United States.
In a statement, Davis wrote that she felt honored her writings would join the work of other women who are “advocates of social transformation” at the library.
“My papers reflect 50 years
of involvement in activist and scholarly collaborations seeking to expand the reach of justice in the world,” Davis wrote in a statement.
Faculty specializing in African American Studies believe the library housing Davis’s papers will