“Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it’s perhaps far more terrible than it’s ever been.” – Angela Davis
Angela Davis has been America’s public revolutionary for the past 45 years. She has dedicated her life to fighting institutional racism. Today, as national protests over police brutality and marches for the rights of the undocumented proliferate, and as college students demand support and reform for students of color, Davis’s perspective is as profound and timely as ever. Join her and KPCC’s Annie Gilbertson for a conversation about a life of radical activism.
Davis, a one-time Communist party candidate and champion for prison reform, is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. Davis is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is also the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Annie Gilbertson is KPCC’s Investigative Reporter. She joined the station in 2013 as an education reporter covering the nation’s second largest school district, Los Angeles Unified. She was honored as a national finalist at the 2014 Investigative Reporters and Editors awards for her year-long investigation into L.A. Unified’s $1.3 billion deal to equip every student with an iPad. Her reports exposing the school district’s close ties with Apple and publisher Pearson contributed to the cancelation of the contract, the resignation of the superintendent and the launch of an FBI investigation. Prior to joining KPCC, Gilbertson worked at Mississippi Public Broadcasting, where she produced an award-winning investigative series on how schools had purchased inaccurate sex education materials. In her role as investigative reporter, she is digging into a variety of subjects including but not limited to healthcare, poverty and her first love — public schools.
This program is made possible by the Alexa Fullerton Hampton ’42 Endowed Speaker Fund and SCORE.