Angela Y. Davis - Women, Culture & Politics

If They Come in the Morning
Angela Davis: An Autobiography
Women, Race & Class

F IRST V INTAGE B OOKS E DITION , F EBRUARY 1990

Copyright 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Angela Y. Davis

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1989.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Angela Yvonne, 1944
Women, culture & politics / Angela Y. Davis.1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published in hardcover by Random House in 1989T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79850-3
1. Afro-American women. 2. Afro-AmericansSocial conditions1975 3. SexismUnited States. 4. RacismUnited States. 5. United StatesRace relations. 6. Sexism. 7. Racism. I. Title. II. Title: Women, culture, and politics
E185.86.D382 1990
305.48896073dc20
89-40103

constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

Portions of this work first appeared in the following publications, often with different titles:

Rupert Garcia Catalogue, Political Affairs, Vital Signs, and Vogue.

Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press: We Do Not Consent: Violence Against Women in a Racist Society (originally published as Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism) by Angela Davis. First published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, P.O. Box 908, Latham, NY 12110.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Buttermilk Sky Associates, Inc.: A rap song, Beat Street Breakdown, written by Melvin Glover and Regina Griffin. Copyright 1984 by Hargreen Music, Inc. Administered by Buttermilk Sky Associates, Inc.

Harvard Educational Review: Let Us All Rise Together: Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women (originally published as Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women) by Angela Davis in Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 58, Issue 3, August 1988. Copyright 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Gil Scott-Heron: A song entitled B-Movie by Gil Scott-Heron. Used by permission.

Oxford University Press, Inc., and Methuen London Ltd.: Adaptation of Women in Egypt: A Personal View, by Angela Davis from Women, a World Report 1985, a New Internationalist Book. Copyright 1985 by Angela Davis. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., and Methuen London Ltd.

Rhode Island School of Design: Underexposed: Photography and Afro-American History (originally published as Photography and Afro-American History) by Angela Davis in A Century of Black American Photographers, 1840-1960 by Valencia Hollins Coar. Permission granted by RISD.

SBK Entertainment World and Chappell Music Ltd.: Excerpt from the lyrics to Imagine by John Lennon. Copyright 1971 LENONO MUSIC. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission of SBK Blackwood Music, Inc., and Chappell Music Ltd.

Sugarhill Music: A rap song, Jesse, by Melvin Glover, Regina Griffin, Silvia Robinson, and Ronald Isley. Reprinted courtesy of Sugar Hill Music.

v3.1

For Nikky

Five years ago, during one of my parents regular visits to the Bay Area, I was preparing to deliver the commencement address to Berkeley High Schools graduating class. My mother remarked that since I had the habit of devoting so much of my time to the preparation of speeches, I should consider publishing them in book form. I therefore thank my mother, Sallye B. Davis, for providing the initial inspiration for this book, which during the next few years remained a seductive but unrealized idea until my close friend Nikky Finney convinced me to set aside some time to work on the project. Nikky assisted me in sifting through scores of old speeches and articles with a view to gleaning material for this collection. She read the final manuscript and helped me to formulate appropriate titles for the individual pieces. The title of the chapter on Winnie Mandela, in fact, is taken from a poem Nikky wrote on women in South Africa that was in turn inspired by the womens chant that arose out of the 1956 campaign against the pass laws: Now that you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, and you will be crushed.

Some of the ideas incorporated in the speeches reflect many hours of late-night political debates with my friend June Jordan. I thank her for her enduring friendship, and I thank her for Poem About My Rights.

Stefanie Kelly, my teaching assistant at that time in the Womens Studies Department at San Francisco State University, spent many hours at the computer typing and editing the manuscript. I thank her for her invaluable assistance.

Finally, I am immensely grateful to my administrative assistant, Roberta Goodman, who devoted painstaking attention to every phase of this project.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that positions be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that ones contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time. In this sense the most difficult challenge facing the activist is to respond fully to the needs of the moment and to do so in such a way that the light one attempts to shine on the present will simultaneously illuminate the future. Of course, one can never really know whether ones positions and analyses will retain their value beyond the immediacy of the moment. There is thus a certain riskand even a measure of presumptuousnessinherent in a book such as this.

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the personal motivation underlying this book, for it is also an attempt to capture a few of the moments in my career as an activist over the last period that would have otherwise gone the way of all such fleeting experiences. It is an effort to retrospectively provide some continuity to a life that has been informed for almost two decades by local and global struggles for progressive social change. During the late 1960s, this involvement was the background against which I was fired from my position at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of my membership in the Communist Party and was eventually arrested on false charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Since my acquittal in 1972, much of my life has been devoted to public speaking as I have traveled and lectured throughout this country and abroad.

Although my organizational affiliations and my interestsand thus the themes of my work, my lectures, and much of my writinghave been diverse, I have always tried, whether successfully or not, to make sure that there are connecting threads that prevent me from dissipating my energies in too many directions. I have continued to function as a National Committee member of the Communist Party, as a co-chairperson of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and as member of the executive boards of the National Political Congress of Black Women and the National Black Womens Health Project. The lectures and articles collected in this book reflectdirectly or indirectlymy involvement in all these movements.