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Davis recounts a small but revealing anecdote in the opening chapter of An Autobiography. At the time, she is in jail awaiting trial on essentially fabricated conspiracy/murder charges:

One evening, after lock-up, a loud question broke the silence. It came from a sister who was reading a book I had lent her.

"Angela, what does 'imperialism' mean?"

I called out, "The ruling class of one country conquers the people of another in order to rob them of their land, their resources, and to exploit their labor."

Another voice shouted, "You mean treating people in other countries the way Black people are treated here?"

She explains what the word means; another woman filled in the extrapolation (shared by Davis, of course) of what it means. But this isn't some sanitized "feminist-industrial complex" reliance on ideas and theory. Davis is right there in jail, less for an act and more for the running tally of her actions and what she has come to represent. Instead, in Davis' ready reference to the formal definition, the Marxist tinge of her language, and her passion for stoking enthusiasm for communism and black liberation through serious education, you can see the importance of her philosophical training in shaping her orientation towards activism.

Davis (b. 1944) grew up in Birmingham, AL, which would come to play an important role in the civil rights movement. Her parents were politically involved, too--her mother had been involved in the anti-racism movements of the early 1930s; her father maintained connections to members of the Communist Party; both belonged to the NAACP and, when it was outlawed, its successor organization. This would seem to position their oldest daughter for a primary role in the civil rights movement. But, Davis recounts, when the Birmingham black community was organizing its bus boycott in 1956, she was told, "You're too young." When the Freedom Riders' bus stopped in Birmingham in 1961 and she longed to join them, she was finishing high school in New York City. And when Los Angeles exploded in the Watt riots of 1965, she was heading for Germany to start her graduate work in philosophy.

But Davis had grown up in a neighborhood known as "Dynamite Hill" for the frequent bombings of black residents' homes. She describes, painfully to read, how she and her elementary school friends would stand on her front lawn and yell, "Cracker! Redneck!" at passing white drivers to provoke a reaction, as their one way to feel a little better, a little powerful. So when her hippie Quaker high school in NYC introduced her to the Communist Manifesto, she found in it two keys to a whole new world. First, the vision of a word with no exploited classes and the role of the proletariat in achieving that world became the kernel of her black radical thought--that is, the fundamentally anti-capitalist, destroy-not-reform stance, rooted in the struggles of working class people rather than the middle class ascent towards a "respectability" that black people could never fully achieve. Second, it turned her thoughts about racist actions from personal insults to a cold-hearted system that chewed up all in its path (including the working-class white people pressed into the service of capitalism-racism, preserving their economic oppression).

The jump from understanding racism as individual to systemic means something different to everyone, I think. In Davis's actions with the black liberation movement in the late 60s, you can see two major meanings it had for her: first, that collective action is absolutely paramount. Second, perceiving racism as systemic oppression rather than individual insults aids what she came to see as the need to bridle one's emotions and act rationally, with a plan and a goal.

That's not to say that studying Marx radicalized Davis overnight. Indeed, despite joining a Marxist youth group in high school and becoming friends with a couple of prominent black Communist leaders, her next life decision was to head to college at the pasty white, old school East Coast Brandeis University. Brandeis was a bubble, for Davis as much as anyone else.

Despite her resolutely race-involved interpretation of communism and a homeland on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Davis's formative early activism actually came in Europe! As a foreign exchange student in France and during her initial graduate work in Germany, she was exposed to the world of communist youth movements, and the power of rallies and protests with the German SDS. And finally, the black liberationist tinge to her communism, the power and progress she felt in the European movements, and the rise of "Black Power" in the U.S. took her to California to continue her philosophy grad work while being active.

Except--active in what? Waiting for the semester to start, she found no other black people on UC San Diego's campus. With no track record of American activism and no roots in Southern California, the two leaders of local black liberation movements she contacted wouldn't even call her back. (Later developments suggest that the reaction may have been different were she male). Something was better than nothing, and anyway, Davis had come to believe in the need for alliances across causes in order to rebuild a world without any exploitation. She joined in an early (U.S.) anti-Vietnam campaign, which taught her the tools of grassroots organizing and publicity she would bring to black groups in the coming months. There were the more formal demonstrations, of course, which she notes acquired increasing amounts of police surveillance. But even more were outreach efforts. Door to door, or standing on the sidewalk. Talking to anyone that would listen, talking to people that wouldn't listen. Printing pamphlet after pamphlet. To people wrapped up in a "places to go, money to earn" capitalist mindset, Davis and her comrades were nuisances. To Davis, the only way any movement could succeed was to acquire numbers strong enough to overcome existing power structures. That meant education on as broad a level as possible.

One of the truisms of the civil rights movement and black liberation movement is that the leadership roles in major organizations were not just dominated by men, but purposefully limited to men. On a university campus where it took all the black students, professors, and staff workers to meet the minimum number to start a student group, pre-existing command structures weren't a burden. Davis was crucial in establishing UCSD's Black Student Alliance. But she wasn't done. She pushed for more alliances, more connections, more collectivity. They reached out to the Black Student Council at a neighboring college, and then to the broader San Diego Black Conference umbrella. And thus the first major action of the UCSD Black Student Alliance was to agitate for fair conditions on, of all things, the local naval base.