Angela Davis Net Worth

What Is Angela Davis' Net Worth?

Angela Davis is an American political activist, author, and academic scholar who has a net worth of $800 thousand. Angela Davis became a counterculture activist in the 1960s and was an important figure in the Communist Party USA. She co-founded the organization Critical Resistance to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Angela served as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was a director of the Feminist Studies department. She was prosecuted and acquitted in a federal trial involving the armed take-over of a courtroom in California in 1970.

Ronald Reagan requested that Davis be barred from teaching at any university of California in 1969 due to her membership in the Communist Party. Angela was a candidate for Vice President for the party twice in the 1980s. She has also authored several books, including "If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance" (1971), "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday" (1998), and "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement" (2015). In 2020, Davis was named the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" issue, and Time included her on its list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Early Life

Angela Davis was born Angela Yvonne Davis on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. She is the daughter of Sallye Bell Davis and Benjamin Frank Davis, and she was christened in the Episcopal church. Angela grew up in the Dynamite Hill neighborhood, and in the '50s, some of the homes were bombed in an attempt to scare middle-class Black residents into leaving the neighborhood. Davis studied at a segregated Black elementary school called Carrie A. Tuggle School, then she attended Parker Annex, which was Parker High School's middle school branch. During Angela's youth, her mother was a national officer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress as well as the group's leading organizer. The Southern Negro Youth Congress was influenced by the Communist Party, and its mission was to build alliances among African Americans in southern states. Davis was involved with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, and she marched in protest of racial segregation as a Girl Scout. As a teenager, she was accepted into an American Friends Service Committee program that placed Southern Black students in integrated schools in the North. Angela chose to attend Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City, where she was recruited by the communist youth group Advance.

Davis earned a scholarship to Brandeis University in Massachusetts. While attending a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis, she met Herbert Marcuse, a Frankfurt School philosopher, and later became his student. In a 2007 interview, Angela stated, "Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary." Davis traveled to Europe and attended the communist-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students in Switzerland, which earned her a visit from the FBI when she returned home. As a sophomore, she decided to major in French, and she subsequently took part in Hamilton College's Junior Year in France Program. She was in France when she found out about the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, in which the Ku Klux Klan killed four Black girls; Angela had been acquainted with all the four victims. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis in 1965, then she moved to West Germany to attend the University of Frankfurt. After two years in Germany, Davis returned to the U.S., and in 1968, she graduated from the University of California, San Diego, with a master's degree. She began working toward a PhD there, but she didn't graduate because the FBI confiscated her manuscripts. In the early '80s, she returned to Germany and kept working on her PhD.

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Career

In 1969, Davis was hired as an acting assistant professor in UCLA's philosophy department. At the time, she was known for being a Communist Party USA member and an affiliate of the Black Panther Party's Los Angeles chapter as well as an activist and feminist. Later that year, UCLA put a new policy in place that prohibited the hiring of communists, and the school fired her on September 19th. However, Judge Jerry Pacht ruled that UCLA couldn't fire Angela for being a member of the Communist Party, and she resumed teaching there. The UCLA Board of Regents fired her again in June 1970 for "inflammatory language" she had used in a few of her speeches, and the board was censured by the American Association of University Professors. In 1975, Davis worked at the Claremont Black Studies Center as a lecturer and had to teach in secret because the alumni benefactors of the Claremont Colleges had "fears of Communist indoctrination." In 1978, Angela taught women's studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and two years later, she became a professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University; she later taught political science classes there. From 1991 to 2008, she taught in the Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness departments at Rutgers University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she was a distinguished visiting professor at Syracuse University in 1992 and 2010 and Vassar College in 1995. In 2021, Davis was the Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecturer in the history department of Pomona College.

Political Activism

In 1980 and 1994, Davis was the Communist Party USA's nominee for vice president. In 1991, she left the Communist Party and founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Angela co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization dedicated to abolishing the prison system. She has spoken out against racism, sexism, the Vietnam War, the war on terror, the Million Man March, and the death penalty and in support of gay rights. Davis and Kimberlé Crenshaw formed an alliance of black feminists called the African American Agenda 2000, and in 2017, she was an honorary co-chair of the Women's March on Washington that took place the day after Donald Trump's inauguration.

Personal Life

Angela married Hilton Braithwaite in 1980. They divorced in 1983, and Davis publicly came out as a lesbian in a 1997 Out magazine interview. Angela is in a long-term relationship with Gina Dent, who has worked at UC Santa Cruz as an associate professor of Feminist Studies and as the Humanities Division's associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The couple has advocated for Palestinian solidarity, Black liberation, and the abolition of prisons. In 2023, Davis appeared on the PBS series "Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates" and discovered that she is a descendant of Mayflower passenger William Brewster and Alabama politician John A. Darden. In a later episode of the show, Emmy-winning actress Niecy Nash-Betts found out that she and Angela are distant cousins. Davis' brother Ben was a defensive back for the NFL teams the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions in the '60s and '70s.

Arrest and Trial

In August 1970, three inmates known as the Soledad Brothers escaped from a California courtroom with the help of 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson (the brother of one of the inmates), who was heavily armed. Four people were killed during the escape, including a judge. Evidence showed that Angela purchased several of the guns Jackson used and that she had been corresponding with one of  Soledad Brothers, George Jackson. California considered "all persons concerned in the commission of a crime… are principals in any crime so committed," so Davis was charged with "aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley." A warrant for her arrest was issued on August 14, 1970, and she was listed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List four days later. Angela fled the state, and the authorities didn't find her until October 13, 1970, when she was staying at a New York City Howard Johnson Motor Lodge. She declared her innocence in court on January 5, 1971, and thousands of people began working to get her released. John Lennon and Yoko Ono released a song titled "Angela" about the situation. Davis was eventually released on $100,000 bail in February 1972. At her trial, witnesses stated that she had bought the guns for protection of the Soledad Brothers defense headquarters. On June 4, 1972, the all-white jury returned a not guilty verdict.

Honors

Davis was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and she has been honored with several awards, such as the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize. In 2025, the University of Cambridge awarded Angela an Honorary Doctorate in Letters, and she received The Center for LGBTQ Studies' José Muñoz Award. Davis has received honorary doctorates from educational institutions such as Moscow State University, the University of Tashkent, and Karl-Marx University.

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