Adducing the old adage of actions speaking louder than words, Angela Yvonne Davis embodies radical citizenship, activist, and scholarly engagement through her history of anti-imperialist and feminist struggles. Once on the FBI’s most wanted list, Davis continues to haunt the increasingly intricate authoritarian systems on a global level by her continuous commitment to the exercise of intersectionality. Her new book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, borrows its title from a freedom song chanted in the Southern United States during the twentieth century freedom movement, and it speaks precisely of that, of the continuities rather than closures when it comes to the unfinished plights for freedom all over the world. In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

The book is built of short speeches and interviews. It's short but unfortunately, repeats itself. For example, Davis mentions that Palestinians tweeted Ferguson activists advice about tear gas 4 times or that she was on the FBI wanted list 5 times. Ideas weren't always coherent enough, as often happens in interviews and short speeches. I imagine this is a great book for people who are already familiar with her activism and want some more extra content. Davis’s book hinges on the parallels of the struggles in Ferguson and Palestine to illustrate the necessity of transnational solidarity between movements. At one point Davis is “critical in a friendly way” of Michelle Alexander’s important book “The New Jim Crow” for not incorporating a global framework. Davis suggests that without this global understanding, it is difficult to understand the apparatus that has produced mass incarceration in the US. She specifies that if an activist wants to abolish the prison-industrial complex in the US it is a necessity to realize the interrelated need to abolish apartheid and end the occupation of Palestine. Davis connects these movements by examining the concerted global strategy to deal with disposable populations from the Global South that involves putting them in a “vast garbage bin” (prison) and creating an “ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free”. We also live with the myth that the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement freed the second-class citizens. Civil rights, of course, constitute an essential element of the freedom that was demanded at that time, but it was not the whole story, but maybe we’ll get to that later. Eric Foner, in his book called The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, wrote that, and I am quoting:Even though numbers of books, both scholarly and popular, have been written on the role of women in the 1955 Boycott, Dr King, who was actually invited to be a spokesperson for a movement when he was entirely unknown—the movement had already formed—Dr King remains the dominant figure. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and buildthe movement for human liberation.And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."

By Fazeela Siddiqui, currently a Staff Attorney at a large non-profit legal service organization in New York City. And there were series of events that marked the fiftieth anniversary. Many people did not know which march to attend (I think one was on the 24th and one was on the 28th). But last month in September a number of events took place in Birmingham, Alabama, which as you heard is where I was born and where I grew up. A good rule for recognizing antisemitism- if you replace Zionists with Jews, is it antisemitic? Or, in other words, talking about "the Zionist's media's tentacles" plays into a classic antisemitic troupe of Jews controlling the world, of Jews doing evil and getting away with it because they're so powerful. Literally, the octopus imagery is an antisemitic canard. Do better, socialists. She believes that the Occupy movement of 2011, which did transform our ability to talk about capitalism so openly, could have had an even larger and more sustained impact had organization occurred beforehand.As Carole Boyce Davies has pointed out in her wonderful book on Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx, Claudia Jones was one of the leaders of the Negro Youth Congress (the American Negro Youth Congress and the Southern Youth Congress). And I mention Jones both because of her important work in the US and because she became a pivotal figure in the organizing of Caribbean communities here in Britain after she was arrested for the work she did in the US and eventually deported. Major support is provided by SK Group, Laura and Scott Malkin, the Mellon Foundation, and the LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust Angela Davis new book made me think of what Dear Nelson Mandela kept reminding us, that we must be willing to embrace that long walk to freedom. Understanding what it takes to really be free, to have no fear, is the first and most important step one has to make before undertaking this journey. Angela is the living proof that this arduous challenge can also be an exhilarating and beautiful one." —Archbishop Desmond Tutu In these various speeches, interviews and essays, Angela Davis strikingly and brilliantly (as always) draws the parallels between capitalist individualism, neoliberalism and racism, poverty, repression. They perpetually feed on and spawn each other. She also points out the dangers of tying down entire revolt movements to single, deified individuals. While these individuals (like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr) certainly had prominent roles to play, these movements are a collective phenomena, and to identify them with single, monumental personas is to remove our own personal agencies from an expanding community struggle.

Davis offers two pieces of advice to movement builders in their effort to chip away at individualism: i) Teach, learn, and disseminate the socio-historical conditions and foundations of structural inequalities in movements through advocacy and organizing; ii) Focus on grassroots organizing that involves the most affected. For example, if prisoners are treated like objects of charity by academics, lawyers and policy-makers, where conferences are held about them and not with them, we not only defeat anti-prison work, but constitute the prisoners as inferior in the process of working to defend their rights. It’s important for us to recognize the extent to which, in the aftermath of the war on terror, police departments all over the U.S. have been equipped with the means to allegedly ‘fight terror.’ The police slogan is ‘to protect and serve.’ Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.”What I fear about many of these observances is that they tend to enact historical closures. They are represented as historical high points on a road to an ultimately triumphant democracy; one which can be displayed as a model for the world; one which perhaps can serve as justification for military incursions, including the increased use of drones in the so-called war on terror, which has resulted in the killing of vast numbers of people, especially in Pakistan. When talking about the Middle East, why is Palestine held more accountable and liable for violence than Israel? Why do people assume that the oppressed are responsible for the safety of the oppressors? education has thoroughly become a commodity. It has been so thoroughly commoditized that many people don't even know how to understand the very process of acquiring knowledge because it is subordinated to the future capacity to make money." And finally, number ten: we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology. of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

So... the negatives first. Collections like this are hit and miss for me. I'm a little torn on how I feel about this one. I think that, as far as content, the ideas and concepts and arguments and connections she presented on the various topics in these talks, it was brilliant. Really interesting and informative and eye-opening.Davis strongly discourages the idolizing of movement leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. This is not because their work was not important, but rather because progressive organizers need ethics free of selfishness and individualism. Neither King nor Mandela, she argues, would want the collective efforts behind the movement to be forgotten or overshadowed by their personalities when reflecting on history. Which is a shame, because I really do think that she is brilliant and is able to see and connect movements and concepts that I probably would never have seen without someone to point them out. She is able to provide context and perspective to movements that I could never experience and was only taught about in very biased and skewed ways. (I mean, it's unsurprising that this would happen, and the more that I read on this topic and learn, the more I realize how little I know.) As I was listening to this, I took a bunch of notes and jotted down quotes and thoughts that I had in reaction to her talks. I wrote down other books to add to my list, and other topics to read more on, particularly conflicts and movements outside of the US. I know VERY little about them beyond basic info one would see on the news, but after listening to Davis relate them to the movements here, it's easy to see how it's all the same fight... and as I continue to read and learn about history that shaped THIS country, and how it brought us to where we are, I should expand that to encompass other countries that have, and are still, fighting for equality and freedom - not just racial, but feminist and gender based, and LGBTQ+ and all manner of intersectionality. It's all relative, and it's all important. Although Occupy was a spontaneous reaction to the 2008 recession and income inequality in the United States, Davis points out that we cannot romanticize spontaneity and leaderless movements (more on leaders later). Additionally, she notes that the electoral arena is a field for organizing, but cannot and should not be the primary focus of progressive organizers. After all, reform-which is what comes from electoralism-is not enough. For the abolition movement, reform has only ever brought better prisons. For progressive movements like abolition, ideological change is necessary.