VISION AND HISTORY
The Enduring Power of Angela Davis
A beautiful and bold visionary of our future
I heard Angela Davis speak in Nashville, Tennessee at Vanderbilt University in 2015. It just so happened that I was in the city for a poetry reading at the time. Davis, as always, was her courageous and cool self, still regal in resistance, resolute in her commitment to a different world, a different America. It was February 13, 2015 and the auditorium was packed with students, scholars, radicals, artists, activists, and locals from the city of Nashville.
It was, as expected, a powerful speech but it wasn’t powerful because it was emotional. Davis always speaks truth to power and is always seeking a path for change. Even when she speaks these days or appears on Democracy Now or some other alternative news program, she is contemplating the struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, violence, and exploitative capitalism.
If anyone embodies the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous line that the struggle is “long” but “it bends towards justice,” it is Davis. She totally gets it. Davis knows that change takes decades, perhaps centuries. The key is to continue to maintain your goals to change the world and your country and communities each and every day.
