Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow.

Welcome to Words Matter, I'm Katie Barlow.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Words have power and words have consequences.

Dr. Angela Davis is an activist, philosopher, academic and bestselling author.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, at the end of World War II, she attended segregated black elementary and middle schools in the 1950s.

Davis later studied philosophy at Brandeis University and did her graduate work in Germany with famed philosopher Herbert Mark Kuse.

She would later say that Mark Kuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic and activist, a scholar and a revolutionary.

After returning to the United States, Angela Davis joined the Communist Party, became involved in the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,

Second Wave Feminism, and actively protested the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Angela Davis became an acting associate professor of philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles.

That same year, the University of California System initiated a policy against hiring communists.

At their September 19, 1969 meeting, the California Board of Regents urged on by then Governor Ronald Reagan,

fired Professor Angela Davis from her teaching post because of her political beliefs.

On October 8, 1969, Angela Davis gave a speech at UCLA protesting her dismissal.

Education she told a cheering student audience should not mold the mind according to a prefabricated architectural plan.

It should rather liberate the mind because the mind has to be liberated in order to perceive the world, to see society, to understand what its advantages are,

and what its disadvantages are.

In that same speech, Angela Davis drew persuasive links between the suppression of academic freedom, institutional racism, and the rise of totalitarianism in Germany during the 1930s.

Later that month, Angela Davis was reinstated by a California Superior Court judge and completed teaching the 1969 to 1970 academic year.

With that, let's listen to Angela Davis talk about academic freedom, institutional racism, and the dangers of totalitarianism.

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