Angela Davis
Angela Davis is an American civil rights activist, who often speaks on the connections between human and animal rights.
Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944 and went on to study at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and the University of Frankfurt, in Germany. Davis completed her doctorate at the University of Berlin, all the time becoming more and more interested in political activism.
According to The Smithsonian, “she continued to tackle oppression faced by the black community, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. After spending time travelling and lecturing, Davis returned to teaching. She served as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught courses on the history of consciousness. Her interests in prisoner rights led her to found Critical Resistance, an organisation working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Davis is the author of several books including Women, Race, and Class (1983) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).”
While Angela Davis is well-known for her views on race, feminism, the prison system, and LGBTQ+ rights, she is less well-known for her veganism. At the 27th Empowering Women of Color Conference, she said this:
“I usually don’t mention that I’m vegan but that has evolved. I think it’s the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective – how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production.
Most people don’t think about the fact they’re eating animals. When they’re eating a steak or eating chicken, most people don’t think about the tremendous suffering that those animals endure simply to become food products to be consumed by human beings.”
