Study and political education
In 1967, Davis left Frankfurt to resume study with Marcuse in San Diego . She later explained that Marcuse had shown her how serious scholarship could go together with political action. She contrasted that example with Adorno's advice to keep her philosophical study apart from activism. (p.xi) [1]
Davis recalled helping organize a UCSD student coalition seeking Lumumba-Zapata College for Black, Chicano and white working-class students. (opening college discussion) [6]
She also worked in community political education. In a later interview, Davis described heading the Liberation School project in Los Angeles SNCC and working on political education with the Black Panther Party. (“Leaders as Teachers”) [4]
Taking philosophy into the classroom
Davis taught philosophy at UCLA in 1969. Her October lectures on Frederick Douglass connected the struggle against slavery with philosophical arguments about freedom. Marcuse discussed those lectures in a letter dated November 18,1970. He said her treatment of Douglass had made him rethink one of his own criticisms of Sartre. The exchange shows a teacher responding to his former student's argument. (pp.49–50) [1]
In 2003, Davis published Are Prisons Obsolete?. Her 2005 interviews in Abolition Democracy explained how her prison experience, political organizing and reading had shaped that work. She gave George Jackson a central place in the development of her thinking about prisons. (copyright page) [5] (“Resistance, Language, and Law,” opening answer) [3]