Civil rights activist and scholar Angela Davis said she sees President Barack Obama’s election as a cause for celebration but also a call to action.
“Many people assume that this election represents the final victory of the civil rights movement,” said Davis in a speech she gave at the Law School Monday evening. She cautioned the audience against such generalizations and urged them to consider “why citizenship is a struggle for some, but taken for granted by others.”
Davis gave the keynote address Monday for Northwestern’s Black Law Students Association’s celebration of Black History Month. She drew an audience of about 200 students and Chicagoans to the Chicago Campus’s Thorne Auditorium.
Davis, a professor at University of California – Santa Cruz, was an active member of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and a member of the Black Panther Party. She briefly graced the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted” list and was memorialized in pop culture by several songs that were dedicated to her.
“My grandparents were in the Black Panther Party,” said Lavern Thomas, a senior at DePaul University. “They always talked about the movement. She was like a household name.”
The idea of inviting Davis to address Obama’s presidency hatched when his victory was a distant vision, BLSA president Yondi Morris said.
“I had an idea about six months ago to get Angela Davis to speak about what would happen if Barack Obama was president,” the second-year law student said. “To speak about where we came from in terms of slavery and the civil rights movement and where we are now.”
Morris said this year’s celebration had particular resonance with BLSA.
“Everyone is really pumped to see what this Black History Month will be like, knowing this is the first year when we can see what change looks like,” she said. “I wanted her to be able to advise us as African-American students, what we can do as black legal thinkers.”
Davis said one of the challenges America must now face is confronting the issue of race, rather than glossing over it.
“The legal discourse of color-blindness has asserted itself as the only possibility of moving beyond racism,” Davis said. “We learn how not to acknowledge race. There’s something very bizarre about that.”
Davis said students should now focus their efforts on bringing issues of racial profiling among police officers to the new president’s attention.
“I want to hear Obama commit to ending the imprisonment binge,” Davis said, earning applause. “Racism has not ended because one black man has risen to the highest office in the land, because one black family is in the White House.”
Student activism during the Obama campaign, Davis said, was reminiscent of the movement she knew during the 1960s.
“This is an exceptional period. In some ways, it reminds me of an earlier period,” Davis said. “So many young people were absolutely convinced they were going to change the world.”
