FMO to host activist Angela Davis at this year’s State of the Black Union

(Netflix/TNS)

Angela Davis in the Netflix documentary “13th.” Davis will be speaking at For Members Only’s State of the Black Union on Nov. 12.

Isabelle Sarraf, Campus Editor

For Members Only, Northwestern’s premier Black Student Alliance, will host activist, scholar and writer Angela Davis at its annual State of the Black Union on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m.

A major figure in the prison abolition movement, Davis has been one of the most influential activists in the country for half a century as an advocate for Black liberation. Her name has become synonymous with calls for transformative justice and abolishing the prison-industrial complex.

Her book “Are Prisons Obsolete?” details the concept of abolition and grounds contemporary issues surrounding police and prison abolition in the Black Radical Tradition.

Davis’s virtual visit to Northwestern’s campus will be exactly one month into student-led daily actions by NU Community Not Cops, who are demanding the University disarm, defund and disband University Police. The group’s movement is grounded in the abolition of policing and prisons as perpetrators of systemic racism and violence against Black and Brown communities.

Abolition, a call heard amid protests this summer, implies not just the dissolution of the current system of public safety but a reinvestment in a new community-driven system without police.

“We hope this event will provide inspiration and an empowering space for our community during this time,” FMO wrote in a Facebook post.

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @isabellesarraf

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