As an internationally known civil rights activist, Angela Davis says she's doing things she never imagined when she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List in 1970.
"At the same time I cannot see this as a triumph," said Davis, professor of history of consciousness at the University of Santa Cruz.
Davis delivered the keynote lecture Wednesday for the University of Utah's Martin Luther King Jr. events. She said the theme "Civil Rights Postponed" is apt.
"We are not now living the dream of Dr. King," she said. "What we celebrate is the continued struggle for equality and justice."
Davis was greeted with a standing ovation and often interrupted with applause by the standing-room-only crowd of more than 850 at the U.'s Olpin Student Union. At one point an audience member suggested she run for president.
Davis was fired from a previous teaching post at the University of California in 1969 because of her activism and membership in the Communist Party, USA. She was later arrested as a suspected conspirator in the murder of a judge during an attempted Black Panther prison break.
Davis was eventually acquitted, and she said that acquittal was largely due to a massive "Free Angela Davis" campaign.
"I have not triumphed," she said. "I could just as easily have been there."
Davis said like the campaign that led to her freedom, the civil rights movement was an example of the power held by ordinary people. So was the 15-year struggle for federal recognition of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
"Often times, we have difficulty imagining ourselves as these heroic figures," she said. "But we can imagine ourselves as doing the work that alone can build movements that will bring around change. ... I think that is the real message of Dr. King's legacy."
Davis says she's seen "wonderful changes," since she grew up in a Birmingham, Ala., neighborhood that was called Dynamite Hill because "every time black people bought houses in that neighborhood they would get blown up or burned down by the Ku Klux Klan."
However, Davis said there are forms of racism today that she didn't perceive during her childhood.
"Now there is even more poverty than there was when I was growing up, and now there are so many more black people in Alabama behind bars than I could have ever begun to imagine 30, 40, 50, years ago."
Davis said undocumented immigration and the gay and lesbian rights movement are modern civil rights struggles. She said current racism also includes the war in Iraq, and some states' permanent disenfranchisement of convicted felons, who are disproportionately black.
"People of color have a much greater likelihood to go to prison than they do to college or a university," she said. "I ask why we cannot see the damage that structural racism, institutional racism, is doing to our society."
In closing, Davis returned to the need for continued social activism, saying, "Please get involved, please try to make a difference, please try to turn this country around."
After her speech, Davis warmly greeted audience members, posing for pictures and signing autographs. When one woman asked her how to be an activist, Davis replied: "You do it the way that feels the most comfortable to you."
E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com