Angela Davis, the pioneering Black intellectual, earned a Ph.D. and spent years teaching race and feminist studies. Despite her academic credentials, Davis maintained a complex relationship with the academy throughout her career. According to Dr. Wendy Wright, who teaches legal studies and women’s and gender studies at William Paterson University, Davis didn’t view herself as an academic first.

“She’s not conceptualizing this as academic work,” Wright said in an April 9 lecture in the Atrium Auditorium. “She’s conceptualizing this as work she has to do, that’s related to her activist life.”

Wright told the audience that most of Davis’s writings weren’t originally intended as scholarly publications. “Most of them are speeches or essays, things she took from her organizing life,” Wright noted. “I’m thankful we have them as archives. But she’s not conceptualizing this as academic work.”

Wright’s lecture about a prominent Black feminist came at a time when universities across the country are scaling back or reevaluating diversity, equity, and inclusion programming amid political pressure from the second Trump administration, which has intensified scrutiny of race- and gender-related initiatives in higher education. For William Paterson students navigating a politically charged moment, Davis’s life offers a model of intellectual resistance and a reminder that activism and academia don’t have to exist in separate spheres.

According to Wright, Davis didn’t view her publications as academic works, but rather as extensions of her organizing speeches and essays that documented her activist journey.

Wright identified several key themes in Davis’s work, beginning with solidarity. “The communist’s organizations are whiter than other progressive organizations, and so they’re not trusted by racial immigration groups,” Wright said. “She’s making an argument that solidarity needs to happen on the organizational level, and that folks who wish to create free worlds need to figure out how to do this.”

Davis’s early writings showed little engagement with homophobia or queerness in women’s prisons, but by the 1980s-90s, she actively identified “cis heteropatriarchy” as a site of domination requiring attention. “If we’re going to have racial liberation movements, then they cannot be homophobic. That’s not the work of liberation,” Wright said, summarizing Davis’s evolving stance.

Wright emphasized Davis’s development of what she called “multi-dimensionality of unfreedom”—early articulations of intersectional theory. Davis’s approach suggested that “if you liberate working-class Black women, everyone else’s life is going to get better too.”

The presentation highlighted how Davis positioned imagination as essential to liberation work. “She’s pushing us to find and imagine freedom as part of our revolutionary process,” Wright said.

In “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, Davis was examining how prisons became naturalized despite being modern inventions. Published during peak mass incarceration, the text traced how “world-making gets dumped into the prison as it’s stripped away from education, housing, childcare, and drug programs.”

Wright concluded by noting Davis’s rejection of political purity tests. When the Free Angela movement brought in politically inexperienced people, Davis welcomed them: “You know what we need? We need people. They don’t need to be perfect at the beginning.”