Courtesy of Mara Lavitt

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, Angela Davis, political activist and professor emerita of history and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, gave a series of lectures on abolition in Battell Chapel. 

Davis’ talks were a part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values — a series of lectures on the humanities given annually at nine universities. Hosted by the Whitney Humanities Center, this year’s Tanner Lectures at Yale focused on the theme of incarceration. Davis’ work in activism and writing, which focuses on intersectionality and mass incarceration, made her the “dream pick” for the lecture, according to the Yale Prison Education Initiative faculty advisory committee. 

“Angela Davis has fostered a new kind of hope through abolition. Abolition is an invitation to envision the end of the prison system, yet it is also a creative act,” said Caleb Smith, professor of English and American studies at Yale, as he introduced Davis to the audience last Tuesday. 

Davis has written extensively on the notion of a “prison industrial complex” — the linkage of prisons to corporations and political systems. The framework also points to a state’s reliance on incarceration and surveillance to solve social problems. 

Yet, a portion of Davis’ scholarship also envisions a hope for an alternative future built on collective action, education and dismantling existing systems of oppression through abolition.

Davis’s lecture came amid a crucial moment for higher education, as universities face threats from the Trump administration. 

By sharing her vision for collective solidarity and the role of student movements, Davis represented a refusal to “compromise the fundamental promise of the university — not now, not ever,” said Cajetan Iheka, professor of English and director of the Whitney Humanities Center, in his introductory remarks.

The lectures were open to Yale and New Haven community members. According to Meghan O’Donnell, the associate communications officer of the Whitney Humanities Center, this embodies the center’s mission to spread humanities education beyond just Yale’s campus.

“I consider access to education crucial to freedom — and that includes access to education in the humanities. As a humanities center, one of our main roles is to expand access to the ideas, modes of inquiry, and knowledge that makes up the humanities,” O’Donnell wrote in an email to the News. 

During her lecture, Davis first thanked the nearly 900 Yale faculty members who signed a letter to University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel calling on them to “challenge the unlawful demand that threatens academic freedom and university self-governance.” 

Davis then turned toward the broader movement of student advocacy across the nation — recounting the protests against the arrest of six Black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, the detainment of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and the student protests against Florida Atlantic University’s decision to name their stadium after a private prison company.

Davis emphasized the connections between “prisons, corporations, politics and universities” and the role of student protesters in “unveiling and challenging these relationships through popular and scholarly discourse.”

“If you stand with the students, you have a pretty good chance of being on the right side of history,” Davis said. 

According to Davis, university students are “likely to stand for justice, equality and freedom.” 

Students learning to challenge the institutions that are “teaching them how to question the world” has given rise to fields of study like Black, Latinx, Asian American, Indigenous, feminist and queer studies, she said. 

These fields slowly became incorporated into academia, beginning with the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State College after a student strike in 1968. According to Davis, the work of these departments “strive for and organize towards a society that no longer requires the existence of racist and repressive institutions of punishment.” 

In her second lecture, Davis expanded her focus to include the global struggle against injustice and oppression — specifically the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. 

By connecting police violence in the United States to settler colonialism and imperialism abroad, Davis said that abolition was driven by the “collective imagination.” 

Instead of focusing solely on what must be abolished, it is necessary to “understand the conditions that enable the possibilities of abolition,” Davis said.

Davis’s final words called upon students to embrace collective education. 

“If we believe in the future, it must be based in our own collective confidence and what we can achieve if we lean on each other, if we hold each other up, if we support each other and if we live inside global solidarity with the help of abolition ethics and the love that emanates from our togetherness,” Davis said. 

Angela Davis is the author of “Women, Race and Class,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” and “Abolition. Feminism. Now.”