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Angela Y. Davis is
known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all kinds of oppression
in the U.S. and abroad.  Over the years she has been active as a student
teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer.

Prof. Davis’s political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham,
Alabama, and continued through her high school years in New York.
But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being
removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA
as a result of her social activism and her membership in the communist
party, USA.

Prof. Davis’s long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates back
to her involvement in the campaign to free Soledad Brothers, which led
to her own arrest and imprisonment.  Today, she remains an advocate
of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in
the criminal justice system.

During the last twenty-five years, Prof. Davis has lectured in all of
the fifty United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, South America and
the former Soviet Union.  Her articles and essays have appeared in
numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of several books,
including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race & Class;
and the recently published Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude
“Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billy Holiday and The Prison-Industrial Complex.

Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Angela Davis
would never again teach in the University of California system.  Today,
she is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 1994 to 1997, she held the
distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential
Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.

Michael Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University
in 1962. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, in the United States
and abroad.

His writings have been translated into Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, Polish, German, Bangla, and Dutch.

He is the author of fifteen books including:

• To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (Verso Books, 2001)
• History as Mystery (City Lights Books, 1999)
• America Besieged (City Lights Books, 1998)
• Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, 1997)
• Against Empire (City Lights Books, 1995)
• Dirty Truths (City Lights Books, 1996)
• Democracy for the Few (St. Martin’s; sixth edition, 1995)
• Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (St. Martin’s; second edition, 1993)
• Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (St. Martin’s, 1992)
• Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America (St. Martin’s, 1993)
• The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race (St. Martin’s, 1989)

Howard Zinn (Excert from an interview)

He was born in 1922 to Jewish immigrants, and grew up in New York migrating from one broken-down tenement to another. For
most of his childhood there was no telephone, no radio, icebox, or
shower, often no electricity. He worked as a shipfitter in the Brooklyn
Navy Yard. He and his wife moved into a rat-infested basement in
Brooklyn. He went to war, where as a second lieutenant he experienced
privilege for the first time. At 27 he was as a freshman at New
York University. He loaded warehouses. He went to Columbia. He got a job
as a professor at Spelman, an all-black women’s college in Georgia, and
moved his wife and four kids down “among the magnolias.” That was long
before the Civil Rights Movement. He describes all this in his memoir
You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train without any trace of
remorse or awe, just as an explanation of why he grew up class-conscious.
After Spelman he went to Boston University where, as a professor of
history, he refused to “pretend to neutrality.”

There was one particular episode, which he describes in Future of
History, that “turned him around politically.” Early on, Zinn read a
lot of Steinbeck and Dickens, Sinclair, Wright, and Koestler, but his
relationship to politics wasn’t really galvanized until it clubbed him in
the head: “I was a seventeen-year-old kid living in the slums of
Brooklyn. There living on the same block were these young communists who
were older than I and seemed very politically sophisticated. They asked
me to come to a demonstration at Times Square… I wasn’t even sure
what it was all about, except that vaguely I thought it was against the
war. They seemed to be for good causes. I went along… It was like
Charlie Chaplin, picking up that red flag, and then there’s an army of
unemployed behind him in this demonstration… Soon the mounted police,
driving their horses into the crowd, beating people. I was knocked
unconscious… woke up in a doorway, not only nursing a hurt head, but
hurt feelings about our country… There really is no free speech in this
country if you are a radical.”

Maybe not at a Times Square demonstration, but Howard Zinn has since been quietly liberating the radical voices of America’s forgotten dead. Soon you might even see some of them dramatized in six two-hour installments on FOX. In the following interview, FEED’s Amanda Griscom talks to Zinn from his summer house on Cape Cod. He was 25 feet from the sea, appreciating the breeze, which he
offered to email in a little packet along with a bit of salt water.