Episode Five: Angela Davis

Welcome to Star Gays: the Queer Astrology Archives Podcast, where we examine the lives of important queer artists, activists, and thinkers through the lens of their astrological birth chart. My name is Elly, and I'll be your host.

Hey, welcome back to Star Gays: the Queer Astrology Archives Podcast. In today's episode, we are going to take a look at revolutionary scholar and activist Angela Davis. But before we get into the episode, I wanna take a moment to acknowledge the context in which I am recording this episode. Right now, we are in a moment in which so many people are experiencing immense amounts of grief.

There are not words that could encompass the enormity of this grief, but I wanted to share some of the words of people that I've been listening to in the last couple of weeks. And so I will share some contemporary words, and then I will also share some of what Angela Davis, who has been a long time advocate for Palestinian freedom, has said.

So the first thing that I wanted to share is from an essay by Nicki Kattoura and Nada Abuasi. I'm going to read just part of it, but I will include a link in the show notes so that you can read it in full.

[from: Grief Beyond Language]

“Etymologically, the word grief derives from the Latin word garave, which means to make heavy. Like gravity, Palestinian grief is a constant scientific fact, a physical force that holds us down as the earth continues to spin on its axis. Yet for us, time has stood still. The last three weeks feel infinite, carrying the burden of all the victims of the last 75 years. Often repeated, there seem to be no words that can convey this grief. In fact, we realize the irony of even writing about it. The entire premise of this essay has already fallen apart before we begin, because writing about Palestine's grief exposes the limits of language itself. But we will try anyway. 

We grieve our children, those whose potential could not be contained by the prison they were trapped in, the children who aspired to create and imagine things that would outlive them, but who were instead victims to a racist colonial logic that long preceded them, a logic that had marked them for death long before they were even born. There's no allegory and no poem, no chant and no comparison that can revive them or encapsulate losing each and every one of them. Yet still, we rewrite and edit sentences to make senseless brutality more eloquent, reading words out loud as if they were an incantation for their resurrection.

We grieve our women, the matriarchs and caretakers of our land, at whose feet heaven lies, the ones who reared our children and freedom fighters and were still freedom fighters themselves. Our women deserve to love and be loved, while they currently sift through rubble with their bare hands and search makeshift morgues in the hopes to uncover life that they had originally bestowed. We search for the perfect word in a thesaurus to describe their nightmare. They are our martyrs who refuse to capitulate to Zionist terror, but instead stand tall, steadfast against monstrous, shameless theft. We write as though this page could be a shield. Instead, it is a single paper rose on a mass grave, only symbolic, a metaphor, utterly and shatteringly useless. 

We grieve our men, those whose deaths have been obscured to make space for the overwhelming loss of our children. The ones clinging to their offspring in death, marked by others as violent savages and thus undeserving of our tears. The ones who fasted so their families could eat, who photographed their own murder so the world could refuse to care. We refuse to withhold our mourning until we can prove their innocence. These sentences cannot assemble a bulldozer that can break through the walls of their captivity or dig them graves to rest in. Instead, these sentences flatten multi-faceted, contradictory, peculiar lives into the vapid category of ‘men’ that denies them their names and unique histories and ignores that they are devastatingly people without a future. 

We grieve all of Palestine. We grieve the parts of her no one speaks about. We grieve the many things that are to grieve that these pages have no space for. Our ancestors. Our homes. Our sick. Our injured. Our land. The list is endless. It grows while the grief drains us of the energy to write, even when every single victim requires entire bodies of work. We have repeated ad nauseum the word grieve that it has been stripped of its meaning. From the beginning, we were aware that writing on this is deeply flawed. Language cannot communicate what the mind cannot process. Maybe we do not need to write. Maybe we weaponize our chants as eulogy, turn our marching into prayer, transform the streets into a funeral procession.”

And then this next thing is from a 2013 speech that Angela Davis gave called ‘On Palestine, G4S, and the Prison Industrial Complex.’ 

“When I traveled to Palestine two years ago with a delegation of indigenous and women of color scholar/activists, it was the first time the members of the delegation had actually visited Palestine. Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the oppression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people. Gun-carrying military men and women, many extremely young, were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison. One can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison. G4S clearly represents these carceral trajectories that are so obvious in Palestine, but also increasingly characterize the profit-driven moves of transnational corporations associated with the rise of mass incarceration in the U.S. and around the world. On any given day, there are almost 2.5 million people in our country's jails, prisons, and military prisons, as well as jails in Indian country and immigrant detention centers. It is a daily census, so it doesn't reflect the number of people who go through the system every week or every month or every year. The majority are people of color. The fastest growing sector comprises of women of color. Many are queer or trans. As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison industrial complex. And so, if we say, abolish the prison industrial complex as we do, we should also say, abolish apartheid and end the occupation of Palestine. In the United States, when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America, and especially before black audiences, the response often is, why hasn't anyone told us about this before? Why hasn't anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron, not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South? Why hasn't anyone told us this before? Just as we say, never again, with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say, never again, with respect to the apartheid in South Africa and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities, people inside and outside the prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall, Boycott G4S, support BDS, Palestine will be free.”

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I want to share one final quote from Angela Davis, and this is from an interview that she gave just this past month.

Angela Davis: You know, I think back to June Jordan, the incredible poet. When very few people were talking about the importance of supporting Palestine, June was up front, arguing that it was not only necessary to support people in Palestine, but to recognize that Palestine itself is a kind of moral litmus tests for the world. Of course, Nelson Mandela said that South Africa would not be free until Palestine is free. So Palestine occupies a very central place in the political imagination of the last 50, 75 years.

EH: I realize there is so much more that can and should be said, and I will share more of Angela Davis's analysis and connections throughout this episode, but I did just wanna start there. 

And before we get into today's episode, please don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of the podcast wherever you listen. If you appreciate the work that I'm doing, you can become a supporter of the podcast on my website stargaysastrology.ghost.io. The link will be in the show notes. 

[From 1971 Interview with Angela Davis}

Interviewer: What do you see as the meaning of the term revolutionary?

Angela Davis: Well, there's no single simple meaning of the term revolutionary. A revolutionary is a man or a woman who is a lot of things. But basically, the revolutionary wants to change the nature of society in a way to promote a world where the needs and interests of the people are responded to. A revolutionary realizes, however, that in order to create a world where human beings can live and love and be healthy and create, you have to completely revolutionize the entire fabric of society. You have to overturn the economic structure where you have a few individuals who are in possession of the vast majority of the wealth in this country that's been produced by the majority of the people, and you have to destroy this political apparatus which, under the guise of revolutionary government, perpetrates the most incredible misery on the masses of people.

EH: Angela Davis is a revolutionary Marxist feminist, an activist and a scholar focused on connecting the struggles of all oppressed people. In particular, understanding how capitalism and imperialism create the conditions for racism, sexism, and the prison and military industrial complex. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the Dynamite Hill neighborhood, a neighborhood that suffered from frequent bombings meant to deter black people from living there. Her mother was connected with communist groups during Davis's youth, and Davis went to study at the more radical, not segregated Elizabeth Erwin High School in the Greenwich Village, experiences which she names as setting her on a path towards Marxism. She attended Brandeis University, where she met philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who would become her academic mentor for much of her education. She studied abroad in France, and then philosophy at the University of Frankfurt before returning to the states to follow Herbert Marcuse to University of California, San Diego for her Masters and then PhD. During her studies, she had a growing interest and commitment to communism, in particular, Marxism. And in 1968, she officially joined the Communist Party via the Che-Lumumba cell.

In 1969, she began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, but was promptly fired by the California Board of Regents for being a communist, before being briefly rehired after a judge ruled that she couldn't be fired for her affiliation, and then fired again in June of 1970, this time for inflammatory language, referring to the police as ‘pigs’ in some of the speeches that she had given. During this time, she became involved with the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. a group dedicated to advocating on behalf of George Jackson, Fleta Drumgo, and John Cluchette, who were accused of killing a prison guard in Soledad Prison. In particular, she was close with George Jackson and his younger brother, Jonathan Jackson, who was not in prison. In August of 1970, Jonathan Jackson took control of a Marin County courtroom and took the judge and several jurors hostage, arming the defendants in an attempt to free the Soledad brothers. The ensuing exchange of gunfire with the police killed the judge, the defendants, and Jonathan Jackson. And because the guns used had been purchased under Davis's name, she was persecuted by the state of California, and a warrant was issued for her arrest on August 14th, 1970, before she was added to the FBI's most wanted list on August 18th. Davis fled and traveled between friends' homes to avoid arrest. But on October 13th, 1970, she was captured by the FBI in New York City.

During her 16-month incarceration, a large movement to free Angela Davis began, and she was acquitted on June 4th, 1972. Following her acquittal, Davis returned to teaching, but her class sizes were limited, and she was forced to teach in secret to avoid backlash from funders, initially at least. She taught at the Claremont Colleges, San Francisco State, UC Santa Cruz, and Rutgers. She's also published several books, first her autobiography, and then many books on the relationship between race, gender, and class, and also on abolition. In 1997, she helped form Critical Resistance, a prison abolition group, and has been a strong advocate for many liberation struggles, and in particular for understanding that all liberation struggles are connected, as they are all the results of imperialism and capitalism. 

Okay, let's talk about Angela Davis's birth chart.

So, Davis was born on January 26, 1944, at 12.30 p.m. in Birmingham, Alabama. She has a Taurus rising, with her sun and moon both in Aquarius. She has Mercury and the Midheaven in Capricorn. Venus is in Sagittarius. Mars and Saturn are both in Gemini. And Jupiter is in Leo.

So let's talk first about her Taurus rising. So Taurus is a fixed Earth sign. So with the fixed we're looking at stabilizing, and with Earth we're looking at the material physical realm. So Taurus is all about stabilizing material resources. And the rising sign is what we are motivated by and what we want to be known for. So with Taurus it's all about building something beautiful that is meant to last. With Taurus, I often think about a hand-knit wool blanket. It takes a long time to make, and you can't rush the process. But what you end up with is a beautiful, high-quality blanket that will last for a very long time. So with Angela's rising sign being Taurus, she wants to be known for building something beautiful that is meant to last.

And her Taurus Rising is ruled by Venus in Sagittarius and the Eighth House. Now, the Eighth House being about shared resources, what we owe to others and what is owed to us, we know that her life is being driven by the need to create shared resources that will stand the test of time. I think we can see this play out most clearly in her commitment to communism and her rejection of capitalism. Angela Davis was a committed Marxist, and a longtime member of the Communist Party. She joined the Communist Party via the Che-Lumumba Club, which was an all-Black contingent, focused on bringing Marxist-Leninist ideology to the Black liberation struggle. And she later ran as the vice presidential candidate for the Communist Party of the United States in 1980 and 84, and then founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a democratic socialist group, in 1991.

I want to look briefly at a few Marxist principles in order to understand Davis's Taurus Rising a little bit better. One of Marx's main critiques of capitalism is that work is alienated. He says that labor can be one of life's greatest joys if workers can, quote, see themselves in the objects they've created. In other words, labor offers us an opportunity to externalize something of ourselves into the material world.

Take for example the wool blanket. The person making it has picked the design and the colors and spent the time doing stitch after stitch. By creating the blanket, they are externalizing some part of themselves. In contrast to this, the factory assembly lines where one person makes one small part of a larger object and never sees the fully realized product. And of course, we know in the age of fast fashion and Apple phones, which are designed to only last a few years that these factory assembly line products are not made to last. Marx also writes about the precarity of workers in a capitalist system. If costs rise or technology advances, workers can be laid off, which is the opposite of that Taurean stability of resources. And then of course Marx's main criticism is that capitalists exploit workers by paying them as little as possible in order to have the largest profit margins possible.

We can see how Davis' ascendant ruler, being in the Eighth House, would make her focused on the question of how communal resources are shared or not. Who gets what of the resources that are available, and how resources are being made. Will they last a long time? 

And as a side note, she has some very interesting synastry with Karl Marx. They both were born on solar eclipses, and Marx's sun and moon are conjunct Davis' ascendant while Davis's son and moon are conjunct Marx's ascendant. 

So Davis's commitment to communism was in large part defined by her understanding of the connections between racism and capitalism. She speaks often about the super-exploitation of Black people and other racialized groups and to the history of capitalism dating back to the forced slave labor of African people. She takes this analysis further and connects the roots of many forms of oppression. In one interview, she says, 

“fundamentally, the roots of homophobia are very much connected to the roots of racism, which are connected to the roots of sexism, and to the roots of economic exploitation. It is not coincidental that the same forces that will picket an abortion line or inflict violence on abortion providers are the same ones who have tried to prevent integrated schools. These ultra-right forces, the most extreme being the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis, are also the same forces responsible for violence against gays and lesbians, and for a fraudulent analysis holding homosexuals responsible for the so-called breakdown of the family. If one simply looks at the ties established among our enemies, there should be a greater awareness of the need to build a united movement. After all, we're challenging a common adversary.”

So we can understand her commitment to Marxism and communism as a commitment to building a structure that would more equitably share communal resources among all people and would create resources that are sturdy and reliable. Okay, now let's take a look at Davis's sun. And we're actually going to look at her sun and moon together because she is an Aquarius Sun and Moon. This means that she was born just after a new moon, but this wasn't just any new moon.

She was born hours after a solar eclipse at four degrees of Aquarius. And this would have been a pretty total solar eclipse as the south node of the moon, (the nodes being the places that indicate an eclipse), was just two degrees away at six degrees of Aquarius. So let's talk about the eclipse piece first. Eclipses take place every six months and they represent big beginnings, big endings, moments where time seems to move at a different pace and they will often coincide with major events or turning points. Being born on an eclipse means that Angela Davis has captured in her chart this intense energy, and it likely indicates that eclipses will coincide with major turning points in her life, and that she carries the weight of the eclipses. I will return to the fact that this is a south node eclipse in a moment, but I want to talk about Aquarius energy first.

So Aquarius is a fixed air sign, so we're thinking about stabilizing again, but this time in the social and intellectual. Aquarius is ideologically firm, committed to its beliefs, and being ruled by Saturn, interested in the larger structures that govern life and theories that make sense of these structures. The symbol for Aquarius is the water bearer, the one who brings necessary life-giving resources to the community.

So Aquarius is committed to the collective, but from a place of deeply held ideological visions about what the structures of society could or should look like. And again, Davis's commitment to communism is particularly apt here. Her focus on the need to dismantle capitalism in order to do away with racism comes to mind in particular. She has a vision of a structure of society that would actually meet the needs of the people involved. In a speech on the Vietnam War she said,

“We have to talk about what's happening in Vietnam as being a symptom of something that's happening all over the world, of something that's happening in this country. And in order for the anti-war movement to be effective, it has to link up with the struggle for Black and Brown liberation in this country, with the struggle of exploited white workers. We are facing a common enemy, and that enemy is Yankee imperialism, which is killing us both here and abroad. Now I think anyone who would try to separate those struggles, anyone who would say that in order to consolidate an anti-war movement, you have to leave all of these other outlying issues out of the picture, is playing right into the hands of the enemy.”

And even her approach to communism is Aquarian. In her autobiography, she said, 

“For me, revolution was never an interim thing to do before settling down. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime. As 1968 got underway, I realized how much I needed to find a collective. Floating from activity to activity was no revolutionary anything. Individual activity, sporadic and disconnected, is not revolutionary work. Serious revolutionary work consists of persistent and methodical efforts through a collective of other revolutionaries to organize the masses for action. To become a communist is to make a lifetime commitment that requires a great deal of serious thinking about whether one has the knowledge, the strength, the stamina and the discipline that a communist must have.”

And later, 

“at this stage in my life and political evolution, I needed to become a part of a serious revolutionary party. I wanted an anchor, a base, a mooring. I needed comrades with whom I could share a common ideology. It wasn't that I was fearless, but I knew that to win we had to fight. And the fight that would win was the one collectively waged by masses of our people and working people in general. This fight had to be led by a group, a party with more permanence in its membership and structure and more substance in its ideology.”

So in both of these quotes we see that she takes the ideology very seriously, and it takes her many months to decide whether or not to join the Communist Party because she needs to be sure that she can commit fully to the party's ideology. And her desire to have a base to work from, she wants something that is sturdy and permanent, so again we get that fixed energy. Another example of this is in her studies in philosophy. After she has decided that she's interested in studying philosophy in graduate school, she schedules an appointment with the professor Herbert Marcuse to ask him for a list of philosophy works and the sequence in which she ought to read them, because her “independent reading in philosophy had been unsystematic with that regard for any national or historical relations” thus far.

The things that she learns, she wants to learn the whole of, and wants to understand the larger structure in which the different pieces fit together. This is very Saturnian. There is a desire for that rigid structure of thought. With her sun, which is her purpose, and her moon, how she lives out that purpose, both being an Aquarius, her life is committed to the struggle to end capitalism, to end racism, to abolish prisons, and all the other collective liberation struggles that are connected to these. And if we bring in the house placement, the 10th house of career, public image, and reputation, she is very obviously committed to her ideology in the public sphere. She's known for her commitment to liberation struggles, and her reputation is as a communist and revolutionary. Her time on the FBI's Most Wanted list was in large part the result of her political affiliations and a large part of her career has involved public speaking engagements about the interconnectedness of liberatory struggles. 

As far as this being a south node eclipse and the south node being so closely conjunct to our sun, the south node is associated with releasing, purging, and letting go. And the sun is the ego, the place that we shine. So with that conjunction, we would expect a releasing of ego or perhaps a shunning of that shining individuality that is associated with the solar. And we do see this in several interviews. So in one she says, 

“Well, I'm a person who doesn't focus so much on individual identities as I do on collective struggles.”

And in another she says, 

“I’m aware of the ways in which, especially in capitalist societies, there's a tendency to focus on the individual at the expense of allowing people to understand that history unfolds, not as a consequence of the actions and words of great individuals, but rather as a consequence of people coming together, joining hands and uniting with their differences, not across their differences, but with their differences, in a quest to create more freedom and more happiness in the world.”

And in another interview, she says of the attention that she received while in jail, 

“the campaign made her feel less isolated, but she found the attention embarrassing, there were so many women in jail with nobody for support. And here she was with her million postcards. She was thankful, but she never had wanted to be the pinup. I feel best when I'm working in the background. Teaching and organizing is the work I love doing. I was very disturbed in jail because I saw so many women who got such a bad deal. It was not right for me to be the focus of so much attention when I already had a network of people.”

So there is both an intentional turn towards collective identification over individualism, and we can see that she's not interested in being an icon, and in fact there is some shame around this. But this of course does not override the fact that her sun is in the Tenth House. She is and has been for the majority of her life a major public figure. Having the sun and Moon both in the Tenth House indicates that her purpose is taking place in the public sphere. She can't hide from the spotlight. 

Another important piece of Davis' chart that we see playing out is her 9th house of Capricorn, which contains both her Midheaven and Mercury. Because the Midheaven, which is the highest point in the sky, is in the 9th house, we get 9th house themes imported into Angela's public image and career, the work that she is known for. The 9th house is associated with higher education as well as foreign travel.

Davis has been a career academic alongside her activism, and some of her most important studies took place abroad, when she studied in France and then in Germany. So we get both of these 9th house significations here. Davis has consistently woven her academic studies with her revolutionary work, referring to herself as a scholar-activist. And because we have Mercury, the planet of communication, writing, and teaching, we see her work primarily as a lecturer and as a writer of several important books. Outside of the higher education institutions, she also led the liberation school for the L.A. SNCC in 1968. In her autobiography, she said, 

“I was personally criticized for the courses I had included in the curriculum for the liberation school. Whereas I saw the school as being a consciousness-raising vehicle, as imparting political education to the community, the brother from New York thought it should be geared fundamentally towards teaching skills to the community. Skills such as radio and TV repair and computer programming. But my overall vision for the school I directed was of a place where political understanding was forged and sharpened. Where consciousness became explicit and was urged in a revolutionary direction.”

 And later in San Diego, she helped form the Lumumba-Zapata College, a place where people could acquire the knowledge and skills needed to more effectively wage liberation struggles. So clearly from these examples, we see that political education and teaching are integral to Davis's understanding of revolution and activism. And I will just say briefly that all of these placements we've been talking about in the ninth and tenth houses, so Capricorn and Aquarius, are ruled by Saturn, which is in Gemini, in the second house in her chart, and actually is in an exact trine with her moon.

And the second house has to do with one's own resources. So it makes sense that so much of her focus, with her ascendant ruler being in the eighth house of other people's resources, and her sun, moon, mid-heaven, and mercury, all being ruled by Saturn in the second house, her focus is on resources. On what people have and don't have, and on what the systems and structures, Saturn, are that create those divisions of resources. 

Okay, I wanted to do something a little bit different this time and talk a little bit about timing as well. So we're actually going to talk about the secondary progressed moon cycle. So with secondary progressions we are looking at theoretical movement as opposed to actual movement, and with secondary progressions the planets move at the pace of one day per one year. So since Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, the transits on January 27, 1944 would equate to her first year of life, and so on. With this, we can track the moon cycles. So, in real life, the moon cycle is about 28 days, so one progressed moon cycle would be about 28 years. Davis is old enough that she has lived through three progressed moon cycles at this point.

So with the moon cycle in general, the new moon represents something that is just starting, a seed that is being planted. And that seed grows through the moon cycle until we hit the full moon, where it blooms, and then it slowly decays and becomes compost for the next new moon. With secondary progressions, the new moon indicates the beginning of a particular chapter of life, and the full moon indicates the themes of that chapter reaching their peak or full visibility.

So we're going to go through some dates with Davis's Secondary Progressed Moon, but looking at the larger cycles, that first Progressed Moon cycle has to do with her education through her initial Communist Party affiliation, becoming a communist, and getting involved with the Soledad brothers. Her second Progressed Moon cycle has to do with Davis as a professor, drawing connections between gender, race and class. And her third secondary progressed moon cycle has to do with her, again, as a professor now drawing more on connections about abolition and international liberation struggles.

 So for the first moon cycle, she is born just after a new moon. So the first lunation that we get is actually a secondary progressed full moon, which is July 27th, 1957 to September 19th, 1961. And it's during this time that she attends Elizabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, leaving home for the first time and entering an integrated school. And Elizabeth Irwin was known to be more radical and she was approached by the communist group, Advance, while she was there. And then in September of 1961, she hits the progress disseminating moon. which is when she enters Brandeis College. In August of 1965, she hits the progressed last quarter moon and this phase is often called the crisis of consciousness. And this is the time where she realizes that she really wants to study philosophy. So she's having this change in what she wants to focus on after all that she has learned up until this point in her life. She finally hits the next progressed new moon on June 3rd, 1972.

And this date is really important and kind of shocking how accurate it is, because she was acquitted from her affiliation with Jonathan Jackson and the Marin County shooting on June 4th, 1972, so just one day later. So we can see how this first cycle has to do with her education and increasing involvement with philosophy and communism and we can also very clearly see that the Progressed New Moon on June 3rd, 1972 was a real turning point in her life. She was acquitted and able to return to teaching, but because she was fired and then arrested so soon after she initially started teaching, she doesn't really start teaching until after this Progressed New Moon. So this moment really marks an end to this first chapter of her life. During this next progressed moon phase, Davis releases several books. The first is her autobiography, which is released in that New Moon period, and then Women, Race, and Class in 1981, Women, Culture, and Politics in 1989, and Blues, Legacies, and Black Feminism in 1998.

The progressed full moon for this phase is from May of 1987 to May of 1991. It is during this full moon that she actually re-releases her autobiography with a new introduction, reflecting on her thinking over the last 14 years. So if the autobiography is the new moon, that full moon is the blooming of all that she's learned during this progressed moon cycle thus far.

She's also appointed to be a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she holds her longest teaching position. And the books that she releases during this time are all about the relationship between gender, race, and class. 

So the next progressed new moon comes in October of 2001 and it is in this phase that her writing turns more explicitly toward the prison industrial complex and abolition, even though she had been working on these issues before. So during this time, the books she releases are Are Prisons Obsolete?, Abolition Democracy?, The Meaning of Freedom?, Freedom is a Constant Struggle?, and Abolition Feminism Now. The progressed full moon for this was January 23rd, 2017 to December 3rd, 2020.

And what's interesting is that on January 21st, 2017, she gave a major speech at the first ever Women's March. And we're still in this progressed moon cycle, so we'll have to wait and see how the rest of it plays out. But we can see that a lot of what she's doing right now is focused more on abolition and the interplay between abolition, feminism, and international liberation struggles.

So I thought it was just interesting to see some of the things that are playing out through her progressed moon cycle. Angela Davis is thankfully still with us and is still giving talks and lectures and making critical connections between all liberation struggles. 

Recently she participated in a roundtable called Abolition Means No More War Free Palestine Now, which you can find on YouTube and I highly recommend watching. And you can also read her book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. 

Angela Davis: It takes time. And oftentimes, we are unable to see where we're headed. But we have to believe that it is possible to make change. And we can't give up. We can't give up. We can't not hope. Because hope is the condition of all struggles. 

EH: Okay, there's so much more that could be said, but I think we will leave it there for today. As always, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram, and you can support the work that makes this podcast possible by becoming a donor on my website. Please like, rate, review, and subscribe, and I will be back with more soon. Bye.