Teaching as a Tool for Change: Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins in conversation

Please join us for a conversation between Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins. Davis and Huggins will discuss the Oakland Community School and other ground-breaking educational work Huggins has been a part of since her early days as a member of the Black Panther Party’s New Haven Chapter. An opportunity for teachers, parents, and others to hear about their work towards radical educational change and how we can still make change for the future.

This event is free and open to all, you can view the talk on Facebook Live on our Facebook Page. The recording of the event will also be posted there if you are unable to watch live. RECORDING AVAILABLE HERE.

About the Speakers

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of ten books, including Women, Race and Class; Blues Women and Black Feminisms: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday; Are Prisons Obsolete?; The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues; and most recently, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without carceral systems and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

Ericka Huggins is an educator, former Black Panther Party member, political prisoner, human rights activist and poet. For 35 years Ericka has lectured in the United States, and internationally on human rights, Restorative Justice and, the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change.

Ericka was a professor of Sociology and African American Studies in 2014 and 2015 at Merritt College, the home of the Black Panther Party. There she co-created and taught a course titled, “The Black Panther Party-Strategies for Organizing The People”. In 2016, in recognition of the 50 th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party, Ericka regularly travels to speak on campuses and in community about the importance of an inclusive grassroots movement that honors the voices of youth.