Speaking to a sold-out audience at Bailey Hall on Monday, Professor Angela Davis reminded us of that Karl Marx aphorism, in so many words: We make our own history, but not as we choose. Rather, we are constantly haunted by those generations that came before us. History, materialized in the form of dead, calcified labor, weighs heavy upon our actions. Yet, Professor Davis, in speaking to a crowd of young and older activists alike, manifested an altogether different vision of history. Rather than the ghost of past labor, Davis arrived at Cornell representing the vivacity of deferred revolution — a figure of history who reminds us not of our constraints, but our infinite paths forward.
Over the last two years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it must be like to be Angela Davis. As she reminded us, she’s been in the fight for Palestine since her undergraduate years at Brandeis University. In all that time, the issue has existed in only the remotest margins of even the struggle for social justice. At Bailey Hall, however, the first mention of Israeli occupation and genocide was met with a bubbling anticipation. Amidst the raucous applause, a chant of “Free Palestine” broke out. The margins have made their way to the center, she expressed as she spoke about the overwhelming divestment referendum last spring.
At the same time, Davis is 81, and it’s easy to grow conservative as time goes on, even if you’re a communist. Professor Davis has already fallen victim to idiotic social media campaigns portraying her as insufficiently radical — that inevitable process by which a new generation of leftists casts off and destroys the old. Yet, even against my better judgment, I was also wondering if we were in for a disaster. What if this would be a former revolutionary resting on her laurels from half a century ago? There’s a certain poeticism in that possible tragedy: to be vindicated by history only after you have consigned yourself to the past.
It was a silly concern. During the Q&A, Davis offered a provocation: She was glad that the revolution of the 1960s never came about. It would have been a masculinist revolution; it wouldn’t have given space for disability rights; it would have had blindspots for trans people and environmental justice. With perhaps a tinge of excessive modesty, Davis refused to mourn her own biggest claim to fame, and, in doing so, ordered her audience to refuse complacency in themselves. Having been absurdly berated by her ideological progeny, Professor Davis embraced the criticism and urged us to keep pushing.
But, so then, what is the value of Angela Davis in 2025? Was she simply here to offer a reminder to learn from her mistakes? She certainly wasn’t there to serve as figurehead, spending much of the lecture ambivalent about the lionization of the individual in MLK (for whom the lecture was named). Rejecting the “great man” theory of history, she arrived at Cornell as a “great woman,” only qualified to reject the label by its own necessity.
It is that contradiction, isn’t it? To be a leftist means we must constantly take from history, either as negative or positive. It means we must find the radical possibility contained within the past, without allowing the past to be a constraint on the degree of radical possibility. Davis is important because she is, and must be, and cannot be. A brilliant orator and unparalleled thinker, she has all the makings of a “great woman,” but is most valuable in her rejection of the individual for the beauty of the collective. At the end of the lecture, Davis stepped off stage and left us to ruminate: another chant (from the river to the sea) began to ripple. The jubilant conversation began to echo. From the words of the individual, the power of the collective had been reinvigorated.
Max Fattal is a fourth year in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. They can be reached at mfattal@cornellsun.com.
