words by Charles Brooks
During one of the pivotal periods in Black political history, several colleges and universities extended intellectual inquiry and development beyond the classroom. All across the nation, Black radical and revolutionary speakers would engage in political debate and discussion on the critical issues and events of the day.
As campuses emerged as focal points of student activism and organizing, they frequently hosted speakers such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture, H. Rap Brown/Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Fannie Lou Hammer, Muhammad Ali, and Dick Gregory. They articulated a particular message as they publicly grappled with American politics, imperialism, war, racism, fascism, along with the demands for Black studies programs.
On March 28th, 1962, Malcolm X was invited to speak ai Morgan State College to debate history professor Dr. August Meier on questions about race, racism and integration.
Sixty-four years later, Morgan State University’s (MSU) Presidential Distinguished Series, invited Angela Davis as their first speaker in 2026 where previous speakers included Loretta Lynch, Eddie Glaude, Cornel West, and Al Sharpton.
Over 2,000 came to see Angela Davis, author of 10 books, essayist, public speaker, and public intellectual. She's pictured as the face of resistance and revolution, taking radical positions on abolition, prisons, and Black feminism.
She shared the stage with MSU's president, Dr. David K. Wilson, as they had a conversation touching on a number of different topics.
They talked and reminisced about her 1984 campaign run as a vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party before the questions on her reflections on what led to her lifelong commitment to Black liberation, and the impact of her mentor, Herbert Marcuse on her as a young scholar.
Her responses enlightened the audience on the Double V campaign, the Southern Youth Negro Conference, and the 11th Thesis by Karl Marx.
When asked to give her thoughts about student activism, she pushed back on the premise of Dr. Smith’s question about the absence of student activism today compared to her experiences. The conversation ended with her advice to the students, a question about Barack Obama, and her thoughts about being labeled a civil rights activist.
In her response to the question about Obama, Davis referenced Audre Lorde and talked about embracing contradictions, “...we can embrace contradictions. We can embrace things that appear to contradict themselves…,” said Davis.
In her previous public speaking engagements, she has talked about embracing contradictions, what it means to be a radical, about getting to the root of the matter.
Their conversation highlighted her reflections, memories of her political past while dismissing her political present, her observations and analysis of the current political climate. The line of questions didn’t allow for her to respond to the current political climate; the unleashing of ICE and the National Guard in Black and Brown neighborhoods, the proposed trillion dollar military defense budget, the ballooning police budgets in cities headed by Black mayors, the rise of public training centers also known as “Cop Cities”, or the infiltration of data centers.
There was a lost opportunity for the audience to make connections between these issues, their material conditions to the current manifestations of American imperialism around the globe in Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and in Haiti.
The line of questioning and the subsequent conversation were limited and compromised. The contradictions remained unembraced resulting in a wider and deeper discussion that failed to materialize. In other words, any discussion of recent developments in national, geo-politics and current material conditions will inevitably implicate the role of the Democratic Party.
Instead, the event unfolded as a political spectacle, simultaneously embracing Davis’s political celebrity while functioning as an appendage of the Democratic Party.
A substantive conversation and analysis of the current moment contradict the current political framework and structure where Black political life is narrowly seen through a civil rights lens. A view seen in the pursuit of political assimilation that typically identifies with the Democratic Party. A political culture focused on voting and electoral political power, while typically dismissing the contradictions of American electoral politics.
This political framework is confined to civil rights discourse and does not make the critical connection of the current conditions to American imperialism and capitalism. Doing so not only compromises their pursuit of political assimilation, but more significantly, their political identity that identifies with American exceptionalism.
This framework typically does not extend the point of a structural analysis beyond race, racial discrimination and civil rights. As a result, there's little to no engagement with a radical or revolutionary analysis of the American political project.
More importantly, the current conditions are not connected to a material and structural analysis of neoliberalism, capitalism or imperialism.
This framework is reinforced through various online and offline spaces, Black media outlets, Black academia and think tanks, Black civil society, such as churches, fraternities, sororities, civic groups, the civil rights organizational community, and media groups.
Consider how the 1962 debate was described, “…Malcolm talked about racism and what Black folks should do to counter it. It was like he was teaching us [the audience] how to deal with racism. He was talking to us like a mentor…”
Now, fast forward to 2026 when Dr. Wilson opened the discussion in the same venue that hosted the 1962 debate by saying, “…This series is designed to promote what we called mind expansion to enable you to wrestle with issues of the past, the challenges of the present and the possibilities of tomorrow…”
Political scientist Michael Dawson's research and writing are primarily focused on Black political life and political culture. He’s written several books including, “Blacks In and Out of the Left”, where he reminds us of the radical and revolutionary Black political culture and its significance in Black political life.
In describing the two pivotal periods in Black political history, the Black Popular Front and the Black Power Movement, Dawson writes, “…Black radicals and their movements directly and explicitly challenged white supremacy during both periods. White supremacy was viewed as a racial order, a structure of oppression that shaped the very core of American life (including the organization of capitalism itself). Thus, a central tenet embraced by black radicals of both periods was that the struggle for black freedom was a revolutionary struggle in its own right…”
The discussion with Angela Davis however, revealed an episode in Black political life and political culture today that remains detached from the material and political conditions shaping the current moment.
Links to Davis's prior speaking events
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