Angela Davis, Salih Muhammad to Speak at UCSD

On November 2 at 6pm, Associated Students of UC San Diego (ASUCSD) Office of External Affairs will be hosting a virtual panel titled, “From Generation to Generation”. The event will feature prominent civil rights activist and UCSD alum Angela Davis and Salih Muhammad, statewide organizing director for the UC Student Association (UCSA).

Angela Davis earned an MA from UCSD in 1969 and has been a professor at both UCLA and UCSC among other universities; she is a current professor emeritus at UCSC. Davis was a prominent figure in the prison-abolitionist movement of the 1970s, and continues to criticize the prison industrial complex through her career as an academic and activist. She has published numerous books exploring race, gender, freedom and incarceration through a Marxist lens. In 2020, she was recognized as Time Magazine’s 1970 Woman of the Year, as part of their 100 Women of the Year campaign to celebrate the centenary of women’s suffrage. While a student at UCSD, Davis was a founding member of the Black Student Union.

Salih Muhammad has been involved with activism in the black community since his time in high school. After co-founding a black owned coffee shop and pursuing higher education at UC Berkeley, he now teaches at a Black-owned school and serves as the executive director of the Afrikan Black Coalition (ABC), a consortium of Black Student Unions within California.

The program will consist of two parts: part one will be a conversation on racial justice, with Davis and Muhammad serving as panelists. Part two will be hosted by Black Zen, a podcast group focused on improving health and well-being of black and brown bodies. According to Vice President of External Affairs Alisha Saxena, the forum is structured this way to affirm the importance of mental health for Black students. As such, part two of this event is open only to the Black UCSD community.

The event is co-sponsored by the UCSD department of political science, the Ethnic Studies department, the Black Studies Project, the Black Student Union, and the African American Studies Minor.

This panel comes at a time when Black Lives Matter protests continue to be organized across the nation, including in San Diego. At UCSD, calls for defunding the UCPD have also continued, such as the recent Cops off Campus protest and the Black Student Union’s list of demands intended to fight anti-black racism at UCSD and make campus less alienating for Black students.

The program, open to UC students, faculty, alumni, and employees of all campuses, will be delivered remotely. Registration is available here.

Samir Nomani is the News Editor at The Triton. You can follow him @samir_the_first. Sahana Narayan is an Assistant News Editor for The Triton. You can follow her @sahanasnarayan.