Angela Davis has spent her life fighting for civil rights. As a teenager in Alabama, she organized interracial study groups, which the police disbanded. She attended Brandeis University and UC San Diego, where she worked with the all-black branch of the Communist Party. She was hired to teach at UCLA but the UC Regents tried to fire her for her association with communism. Then-Chancellor Charles Young defended her right to academic freedom and she retained her position. When she left UCLA in 1970, Governor Ronald Reagan said she’d never teach in the UC system again. Yet she spent 17 years on the faculty at UC Santa Cruz. Her current work focuses on incarceration and the criminalization of communities most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. For Spring 2014, she has accepted a residency in the UCLA Department of Gender Studies.