Flyer Promoting a Rally for Angela Davis Day

This bold black on yellow flyer was produced by the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) to promote Angela Davis Day, a rally held in New York City in September 1971. The flyer was produced as part of the grassroots mobilization that emerged to challenge the politically charged imprisonment of Angela Davis from 1970-1971. Davis’s involvement with the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party’s Che-Lumumba Club, as well as her association with the incarcerated revolutionary George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers, led her to being falsely accused of supplying the weapons used in the Marin County Courthouse Rebellion.

The flyer also situates Davis’s imprisonment within a broader context of racialized state violence by drawing a direct connection to the Attica Uprising, a prison-led rebellion that occurred while Davis was incarcerated and resulted in the deaths of at least 39 people, most of them incarcerated men. Through this lens, the flyer reveals how the Free Angela Davis campaign extended beyond a call for her release to a broader demand for the liberation of all political prisoners.

Beyond its immediate political message, the flyer reflects a largely erased, matrilineal tradition of resistance led by women of color against intersecting forms of racial and gender violence. Among the featured speakers at the rally was Davis’s mother, Sallye Davis, a lifelong educator and activist whose work with the Southern Negro Youth Congress laid the foundation for later Civil Rights groups such as SNCC. The TWWA, the group behind this flyer, was itself part of this lineage. Founded in 1970 by black women active in SNCC, it grew into a multiracial feminist organization that included Chicana, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native women. The flyer is not only a call to political action, but also a document of the enduring legacy of feminist organizing in the United States.

This flyer advertises a rally for Angela Davis Day. The flyer is yellow with black text and features an image of Angela Davis. The flyer reads: [END / RACISM & / REPRESSION / GET IT TOGETHER AT / CENTRAL PARK MALL FOR / ANGELA DAVIS / DAY SEPTEMBER 25 / 1 TO 4 P.M. ENTER AT 5TH AVE. / AND 72ND STREET / DEMAND BAIL FOR ANGELA / INDICT ROCKEFELLER FOR THE / ATTICA MASSACRE / NOW! / HEAR: CONG. RONALD DELLUMS OSSIE DAVIS / MRS. SALLYE DAVIS DICK GREGORY / and others / SPONSORED BY THE UNITED COALITION FOR ANGELA DAVIS DAY / FOR FURTHER INOFRMATION, CALL 243-8555]. The back of the flyer is blank except for a stamped ...