working on my chapter on the angela davis case, so thought it'd be worth mentioning this again:

davis was a grad student at UCSD when hired as a prof at UCLA in '69. she kept her san diego apartment & rented what she described as a "6-room" apartment in LA. each cost $75/mo 1/x

her salary at UCLA was $10,260/year, which came to $863/mo before deductions, plus a supplemental 2/9 of her salary for a research grant. that's an extra $1,140 during each summer month. deducting state and fed income taxes and $8/mo for health care, comes to around $620/mo.

even if davis hadn't eventually subletted her SD apartment to her sister, the $150/mo she paid to rent two substantial apartments in two major cities still did not put her at rent burden. it also meant that she was able regularly to travel between those two cities to organize.

davis is a not only a generational thinker she's a generational model of courage and principle who, supported by several movements, faced off with the UC regents, ronald reagan, and a law-enforcement apparatus that was organized quite literally, to kill her.

but it's important not to exceptionalize her. we could have other angela davises today. they exist. they would be better equipped to wage the struggle if we did n't have a political system in which real estate inflation and wage stagnation have defined the terrain we struggle on.

one of the reasons i supported the #COLA and #COLA4all movements comes from studying the 60s. people paid less in rent. they expected to keep being able to pay less in rent, they were able to get by pretty well on part-time jobs. the horizons of their lives were less careerist.

the effect of real estate inflation and inflation of the overall cost of living on our political horizons, along with what we think is possible in our lives and our relations to each other, is immense.

tl;dr: want more angela davises in the world? moralizing about the failures of our contemporaries and idolizing those from other generations won't get us there.

you want more angela davises? fight at minimum for no-cost/no-debt education, rent control, and full employment.

fight for public education from preschool through ph.d. that is at the resource level of the private high school in NYUC that davis attended. (this would probably require abolishing such private schools entirely).

you want more angela davises, you don't exceptionalize her brilliance. you generalize the best of the conditions that made her possible, and you fight for them to be entitled to everyone.

(& obvs ABOLISH THE POLICE and PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX tyvm)

ok tl;dr #2: you want more angela davises, do virginia woolf one better: give black women two apartments of their own