Angela Davis, A Love Letter — Because Of You I Refuse To Shrink

Dear Angela Davis,

Cheers to the lady teaching the beauty of our natural crowns! Today, we celebrate a Queen reaching 82 years around the sun. It is a blessing to honor an activist, scholar, and author. Recognized internationally, your name still lands like a lesson. 

The things you’ve seen and lived through, I cannot begin to fathom. I acknowledge your experience as a political prisoner shaping life as we see it, but past that tribulation, you are a global symbol of resistance. Reigning into modern day, we continue to give you your flowers.

Happy birthday!

The seeds you’ve cultivated:

• Born in Birmingham, Alabama, during the era of Jim Crow segregation
  
• Emerged as a scholar and activist during the 1960s civil rights era
  
• Affiliated with the Black Panther Party and aligned with Black liberation movements
  
• Public critic of racism, police violence, and the U.S. prison system
  
• Placed under surveillance by the U.S. government
  
• Added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1970
  
• Falsely accused in connection with a California courtroom shooting
  
• Incarcerated for 16 months while facing the death penalty
  
• Sparked the international “Free Angela Davis” movement
  
• Acquitted of all charges in 1972
  
• Returned to public life as a scholar, author, and educator
  

With all of that in mind down memory lane, you continue to be a leading voice in prison abolition and Black feminist thought.

You knew who you were, and that is inspirational.

A Letter From A Black Woman Still Becoming

I’m writing this letter as a Black woman who is still becoming. Still learning how to be brave out loud. Still learning how to stand on my beliefs without shrinking them down for somebody else’s comfort. When I look at the world we’re living in, where the truth gets edited, where cruelty gets normalized, and where Black women are still expected to carry everybody’s pain with a smile, your life feels like both a mirror and a map.

Because you never made it easy for people to misunderstand you.

You never offered your voice up for approval. You offered it up for truth. Even now, that kind of courage feels rare. Not because people don’t want change, but because so many people want it without consequence.

But you have always been a woman who understood that liberation has a price. And you were willing to pay it. 

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You Never Asked To Be Tolerated

That part of your story stays with me. Not just the public parts that people quote and repost. Not just the photos that have become icons. I’m talking about the discipline behind your beliefs. The patience behind your power. The clarity behind your fight.

You are living proof that a Black woman can be brilliant and still rooted. That she can be soft spoken and still shake rooms. That she can challenge the entire world and still maintain her humanity.

That matters to me deeply because the world has a way of trying to punish Black women for having both a mind and a backbone.

I’ve watched people celebrate Black women’s strength, but only when it’s useful to them. I’ve watched them applaud our resilience, but disappear when we ask for protection. I’ve watched them demand our labor, our leadership, our emotional intelligence, but call us “too much” the second we stop performing peace.

You never performed it.

You never shaped yourself into something smaller just to be tolerated.

You made it clear that the goal was never to be digestible. The goal was to disrupt, to be free.

That is a lesson many are still learning in real time. I know I am. 

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The Lesson Of Courage In A Loud World

Being a young Black woman today can feel like living in constant negotiation. A negotiation between what you know is true and what people want you to pretend isn’t happening. A negotiation between speaking up and staying safe. A negotiation between calling something out and being labeled “angry,” “difficult,” or “dramatic.”

But you showed us that courage isn’t just a personality trait. It is a choice. A practice. Something you train yourself into.

Your life is an example of wanting more for yourself. A showcase of what using Backbone in your voice feels like. A placard of intentionally acting on your decisions. More stamina in the moments where it would be easier to fall silent.

You didn’t just critique the world. You challenged people to change it.

We don’t take that lightly.

You never let anyone confuse talk with transformation.

You didn’t just name problems. You demanded answers. You forced the world to confront the systems it tries to hide behind. We are witnessing a political climate with the current administration, where the future generation needs to remember our leaders. 

Thank you, Angela, for your service.

You Made Room For Black Women To Be Full

What I love most about your legacy is that it made room for Black women to be full. To be complex. To be layered. To be intellectual and emotional. To be tender and radical. To be beautiful and dangerous to injustice at the same time.

You stretched the definition of what Black womanhood could look like when it refuses to be controlled.

So on your birthday, I’m not just celebrating you. I’m studying you.

I’m studying how you held your head up in a world that wanted it bowed.

I’m studying how you kept your spirit intact in a world that profits off Black women being broken.

I’m studying your bravery. 

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Thank You For Planting Courage In Us

Angela, thank you for showing Black women that we don’t have to earn our right to be respected. We can stand on our worth without asking. To the woman who personifies afros as a symbol of pride.

Happy birthday to you!

Cheers, to the courage you planted in people like me, even from a distance. Even through time. Even through history.

With love.