On October 9, 1969, Angela Davis gave a her first lecture at UCI to an overflow crowd of 1,500 at the Science Lecture Hall (now Schneiderman Hall). Angela Davis was then an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at UCLA. At that time, she also was known as a radical feminist and activist, a member of the Communist Party USA and an associate of the Black Panther Party. According to an article in the October 14, 1969 New University, in her UCI speech Ms. Davis “blasted the Regents for their disregard for academic freedom, and told the assembled students that ‘Now is the time to fight.’ She noted that the Constitution of California states that the Regents are to represent the people. ‘It’s time for students to say ‘We’re people, represent us.’”

The Board of Regents, urged by then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, continued to search for ways to release Davis from her position at UCLA throughout the 1969-70 academic year. They finally accomplished this on June 20, 1970, when they fired Davis for the “inflammatory language” she had used in four different speeches.

Professor Angela Davis gave the Annual Wellek Library Lecture on the UCI campus in 2003. She was Professor of Ethnic Studies at the San Francisco State University from 1980-1984. She also taught at Mills College, UC Berkeley, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. She was a professor in the History of Consciousness and the Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1991 to 2008, and she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita.