Angela Davis presented a beautiful speech commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as other important activists’ such as Rosa Parks. Along with this, Davis also discussed many troubling problems of today such as Gender Violence and how Gender Violence in fact, ties into Racism. As she expanded on these discussion topics, she touched upon issues such as sexual assault, inequality between genders and so much more.

One topic that Davis brought to attention that I found rather troubling was when she first began her speech talking about Martin Luther King. In her speech she mentioned that it wasn’t till the year 2000 that all fifty states in the U.S. accepted MLK day as a national holiday. I think this was troubling for me because it just pointed out the fact that we as a nation did not value the importance of MLK’s work and what he stood for till recent years.

Another topic that Davis brought up that I found interesting was when she began talking about the issue of imprisonment. Davis had an interesting point of view on prisons being that, the prison system seeks to solve the immediate problem by locking away the “bad guys”. However, as Davis discussed, when you lock people away in prison you lock them away without thinking of the problem i.e., why that person is in prison; what got them there? Furthermore, when we do this, we are not solving the issue at hand. This is because once that person is out, depending on what they did, that person is most likely going to fall into the same bad habits he or she had before they were imprisoned. Davis did a wonderful job at bringing forth issues we as society are facing today. She also did a great job at getting the message across that these issues are not going to go away unless we deal with them straight-on.