Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

[9] Her family lived in the "Dynamite Hill" neighborhood, which was marked in the 1950s by the bombings of houses in an attempt to intimidate and drive out middle-class black people who had moved there.

"[16] She worked part-time to earn enough money to travel to France and Switzerland and attended the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki.

She was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed; she had been personally acquainted with the victims.

Events in the United States, including the formation of the Black Panther Party and the transformation of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to an all-black organization, drew her interest upon her return.

Although moved by Carmichael's rhetoric, Davis was reportedly disappointed by her colleagues' black nationalist sentiments and their rejection of communism as a "white man's thing".

[18] She joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA named for revolutionaries Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, of Cuba and Congo, respectively.

[33] At their September 19, 1969, meeting, the Board of Regents fired Davis from her $10,000-a-year post (equivalent to $63,750 in 2023) because of her membership in the Communist Party,[34][35] urged on by California Governor and future president Ronald Reagan.

The report stated, "We deem particularly offensive such utterances as her statement that the regents 'killed, brutalized (and) murdered' the People's Park demonstrators, and her repeated characterizations of the police as 'pigs'".

He armed the black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary W. Thomas, and three female jurors as hostages.

[43] Davis had purchased several of the firearms Jackson used in the attack,[44] including the shotgun used to shoot Haley, which she bought at a San Francisco pawn shop two days before the incident.

[18] As California considers "all persons concerned in the commission of a crime, ... whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense, or aid and abet in its commission, ... are principals in any crime so committed", Davis was charged with "aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley", and Marin County Superior Court Judge Peter Allen Smith issued a warrant for her arrest.

[41] On February 23, 1972, Rodger McAfee, a dairy farmer from Fresno, California, paid her $100,000 (equivalent to $552,500 in 2023) bail with the help of Steve Sparacino, a wealthy business owner.

[53] After the verdict, one juror, Ralph DeLange, made the Black Power salute to a crowd of spectators, which he later told reporters was to show "a unity of opinion for all oppressed people".

She was represented by Howard Moore Jr. and Leo Branton Jr., who hired psychologists to help the defense determine who in the jury pool might favor their arguments, a technique that has since become more common.

[60] In August 1972, Davis visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Central Committee, and received an honorary doctorate from Moscow State University.

[63] In September 1972, Davis visited East Germany, where she met the state's leader Erich Honecker, received an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig and the Star of People's Friendship from Walter Ulbricht.

[64][24][65][66] She visited the Berlin Wall, where she laid flowers at the memorial for Reinhold Huhn, an East German guard who had been killed by a man who was trying to escape with his family across the border in 1962.

[67] In the mid-1970s, Jim Jones, who developed the cult Peoples Temple, initiated friendships with progressive leaders in the San Francisco area including Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement and Davis.

[36] In 2016, Davis was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in Healing and Social Justice from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco during its 48th annual commencement ceremony.

[89] Davis said that she and others who had "circulated a petition about the need for democratization of the structures of governance of the party" were not allowed to run for national office and thus "in a sense ... invited to leave".

[95] In recent works, she has argued that the US prison system resembles a new form of slavery, pointing to the disproportionate share of the African-American population who were incarcerated.

[122] Libertarian journalist Cathy Young wrote that Davis's "long record of support for political violence in the United States and the worst of human rights abusers abroad" undermined the march.

[123] On October 16, 2018, Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, presented Davis with an honorary degree during the inaugural Viola Desmond Legacy Lecture, as part of the institution's bicentennial celebration year.

Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin and others cited criticism of Davis's vocal support for Palestinian rights and the movement to boycott Israel.

[128][129] In November 2019, along with other public figures, Davis signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia, and racism in much of the democratic world", and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election.

[134] By 2020, Davis was living with her partner, the academic Gina Dent,[135] a fellow humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz.

[138] In a 2023 episode of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates revealed to Davis that she is a descendant of William Brewster, a passenger on the Mayflower.

[151] In Renato Guttuso's painting The Funerals of Togliatti (1972),[152] Davis is depicted, among other figures of communism, in the left framework, near the author's self-portrait, Elio Vittorini, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

[153] In 1971, black playwright Elvie Moore wrote the play Angela is Happening, depicting Davis on trial with figures such as Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and H. Rap Brown as eyewitnesses proclaiming her innocence.