Women activists who pushed boundaries and helped equate gender

5. Angela Davis

Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama., where she lived on "Dynamite Hill," named after a bombing by the Ku Klux Klan on Black American homes.

Later on in life, at the University of California, San Diego, while in graduate studies during the latter half of the 1960s, she networked with the Black Panthers and the Che-Lumumba Club, the Communist Party's brach which was all Black Americans.

But first and foremost she was an activist.

She fought for the acquittal of three prison inmates of Soledad Prison known as the Soledad brothers, John W. Cluchette, Fleeta Drumgo and George Lester Jackson. They allegedly killed a prison guard after other Black American inmates were killed by another guard. Speculation on political intrigue within the prison was that they were set up. During Jackson's trial in 1970, an escape attempt happened in the courtroom and several people died. Davis was accused of murder, for her alleged co-conspiring. After about 18 months in jail, she was freed in June 1972.

Davis continues her activism to this day, with a focus on race, the criminal justice system and women's rights. Notably, in 2017, Davis spoke at and became honorary co-chair of the Women's March on Washington after Trump's inauguration.

Angela Davis is also co-founder of Critical Resistance, which fights the corrupted prison industrial complex, and has written several books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race, and Class (1980), Women, Culture and Politics (1989), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Abolition Democracy (2005) and The Meaning of Freedom (2012). according to Biography.com.