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The speeches and interviews collected in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement respond to the time contemporary to when they were written in 2013–2015 as well as to the protracted global history of the fight for freedom. Angela Y. Davis repeatedly argues that there are significant continuities between different moments in this struggle and, as a result, the historical context for Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is extensive and spans several centuries. Davis underscores that certain moments during the past couple hundred years are particularly important, however.

Often her speeches mention the history of slavery, including historical acts by governments during the 19th century to bring the practice to an end—the abolition of slavery in England in 1833, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 (which declared that slavery would not continue in the rebellious Southern states), and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865 (which abolished slavery throughout the US). Davis asserts that despite these 19th century acts of abolition, slavery lives on in other forms, such as in the influence of the prison-industrial complex. Davis also describes historical events from the 20th-century civil rights movement—including the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956, the Birmingham campaign or movement for integration of 1963, and the March on Washington in August 1963—for the same purpose. Davis points to these events to stress that, just as the fight for equality was not over at the end of the Civil War, true equality was not achieved by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Davis turns to more contemporary events to describe the continuation of this same pattern. In November 2008, Barack Obama became the first Black person elected President of the United States, leading many observers to suggest that American racism had, at last, finally been vanquished. But Davis points to mounting incidents of violence by police targeted at Black people to counter this conclusion. She describes the outrage sparked by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officers in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. The importance of Brown’s death and the community’s demands for changes to police practices is flagged not only by its mention in the book’s subtitle but also its inclusion of a speech Davis gave in Missouri.

Davis also mentions other young Black people whose deaths in the years after Obama’s historic election also galvanized public attention and spurred activism, including Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy killed by police in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 2014, and Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old shot to death in in Stanford, Florida, in February 2012. Martin was not shot by police, but by a civilian who was later acquitted of all charge using a defense built around Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law, which observers claim creates a dangerous “shoot first” atmosphere of vigilantism and violence that makes young Black men particularly vulnerable in Florida, as well as in other states where similar laws have been enacted.

Numerous incidents of Black people being killed by police in the years after the 2016 release of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle speak to the ongoing relevance of discussions raised by Davis in her book. One such victim was Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who killed in her apartment March 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky, after being struck by six bullets during a botched police raid. An even more impactful incident was the May 2020 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after a police officer was filmed kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes after Floyd as accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill in a small store in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Floyd’s death sparked massive protests as many expressed their horror at yet another incident of violence against a Black man, while others rallied around the police. The police officer in the case, Derek Chauvin, was tried and convicted of Floyd’s murder in 2021.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle also discusses the struggle of Palestinians against Israeli occupation in Gaza extensively. (Several years after the book’s publication, the struggle between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis once again grabbed the world’s attention with the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023.) Davis equates efforts by the Palestinians to break free of Israeli rule to the fight by Nelson Mandela and others against the racist apartheid system that institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa until 1994. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been waged in various forms since the creation of Israel in 1948. Multiple wars between Israeli and Arab forces have been fought, including the Arab-Israeli War (1948), the Six Day War (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). There has been Palestinian resistance since the 1950s, including the First Intifada (meaning “uprising” or “shaking off”) from 1987–1993 and the Second Intifada from 2000–2005. This long history of conflict is included in Davis’s argument advocating for Palestinian liberation in her book.

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