==Early life==
Davis was raised, she told Julian Bond, by a mother who was “an officer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress,” an organization completely under the control of the Communist Party, and “was involved in the campaign to free the [[Scottsboro case|Scottsboro Nine]].”
{{cquote|And as a child, I had the opportunity to spend time with black communists who had come to Birmingham to help organize there, to help organize the Southern Negro Youth Congress. … I often tell people that later, when I joined the Communist Party, it was a difficult decision because I always considered the Communist Party so conservative. It was my parents' friends, you know, I wanted to do something more interesting and more radical, but … I'm following in my mother's footsteps … My parents knew who was a member of the Communist Party and who was underground...”<ref>[http://www.virginia.edu/publichistory/bl/index.php?fulltranscript&uid=45 Angela Davis, interviewed by Julian Bond], Explorations in Black Leadership (University of Virginia). Cf. Phyllis Leffler, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=Y7QaBgAAQBAJ Black Leaders on Leadership: Conversations with Julian Bond]'' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) ISBN 113734251X, pp. 191-192</ref>}}
While still a child, her parents sent Davis to New York City, where she lived with Herbert Aptheker, the Communist Party’s chief theoretician (and a child molester),<ref>Bettina Aptheker, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=7GnE_w_ckBEC&q=%22our+train+rocked%22#v=snippet&q=%22our%20train%20rocked%22&f=false Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel]'' (Seal Press, 2011) ISBN 1580054404</ref> and his family. In New York City, Davis studied at the Little Red Schoolhouse (LRS), notorious for its Communist faculty and student body, including future Weather Underground terrorist [[Kathy Boudin]], then at Elisabeth Irwin High School, an adjunct of LRS.