The tale is a parable for the resistance generation as it broaches subjects such as socialism, Palestinian rights, male privilege, prisons, systemic racism — issues that were once the crux of the radical Angela Agenda but are now liberal talking points. It reveals a crucial question about how we respond to activists: When should we push back — and when should we wait and see where they lead us?She’s someone who, from a very young age, has provoked enormous controversy over whether her ideas were good or bad,” says Jane Kamensky, director of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. “She cast herself as a revolutionary. And we have liked our civil rights activists firmly in the reform tradition, and we have liked our revolutionaries male.”“She inspired a lot of black intellectuals, in addition to being a person about whose fate we were concerned in how the criminal justice system was treating her,” says Henry Louis Gates, director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He recalled that Davis, who studied philosophy, was the reason he enrolled in a philosophy course and that he had once had hung a “Free Angela” poster on his wall.WP