The Angela Davis House

The Angela Davis House. March Route for Fair Housing. 1946 , This two-story Queen-Anne-style house at the corner of Center Street and 11th Court North was built around 1900 for the Hayes family. White neighbors objected when they learned the Hayes family sold their house to a Black couple, Frank and Sallye Davis. Young Peggy Hayes' first childhood memory was of a cross burning in her front yard after the sale was completed. The Davises and their young daughter Angela moved into the house in the middle of the night. Angela was one of many new Black children whose upwardly-mobile families chose to move onto Center Street and lived under the threat of terrorist bombings and drive-by shootings. , "The importance of doing activist work is...it allows you to give back." , Angela Davis , Birmingham native and civil rights activist., Angela Davis in her autobiography described her feelings as a five-year-old at one of the bombings that rocked Dynamite Hill. The explosion that shook her house was “a hundred times louder than the loudest, most frightening thunderclap I had ever heard... Medicine bottles flew off the shelves, shattering all around me. The floor seemed to slip away from my feet as I raced into the kitchen and my frightened mother's arms." Far into the night, angry Black people who gathered on the hill to see the bomb-damaged house “spoke of death, of White hatred...But of their own fear, they said nothing. Apparently it did not exist, for Black families continued to move in.” , Lesson H16: How do you think the two little girls, Peggy Hayes and Angela Davis–viewed the activities that were going on around them?