Fania E. Davis is a leading international voice on the intersection of racial and restorative justice. She is a long-time social justice activist, civil rights trial attorney, author, and educator with a PhD in Indigenous Knowledge. Davis came of age in Birmingham, Alabama during the social ferment of the civil rights era. These formative years, particularly the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombing, crystallized within Fania an enduring commitment to social transformation. For the next decades, she was active in the Civil Rights, Black liberation, women’s, prisoners’, peace, anti-racial violence, economic justice and anti-apartheid movements.
Apprenticing with African indigenous healers catalyzed Fania’s search for a healing justice, ultimately leading her to become the Founding Director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and Co-Founding Board Member of the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice. Her numerous honors include the Lifetime Achievement award for excellence in Restorative Justice, the Black Feminist Shapeshifters and Waymakers’ award, the Tikkun (Repair the World) award, the Ella Jo Baker Human Rights award, and the Ebony POWER 100 award. The Los Angeles Times named her a New Civil Rights Leader of the 21st Century. She recently received the Open Society Foundations Justice Rising Award recognizing 16 Black movement leaders working towards racial justice in the United States. Among Davis’ publications is theLittle Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Justice, and U.S. Social Transformation.
Davis, who resides in Oakland, CA., writes and speaks internationally on restorative justice, racial justice, truth processes and indigeneity. She is a mother, grandmother, dancer, meditator and a yoga, qigong and African spirituality practitioner.
