Aida Miriam Davis Wants Black Americans to Find Power in Their African Roots — Aunt Angela Davis Agrees (Exclusive)

Mother and community organizer Aida Mariam Davis didn't set out on her own to write her first book — she was asked to.

"It was in 2020 and a university press found me on the internet and essentially commissioned a book," says Mariam Davis, an Oakland-native who graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in political science and African American Studies and went on to get her Master's in public policy from USC before launching a company called Decolonize Design.

"In May of 2020 there were the uprisings," she says referencing the Black Lives Matter movement, "so they really wanted to have Black and underrepresented writers. I've always had these ideas but it wasn't until I wrote the proposal that I realized 'I'm a writer'."

She already knew the premise and the purpose. "I wanted this book to exalt the dignity and distinction of the Black and African way of life and to do this book justice," she says. "I had to write it for me first and foremost, as a Black woman and a mother to my girls."

In Kindred Creation: Parables and Paradigms for Freedom, which came out Dec. 3 from North Atlantic Books, the mother of two with another on the way writes, "This is a quilt of poetry, prophecy and philosophy, where pain is transformed into power and power turns into generational practice."

Stitching together what she's learned from her own Ethiopian-American roots as well as her academic research, community work and lived experience, she offers that Black Americans can find their greatest strength and peace by embracing the teachings of their own culture and ancestral histories.

"This was created to celebrate our heritage, bring warmth and be a cover and comforter for displaced Africans, Black folk in this country, so that we can reclaim ourselves in spite of hardship," she says. "We took the scraps and we made masterpieces."

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That thesis, she says, proved too radical for her original publisher. When she was nearly done with the book, she was dropped in 2023 after being told to "cater to a wider audience" and had to seek out a new home for her work. "There's a Yoruba proverb," she says, "the ram only takes a step back when it's building momentum."

Initially at a loss, Mariam Davis, found comfort from a like-minded relative. "When I got dropped, my aunt Angela told me it was a blessing," she says of author, professor and famed political activist Angela Davis, who is her aunt through marriage. "Independent of being family and her notoriety, this is someone who actually cared about the ideas and wanted to see them get out."

Angela Davis even penned the foreword for Kindred Creation. "If you read it, you can tell that at first she was kind of like 'I just thought you were Reggie's little girlfriend,'" she says referencing her husband, "And over time, she got to know how intentional and values-oriented I am. Her whole foreword centered on kinship and that was so meaningful to me. She taught me the value of precision of language."

The newly-minted author hopes the text serves as a balm and a shield for Black Americans in current times. And as Mariam Davis gears up to welcome her third child any day now, she's focused on being grateful for her present and hopeful for the future.

"Every great thing that I'm proud of that I've accomplished has been a function of those two relationships between my partner and my children." she says. "Motherhood has really given me superpowers, but anybody who has an idea to be birthed is a mother of sorts. You want to make the world better so that it's worthy of your children. It gives you a fight."

Kindred Creation: Parables and Paradigms for Freedom by North Atlantic Press is available now, wherever books are sold.

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