Noted '60s radical Angela Davis delivered a backhanded compliment to Donald Trump last week, saying Americans may actually benefit from his time in the White House because it will force them to stand up for their rights.
"Maybe we need a Donald Trump to wake us up. Once he's elected and people rise up in response, we have to say, well, this is a good thing, because we never knew we had this kind of strength," Davis told an audience at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, the Palm Beach Post reports.
The former Black Panther and Communist Party member who spoke at last month's Women's March in praised activists for fighting Trump's short-lived travel ban on foreign nationals from seven mostly Muslim countries.
"We told Trump, we will not allow you to define our relationship with people from other parts of the world. We will definitely stand up to this unabashed Islamophobia," she said.
She also ripped Trump's decision to rescind President Barack Obama's order protecting the rights of transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice.
"Why are people in the White House having such a hard time with transgender issues? Why has the binary structure of gender become so ingrained and normalized, that we can't ask, why does gender have to consist of only male or female?" she asked.
Davis, immortalized in The Rolling Stone's 1972 song "Sweet Black Angel," is author of "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement," published by Haymarket Books.
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