>> they had been trafficking on behalf of the united states government. >> the cia admitted it. >> "freeway - crack in the system". only on al jazeera america. >> a legendary artist known the world over. but to mean harry belafonte's greatest role is as a civil rights leader. >> it is to be expected all of us would participate in the struggle for civil rights, civil liberties to be smeared and to be called names, but it requires much more than that to deter me. >> he stood up at selma and at the side of dr. king. now he shares the stage with the next generation.

>> that's what's happening. >> an america tonight special, young revolutionaries. >> it began that day on the bridge, our nation is still traveling. bloody sunday, when hundreds tried to march from selma, alabama, to montgomery. seeking voting rights and greater justice for all. this marked a turning point as great leaders of the movement see a new generation rising. a fitting moment to bring together two key voices of their time, entertainer harry belafonte, and a new young revolutionary, philip agnu. >> good to see. >> you you, too. >> i'm delighted

for a long time people have been asking what has happened to our youth, where is the next generation going. for a lot of people there has been manied guy suggesting that young people are different. nothing seems to motivate them. of course, we've seen the murder of young like trayvon martin your response to that experience, i think you instant instantly filled a space. have you found that my generation has been responsive to you? you're getting what you need? >> um, yes and no. yes and no. you're an example of someone from previous generation reaching out and reaching back to young people but i think

actually the ball dropped in between. during the civil rights movement the dominant aim and desire eventually move towards integration. the generation that followed you i think began to reap the awards of the fights of the civil rights movement. to really answer your question i think the generation before us, folks who have been able to carry on that legacy have been very helpful, but i think the goals of the civil rights movement have yet to be fully met. >> i'm struck by your observation that enter integration was the target for the movement.

but integration is a little misunderstood. we were looking to integrate into america, whether it was racial integration , economic integration. to be part of the fabric of what this nation professed to be about. but we really would never truly touch the heartbeat of what america was about. when black people received the right to vote in this country, it was not just the right to vote as a mechanical act, but to provoke the black community to go some place that they had never been before. how do you select the individuals who are going to represent us. the only one who is were visible were all the personalities that emerged from the civil rights movement. >> yes. >> that left a void. and in that void was where everybody began to say, what's happened to our young. well, they were no longer being serviced. they were no longer being instructed because the

leadership went off on another mission. correctly so. >> we're tired of our men not being able to be men because they can't find work. >> after the civil rights act and the voting rights act, and dr. king's last and final crusade over the last years of his life was to shift economic policy. that was the most dangerous part of dr. king's legacy, and what he was trying to leave to the next generation. i want to ask you about that the economic part of the struggle. do you think that where it's time that all of us have an indictment of capitalism. >> i think the indictment of

capitalism is not a new theme for our current history. we've always been talking about economic parity, but what black people have always wanted was not that we were rushing to become racially integrated, but the specific target was to shape the economic paradigm, what it looked like. dr. king understood that from the beginning. as a matter of fact he never became as targeted for ultimately what happened to him than he did the moment he began to talk about changing the economic river. >> we're getting ready to demand jobs and income. we're tired of working full-time jobs for part-time income. >> when he developed severe anxiety, he delivered developed

a tick. >> really? >> i took on "the tonight show" and hosted it for a week. dr. king was my guest for the week. >> dr. king, do you think your -- >> i'm more concerned about the quality of my life than the quantity. in other words, i'm more concerned about doing a good job, doing something for humanity and what i consider the will of god than about longevity ultimately. it isn't important how long you live. the important thing is how well you live. [applause] >> i noticed at that time that he had less of that tick, and thought maybe some how he had gotten over it.

i said to him, what happened to the tick? that doesn't seem to be bothering you as much. he said to me was that what has gotten me over it is that i made my peace with death. if i die in the service of lifting fellow humans, that's my award, and in that adjustment he got rid of the tick. i had to example myself, where my ticks were, and what was i pre-occupied with that inhibited my ability to move more aggressively. i challenge myself all the time. >> the voice of two sharing. we'll continue here with what is the most important thing, how well those revolutionaries live and inspire change. at the moment what inspired the young revolutionaries in those days and today. what moved the march to justice?

al jazeera america gives you the total news experience anytime, anywhere. more on every screen. digital, mobile, social. visit aljazeera.com. follow @ajam on twitter. and like aljazeera america on facebook for more stories, more access, more conversations. so you don't just stay on top of the news, go deeper and get more perspectives on every issue. al jazeera america. >> what draws a man or come to stand up and risk all for others?

it takes special courage and a cause worth fighting more. in our conversation actor harry belafonte and new revolutionary philip agnu . a lifetime of braking barriers. harry belafonte rose from humble beginning, but success did not blind him to suffering. >> people asked me what motivate you becoming an activist? i said it wasn't karl marx. it really wasn't abe lincoln. it was just poverty. >> yes. >> oppression motivated me to become an activist in the resistence to that, along the way in this need to get rid of oppression, i heard about marx i heard about lincoln, i heard

about frederick douglas, and that gave me an opportunity to select which one of these voices, which one of these philosophies that i wanted engage with. i happened to move to the places where i moved, which really ticked off the ruling folks. >> yes. >> as early as the 1950s he used his wealth to support the movement. he helped fund the freedom riots and voter registration across the south. he bailed out countless several rights protesters. a commitment echoed by this new generation of young activists. >> we have not forgotten what you have done. in fact, we're building on the blueprint. history is our accomplice. we're creating new ways to do

what you've done before. >> for me this is always always, always been about my personal experience with poverty, and what i saw it do to my family, what i've seen it it do to my family, the community i came from, and what it did to me mentally, physically, what affects effect it is had on my relationships and how i saw myself. >> to act like nothing is happening, that's because we lose. >> philip agnew started his organization, dream defenders n 2012. the group has challenged stand your ground laws and worked to change the disproportionate imprisonment of young black men. >> my first experience ever with activism was in college. it was the murder of a young man named martin lee anderson.

he was 14 years old, and he was killed in a boot camp in florida. it was my first-ever experience doing any kind of activism, any type of organizing. it was in that experience that i really began to see what a path could look like for all the anger that i had about growing up poor. and all the anger i had about looking around and seeing everybody around me struggling. >> struggle is something that belafonte understands well. >> my dear friend harry belafonte. >> he was a close confidant of martin luther king jr. even helped to support dr. king's family, and bailed him out of the birmingham jail. >> one of the things that consistently nourished my commitment to dr. king was his honesty.

the fact that he remained eternally vulnerable because he was always in question about his right to lead, his right to make decisions, and to do things that could have such an impact on human life. one of the things that he did in order to help him stay bouyant in the mist of the storm of decisions was the fact that he gathered around him people whom he thought would bring him in instruction or points of view that would keep him on course. >> agnew grew up in awe of dr. king, belafonte, and other leaders of the movement. but it was the death of trayvon martin that mobilized him to action. >> i think we all know at some point what our purpose is, and the murder of trayvon seemed like people around the country wanted to do something about it. and so really i just followed that. so i was able to get back into

activism during that time, and since that time i've been on a journey to figure out and rediscover, but maybe who i'm supposed to be not in the eyes of anybody else or in the eyes of society who i'm truly supposed to be, but also on a journey to tell other people about that journey. tell young people that, look please do not conform. please do not conform because i think once they take that away from our children, that desire to be different, to be unique, and question everything and think critically about what is around them, question everything, that's when they win. they can control our minds from a very young age, and so i'm very excited being able to talk to people and tell them about my experiences and build a community of free thinkers and non-conformists who really are serious about questioning everything in this society that

this society has taught us. that's what i'm most excited about now, this journey of personal transfer imagination transformation in folks' minds. does that make sense? >> it makes absolute sense. a few of the drives, your mission is not different from what has driven the mission of everybody who is consciously actively engaged in trying to find a way to stop oppression. >> in a moment, more of the conversation between the young revolutionaries.

>> 50 years after bloody sunday think about how much has changed in our nation and how little. activist harry belafonte went to alabama in that march to montgomery. he found while today's young revolutionaries are intrigued about the path he took organizers like philip agnew are pursuing their own goals. >> dr. king said this more than once, it was not necessary for people who are oppressed to always know a certain preciseness of what the end goal will be. sometimes it's equally important

for us to know what we do want even if we don't know what we're aspiring to. yes, we want freedom. yes we want to stop being brutalized. how do you work the system with a new moment for us. >> what is your utopia? i don't like using the word utopia because it place it is in a place that we'll never get there. but what is your vision if the fight continues and the resistence continues in fervor. what would have been the outcome for you? >> the outcome for me simply would have been to know that in every level of the human encounter, of the human experience, we do not count against institutional injustice. systems that are specifically geared to keep people in oppression or in a space that is oppressive .

>> i don't play the police every night in my theater. i play to the americans of all race, creed and color. as long as they keep coming, the police be damned. >> in the early years of my old career i was branded as being arrogant, and i never saw myself as arrogant. after i examined carefully why this critique was being put in place to define who i was, it was that white folks just weren't used to hearing black people speak in the sense of equality. >> yes. >> i want to speak just like you speak to the issues and say what's on my mind and in my heart. and your sense that i might be more appreciative of our benevolence for giving my rights

you see as an act of arrogance and i see as an act of liberation. now i see you come. i don't see you as arrogant, i see you as something more interesting. >> i don't know how they see me. we've been talking a lot about within dreamers and this is a part of a larger conversation about who our target is, and i'm interested in how you all saw t but how we're beginning to frame our fight, our target is not the koch brothers. our target is not--and in reading dr. king i think he would agree, our target is not president obama, it's not a mayor, it's not a police chief. our target actually is public opinion, and it's the masses of people that we've got to move and shift from their place of

comfort, or their place of ignorance, possibly, or just their place of complicit in the system to seeing the world in the way that we see it. an then we can all collectively build a vision for the world that we would all like to see it. >> i take exception with your that your target is not a personality like the koch brothers or barack obama, i can embrace why you would say that but i have to challenge the fact that they should be part of what you target because these are forces that have the power to shape opinion ♪ i'm on my way ♪ ♪ i'm on my way ♪ ♪ i'm on my

way ♪ >> we set out to achieve in the civil rights movement was qualitatively extended by the mission that young people today find themselves on. of all the things i think we could do as a people in this country, the most important tool at our disposal is the reason we seem to be fighting the same fight all the time is because we're fighting the same fight all the time. this generation has now going to back and pay attention to the things that have been won and now lost because of this power play. this thing that we feel redundant for, fighting the same thing is because the enemy has always kept us in the same place. they're tenacious. >> it is to be expected that all of us are participating in the struggle of civil rights and civil liberties to be smeared

and be called names. but it requires much more than that to deter me. >> my mission is near it's end. that's just a fact of life. everybody dies. but in this space i found that in philip agnew i have my dna, my political dna, and he wants to do it the way he's doing it tells me that the future doesn't look so bleak. >> thank you. >> thank you, man. >> two voices, young revolutionaries in their own times, both speaking for justice. that's our america tonight special look at young revolutionary. tell us what you think at www.aljazeera.com/america tonight. talk to us on facebook, come back and we'll have more

"america tonight." [music] al jazeera america gives you the total news experience anytime, anywhere. more on every screen. digital, mobile, social. visit aljazeera.com. follow @ajam on twitter. and like aljazeera america on facebook for more stories, more access, more conversations. so you don't just stay on top of the news, go deeper and get more perspectives on every issue. al jazeera america. >> i took the chance to get out of that prison camp and with a few others went out to work in another camp. >> mary ann yakabi reads her father's words about his time here at the kooskia internment camp in north idaho.

it housed just 265 inmates, all male, mostly volunteers from other camps. >> it was the only camp of its kind in the united states, it was really kind of an experiment... is this gonna work? >> the men were of japanese descent but were not american citizens, some kidnapped by the u.s. government out of latin america and brought to this country after the attack on pearl harbor. arturo yakabi was from lima peru. because kooskia was under justice department jurisdiction, these men were considered prisoners of war. they had geneva convention rights, they knew it and they exercised those rights. >> their food was better, their accommodations were better, the attorneys at the kooskia camp could even get beer. >> summertime digs have produced thousands of objects from the two years kooskia operated during the war. artifacts include art carved from local river rock and so much more. >> he would have loved that there's more studying going on now... he was free to have all that

experience. isn't that ironic - "he was free"... i said "he was 'free' to have all that experience". my father liked it. >> this is al jazeera america, i'm michael eaves in for richelle carey. thousands march to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the selma civil rights event bloody sunday a military offensive against boko haram. banding together for equal rights - nations around the world celebrate international women's day drug source - al jazeera takes you to