tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. a conversation with women's rights activists leymah gbowee. standing up to a brutal dictator and ushering in an era of peace. a new memoir is out now, it is called "mighty be our powers." we will preview our look at the issue of poverty in america starting monday october 10. we will bring you five nights of our travels around the u.s. it is called the poverty tour. all next week will introduce you to the new face of a poor and feature conversations with leaders including kathleen sebelius, jeffrey sachs, a and

cornell west among others. we are glad you joined us. >> every community has a martin luther king boulevard. it's the cornerstone we all know. it's not just a street or boulevard, but a place where wal-mart stands together with your community to make every day better. >> nationwide insurance supports tavis smiley. with every question and answer, help tavis improve financial literacy and remove obstacles to economic empowerment one conversation at a time. nationwide is on your side. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning made possible by kcet public television]

tavis: when her homeland became torn apart by rebels, she decided to fight back. she cursed and empowered women to fight for peace and a new era of stability in the country. a new memoir about it is called "mighty be our powers," how sisterhood and sex changed in nation at war. leymah gbowee, i am pleased to have you on the program. leymah gbowee or witness to the worst of humanity and helped bring liberia out of the dark. her memoir is a captivating narrative that will stand as the testament to women, face, and the spirit of our country. and that is written by the

president of liberia, your native homeland. when year-ago, -- one year ago, the president sat in that chair. i asked for a question about what being a woman did for her, how that challenged her in becoming the first woman president of liberia. here's where she had to say. >> as i man i would of had so many interests. so many things for my attention. i would not have been so concentrated or wanted to be a successful professional the. i would not have been able to speak out in the manner in which i could because i think men and the camaraderie, they want to be sure of everybody. i think it came from the fact that as a woman i felt i could speak. tavis: there's no way she

becomes president if women like you did not pave the way for the moment to happen. what to make of your country having a woman as president as we're approaching the real actions? >> for me, 2005 was an exciting moment. i it felt like we were ordinary women doing our protests and then having a woman president was like the intro of our story coming into the limelight. i often say there is no way anyone can tell the story and not say what the women did for peace. it was an exciting time because it has been years. it was not until 1957 that women could vote. 100 years after independence speaker -- before they could vote. we have all of these years and then we finally got the female

president. it opened up a population of young women who had been destroyed by war. they were at a place where sex, their bodies, all of this was what they knew. the war pushed them into the subservient place. having a woman president brought them out. we had a whole generation of women who were never equal and politics. her elections paved the way for that. it has opened up a new avenue for women in politics. tavis: more to the back story of your life, we are days away from elections in liberia. the president is standing for reelection. what is going to happen? >> i am optimist. i come from a country worrier have little to be hopeful for.

i think it is going to be a first-round win. that is how optimistic i am. there are two challenges ahead of us as women -- african women say to was, your failure is going to prove you not as powerful as we thought you were. that is the first thing. now, we have seen development in a way that was never seen in my own lifetime like i am seeing now. i think we should continue in this trend and then start to prepare someone to take over after she leaves. i think she's going to have a first-round win. >> what, to your story, what motivated you or compelled to to put yourself, your life on the

line to motivate and to power, to bring women together and bringing christian and muslim women together. >> we have no life. there was no like to put on the line. you wake up in the morning and you were grateful, grateful for nothing. it was always in the back of your mind that one bullet could take you out and you could be gone. you go to bed at night, you are grateful to be sleeping but then sleep would never come. we had a horrible life. rape was an everyday thing. our children were being adopted and sent off to fight. there was no future. no one is promised a tomorrow. people plan for tomorrow. when a nation guests to a place where there is no planning and no hope, someone had to do something. it was at that point that we decided we will die sitting.

let's die trying to bring peace. that was the motivation for us. we needed to secure the future of our children. i had four children at the time. they were not with me. they were living as refugees in another country. that was alive. let me get out there, sisters, and let's do what we have to do. we will step out, we will do what we have to do even if we die trying. tavis: tell me what the purpose was and how you came upon the idea to sit holding those signs and, when christians and muslims together, wearing white. >> when we decided to do the protest we had different ideas. the first thing was we had no idea about doctor king, non- violence, the rest of the women.

these were women who did not have any ideas of many of these things. the only thing they knew was the bible and dacron -- the koran. in our sacks close and ashes. we chose white. no makeup. no jewelry. we will cover our hair. that is how it came about. it was symbolic of our ashes. then we decided we would do it fasting and praying. every day we went out there we thought, let's not keep the inside. let's take it outside. we decided to do it because there was a major highway for the president going home and going to work every day. then someone said, let's pick it. at the end of the day it was

about a piece of liberia, the future of our children. i am struck by, and it is in your subtitle, we live in a world where not everybody values the power of prayer, no matter who your prank to. -- you're praying to. the one thing they agree upon is the power of prayer which is for some people so overrated these days. talk about the power in prayer. >> there is no way i can talk about the work that we did or is the success of this work without the religious or the prayer part. i am sitting on your show today and it is evidence of the power of god has in using the foolish things of this world to confront

the wise. when we started our work, we could not have gotten to step aside if we were not trained to god. every morning we said a christian prayer, we set a muslim prayer, and we saying. no one, not a single being in this world, can lead to their children at home knowing that -- and do that protest faithfully for two years without prayers' and without the power of faith in the higher power. i know that everything we did, there was a hand carrying us. there were times that we decided we were going to do something. it is only through the hands of god.

the world we live in, people do not believe in. god first, our nature to persevere second. even from the beginning of the work, it was divinely inspired. tavis: there is a bible verse the comes to my mind that god has not given us a body of fear. but of love, power, and of a sound mind. i'm juxtaposing that scripture with the brutal dictatorship of charles taylor. how do you could be on the fear of a dictator who is on trial right now at the hague, how you get beyond the fear to get to the glove, the power, and the sound mind when you're up against pay a dictator like

charles. >> the first thing, i had been afraid all of my life. you get to replace when the war started. this is 14 years later. you're talking 31, you cannot be afraid for that long. you get used to it. a 17, the first time i saw a dead body i froze. by 31 it was a natural occurrence for me. no people should live like that. that is the first thing. we had gotten over the thing of fear. the power came from our anchor -- anger. anger is like fluid. it takes the shape of the container. so many people you see in

prison, they are angry and they take that and put it into a violent container. we took our anger imported in a peaceful container. then we got the power from god. it propelled us. taylor had a ban on public outrage. we were singing and praising god in our living room. someone said, let's go outside. without leaving a second thought, because he had some of the most brutal soldiers, which took to the streets. people were shocked. we marched to the streets and went to city hall, presented our statement to the press. the next time we stepped out, our numbers increase.

every time we stepped out, it increased and increased and increased. you cannot have a sound mind all by yourself when you live in terror, you live in mayhem, the sound is like the sound of an explosion. you can never have a sound mind by yourself. that is the second place that god stepped in. you will not lose your mind. even after you lose your children. people were losing their children on a daily paces -- basis. tavis: tell me how your range these kinds of protests. you gather these women together. in a country, by your own ignition, where women had not been respected. they are being raped and murdered. women and their children. how do you go from being

disregarded in that way to being respected as a protest in the streets. >> in 2003, we had a gathering where we brought women together. these women, after we had a conversation for 20, we decided, let's take to the streets and create an awareness. we have a stake in all that is happening. recall that our outreach projects. on fridays we went to the markets. sunday we went to the churches. we did that for nine months. the first time we started it was just 20. by the following week, it was 40, 60, 100, and then we had to split up into groups and give people assignments. then we went to a meeting to

evaluate the work we had done. to understand as women that anything in our society would step out. by april of that year, that is when the war started again. when we started, they have different churches and faiths. we asked them to give us leaders from their groups. each group brought in a leader. they became the organizers. every day after we protested, 20 of us went around the table answering questions. what still we do? what did we do wrong? how can we do better tomorrow? because we had no political connections. someone would just call and say, we saw the presidential convoy. there was this guy who could not

make business with his old boss. once we had someone to go, we jumped in. he would say when peace comes out will get my day. that is how we operated. sometimes we walked. other times we had transportation. sometimes no water. one thing we never had was food. tavis: charles taylor is on trial at the hague. to your thoughts on his being on trial and what you expect to come out of the trial? >> i have a radical view when it comes to the hague, the prosecution of taylor. i would like to have seen him on trial for crimes in liberia. not minimizing what he did, but i also think the people of siberia deserve some answers for the terror he unleashed on them.

the verdict is supposed to come any day from now. the one question i'm asking myself, if he is guilty, how does that make it right for those people that we see on a daily basis living in camps. this is like a policy issued in now. intent on keeping this man in a cell while hundreds of thousands of people would never have the ability to live their lives right. every time i asked myself, what kind of justice is this? i think it is equal. if you're serving justice to one person, those who been affected should be served to justice. i would like to see even after his verdict is handing out -- handed down, that some of his wealth is given to those people to rebuild their lives. that would be a semblance of justice. >> how do you spend your time

these days? he had -- if you have a woman president. whether you doing these days? >> there are many challenges. peace is a process. six years later we have seen prostitution on the increase. teen pregnancy. liberia has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world. 994? to everyone hundred thousand births. in some countries it is one to every 100,000. you have the use surge. unemployment is high. we continue to do education among young people. we're doing leadership. the thing i keep saying to my colleagues, we have left a legacy. of those legacies -- we need

women to walk in our shoes. that is the kind of work that we do. beyond that, we use our experiences into other countries. a few years ago we conducted the campaign for the first time. my group and i organized the african women's collections mission. we're having women from all over west africa go to observe the election. tavis: i love coming to work every day because i never know what icon or artist, what a great humanitarian i'm going to meet. it is not often i see courage walked into the studio. up into this building. it happened today. i'm honored to have leymah gbowee on this program. her new book is called "mighty be our powers." i'm honored to have met you.

thank you. >> i am truly humble to have been here today. >> up next, a preview of our look at the issue of poverty in america. stay with us. tavis: next week we're devoting five ties to the issue of poverty. i traveled around the country to meet the people behind the poverty numbers, numbers that show a rise in the ranks of the poor in this country, particularly among children. as the housing crisis grows dyer, those who want the american dream find themselves poor and homeless. >> we are at a camp between interstate 94 and this highway. tavis: how did you come to live in this -- 48 people.

>> we do not have permission to be here. we have been evicted. >> i went to the shelter first and there was no room in the in n. the shelter referred me out here. >> they are having budget problems. tavis: your in your own home and you live in these conditions. >> it makes you feel frustrated. it is like, why couldn't they help me when i was out there? why did i have to be harmless to get help? >> and margaret is predominantly white and middle-class.

we do have a white community. we do have some african- americans and some hispanics as well as other ethnicities here. the age group intends to be people in their 40's, 50's, and 60's. it will be people who had done a physical job for their livelihood and are no longer able to do that. >> i have a found a part-time job. tavis: you live here because you have to or because you want to? >> because i have to. tavis: say you cannot afford a month the apartment? >> it will take me a long time to save up enough money. tavis: the people we met, those who call themselves middle class now rank among the poor. we will introduce you to

americans of all races in our weekend in title the poverty toward. in addition to highlights from our tour, which will feature conversations about poverty with kathleen sebelius, economist jeffrey sachs, cornel west, jim wallis and vicki escarra. i hope he will join this next week as we expose the new face of poverty in america during the party toward. a call to conscious. that is our shore for tonight. good night from los angeles. as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with tom morello and chris evans.

>> every community has a martin luther king boulevard. it's the cornerstone we all know. it's not just a street or boulevard, but a place where wal-mart stands together with your community to make every day better. >> nationwide insurance supports tavis smiley. with every question and answer, help tavis improve financial literacy and remove obstacles to economic empowerment one conversation at a time. nationwide is on your side. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning made possible by kcet public television]