enterprise" i'm here on the campus of ut santa cruz for an exclusive interview with angela davis. that's what's going on in our world starting now.

forty years ago the blant black pant party in self-defense picked up their weapons and started a revolution. the panthers considered the police pigs who slaughtered blacks in the streets. >> the police brutalizing, put an end to this. usually the police wouldn't brutalize anybody if we were on hand because we were armed. they would arrest them and follow them to jail and then bail them out. >> angela davis, a black panther and member of the communist party became an international icon in the struggle for liberation. >> we insist today marks a new beginning for the era of a new movement in the country. >> the fight for civil rights was brewing with anger and determination. >> we're going to walk on this racist power structure and say

to the whole damn government, stick them up [ bleep ] this is a hold up. we've come from what is ours. >> as far as angela davis is concerned, the revolution is over but very different. today she's professor emeritus at the university of california at santa cruz. she's the author of several best sellers and she lectures and travels the world. >> we sit here on the college campus ut santa cruz. forty years ago you were removed from santa cruz, active member of a black freedom struggle. >> actually a little more than 40 years ago i was teaching at ucla. because i was fired from my position in the philosophy department there, my whole story began there. you might say it's a trajectory from one campus to another campus with a lot of very interesting, dangerous and exciting encounters in between.

>> one of those major encounters obviously was you being the third woman in american history to be on the fbi's most wanted history. >> that's interesting. i had forgotten. i had actually repressed that fact and was speaking somewhere and someone introduced me as the third woman in history to have been placed on the fbi's most wanted list and everybody in the audience applauded. >> that moment in history, too, it was almost an honor to be pursued in that way because you were fighting for black liberation. >> but it was also very scary. i became involved in a whole number of campaigns. the soledad brothers was one of the campaigns in which i got involved in. it was as a result of thy activities i found myself charged with what were at that time three capital crimes, murder, kidnapping and conspira

conspiracy. i like to point out it was not so much what i did that has led to my being widely known, all that could have happened to me in object security but it was because of that campaign, people all over the country and then people all over the world, in europe, in africa, in asia. i just returned from india where i met people who told me they had organized a free angela davis committee in deli. almost everywhere i've gone in the world people told me they were people involved at that time. that is why i think, regardless of the fact that i was innocent, i could have been innocent and sentenced to death. it was because of that campaign that i was eventually freed. >> when you were sitting in a prison cell 40 years ago, did

you see any of this happening? did you see yourself getting out of the prison? >> well, to me it's interesting. i had a lot of hope. i was very optimistic. i retained that optimism. >> very really? >> yes. >> after everything that's happened to you, false accusations, incarceration, being kicked out of the university, you still remain hopeful? >> a lot has happened. a lot of positive changes have happened by people in places where we never would have been able to imagine, not only in the white house, right? we have a way of thinking about the relationship between race and class and gender and sexuality and nation and ability that would have boggled people's minds 40 years ago. that to me is progress.

that indicates that we've gone a lot further than i ever would have been able to imagine sitting in that jail cell 40 years ago. >> for so many people you signify a certain kind of militancy and radicalness as opposed to the mainstream civil rights direction. how did you get on that track as opposed to the track other people were on. come from alabama. how do you go from alabama to a black panther party. >> i think it was about generation. nowadays we tend to narrow that movement. we tend to think of it only as a civil rights movement. there were those of us in the '60s who felt as if we needed to go further. we listened to malcolm x. we were also influenced by fidel castro and others.

we were also thinking about global revolutionary transformation. we were thinking about freedom in the largest possible sense. >> so much of the memories at least in the public of the black panther party were people standing around with guns. there were programs and ideas, so much more going on than just women toting guns? >> absolutely. as a matter of fact, initially i would say the guns were more symbolic of resistance, which isn't to say that members of the black panther party didn't have weapons. i had weapons myself at that time. it was a different era. as you point out, the black panther party had all kinds of programs. as a matter of fact, a free breakfast program that is run by the department of agriculture, that idea emanated with the black panther party because the assumption was children couldn't

learn if they were hungry. very simple. but no one else had done it. >> what happened? a question a lot of people ask, if the panthers are so engaged, involved, committed, had such great ideas, how did they disband, fall apart? why are not they still in motion today? >> there is a new black panther party. >> very different organization. >> exactly. exactly. but if you look at the 10-point program that the black panther party developed, you see this schools and health care and into the occupation of the police in black communities and all the other things are still very much on our agenda. the demand has never been fulfilled. they are still there. we still need food. we still need clothing. we still need schools. we still need an end to police occupation. we still need something done about the enormous number of

people, especially black people, who are in prison today. >> i'm glad you said that when we come back, i want to talk to you about the prison crisis, and what your answers are for resolving it. stay right there, we'll be right back. >> at that time there were only a couple hundred thousand people behind bars. today there are more than 2 million.

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♪ >> after witnessing years of brutality and abuse in the criminal system, angela davis has become an advocate for abolishing the prison system all together. >> you've been one of the people over the years that hasn't talk about reforming the prison system but abolishing. >> it goes back further, the atica in 1971. it's very interesting that at that time when the attica rebellion took place, strikes at folsom. the soledad brothers case was a major case involving political prisoners and there was a great deal of public discussion about the prison crisis. and at that time there were only a couple of hundred thousand

people behind bars. today there are more than 2 million, 2.3 million people behind bars. this is, of course, the census on any given day. >> how did this happen? people would say the reason so many more people in prison is because people are committing crimes. if they commit crimes, we put them in jail. >> it's a process called criminalization. as a matter of fact, if we look at the way the so-called drug war has driven the soaring prison population, we see that at one point if one were found to be in possession of an illegal drug, one might get a couple of months or maybe a year. but now it's possible under three strikes mandatory minimum sentences to end up in prison

for an sbir lifeti-- entire lif for simple drug possession. the fact the prison population has risen so drastically has nothing to do with the number of crimes that are or are not committed. the more compelling suggestion is how prison has become an enterprise. so many have a large prison population and that's very difficult to slow down. >> the fight to abolish the prison system started in the '70s when she was fighting for release from political prisoners around the country. >> people from oregon, go back to oregon, continue to build the movement there to abolish the death penalty, free all political prisoners in north carolina. >> if we were to get rid of prison as we understand it, not

use it as a primary place of punishment, what do we replace prison with? >> we think about simple things. what about schools. the resources that ought to be going into education, especially california and all over the country, are going into prison. therefore, people don't have the opportunity to acquire the kind of literacy and relationship to knowledge that would steer them away from trajectory but lead them to prison in the first place. so in my mind education is the very first alternative. housing, some of the basic needs in any society, if we were able to provide those services to people, then they would not move along the trajectory that leads them to prison. then, of course, there is the question of what we do about

people who really do commit -- >> people say that sounds great. i believe in investing now as opposed to paying later, but what about the -- what about the rapists, what about the child molesters? what about people who have serious anti-social crimes that aren't poverty driven and shifts in social policy. >> the question is we haven't even paid enough attention to the reasons why people commit such horrible acts. we tend to assume that if someone is a child molester, just stay in prison and forget about it. so that relieves us of the responsibility of thinking about how we might eventually purge our society from these horrible acts. violence against women. it's really interesting that violence against women was not criminalized initially. it's only been in the last 30

years or so that it has acquired the status of a crime. if we look at all the things we've done around against violence against women over the last decade, we see all kinds of programs. however, the incidence of violence against women is the same. no matter how many people we put in prison for committing violent acts against women, that does not prevent the next generation from replicating it. i think we need to figure out what is going on. as long as we have the prison to steer people into who commit these acts, it's an excuse for not trying to figure out how to deal with the problem itself. so i'm not saying that people shouldn't be held accountable. they should. but we have to figure out ways of understanding how to get rid of child molestation, how to get

rid of violence against women, just throwing people in prison. it actually makes the cycle even more effective. i would say what he saw was an infinite progression of struggle for freedom. we will actually never reach the point where we can rest.

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angela davis has had a long journey since her time in the black panther party. i asked her how she wants to be remembered. >> i haven't really thought that much about an individual legacy. i'm not concerned about people remembering me. i do think it's important to remember that the fact i was facing the death chamber three times. the fact that the political environment was extremely conservative, and that people refused to believe they could

not win the fight with me, that is something that needs to be remembered, because that can be helpful. >> when you think back over the journey from the black panther party until now, what would you do differently? >> if i knew then what i know now? i probably would not have done what i did, but it was necessary to do that at that particular historical moment. and i always like to point out that those of us who are involved in the black liberation movement and anti-imperialist movement, communist movement, we really, truly believe that a revolution was possible. we thought it was going to happen soon, because we saw this happening. we saw the cuban revolution. we saw the african liberation

struggle all over southern africa. we believe it was possible to do that here. i think in a sense you always need this relationship to your goal, in order to be passionate about it. people now might say we were naive, and maybe we were somewhat naive. but i think that naivety was necessary, productive. this is why young people play such an important part in transforming this movement everywhere. because oftentimes they refused to believe it's not possible. i'd like to point out this even though we did not win the revolution we thought we were struggling for, we did bring about dramatic change. what i've come to realize over the years is that in the process of struggling for freedom, our very notion of freedom brought

us, becomes more capacious, begins to include so much more. perhaps that is what it's all about. perhaps we'll never reach that end goal. as nelson mandela pointed out in "long walk to freedom" whenever he reached the point where he thought that he could stop and rest, he looked ahead and there were many, many more struggles to embrace. and dr. king when he went to the top of the mountain, he never told us what he actually saw. and i would say what he saw was uninfinite progression of struggles for freedom. we will never actually reach the point where we can rest. >> we'll be right back.

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♪ it's all right, yeah! ♪ uh! ♪ yeah, all right... announcer: movement. along with weight loss, it's one of the many ways to fight osteoarthritis pain. for more information on managing pain, go to fightarthritispain.org.

that wraps it up for us here at "our world with black enterprise." visit our website. i'm marc lamont hill. follow me on twitter and facebook. thanks for watching. see you next week.