♪ a this special edition of "black world enterprise" i'm on the campus of uc santa cruz with angela davis. that's what's going on in "our world" starting now. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

40 years ago, the black panther party for self-defense picked up their weapons and started a revolution. ♪ >> the panthers considered the police who slaughtered blacks in the street. >> called the police. usually the police -- we were armed and the police arrested the individual we were following to the jail and bailed the individual out. >> angela davis, a black panther and member of the communist party, became an international icon in the struggle for liberation. >> we are convinced that today marks the beginning of a new era in the movement in this country. >> their fight for civil rights was brewing with anger and determination. >> we will walk on this racist power structure and we will tell the whole damn government, stick

'em up [ bleep ]. this is a hold up. we come for what's hours. >> the revolution is far from over, it's very different. she's professor of feminist studies and she lectures and travels the world. we sit here on the college campus of uc santa cruz. 40 years ago you were far removed from santa cruz. you were an active member of black freedom struggle. >> well, actually, a little more than 40 years ago i was teaching at ucla, and because i was fired from my position in the philosophy department there my whole story began. so you might say that it's a trajectory from one campus to another campus with a lot of very interesting, dangerous, exciting encounters in between. >> one of those major encounters obviously was i think the third

woman in american history to be on the fbi's most wanted list. >> well, i mean, that's interesting because i had forgotten. i had actually repressed that fact, and i 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. >> right. right. >> at this moment in history it's almost like an honor to be pursued in that way because you were fighting for black liberation, no? >> 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, and it was as a result of my activity i found myself charged with what were at that time three capital crimes, murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. i always like to point out that it was not so much what i did

that has led to my being widely known. all of that could have happened to me in be on security, but it was because a vast campaign, people all over the country and then people all over the world in europe, in africa and asia and i just returned from india where i met people who told me that they had organized a free angela davis committee in delhi and in pune. so almost everywhere i've gone in the world they tell me that there were people involved at that time, but 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 getting out of the prison? >> well, i mean, it's interesting.

i had a lot of hope. i was very optimistic and i retain that optimism. >> oh, really? after everything that's happened to you, incarcerations and being kicked out of a university you still retain hope? well, so much has happened. a lot of very positive changes have happened. black people are in places where we never would have been able to imagine. not only in the white house, right? >> yes. >> and 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. so 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 mill tansy and a certain kind of radicalness in the freedom struggle as opposed to a civil rights, mainstream civil rights direction. how did you get on that track as opposed to the track that other people were on. you come from alabama. how do you come from alabama to a black panther party? >> think it was about generation. nowadays we tend to narrow that movement. we tend to think of it only as civil rights movement, but 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 che guevera and patrice lamumba. we were thinking about transformation and we were thinking about freedom in the largest possible sense. >> so many of the memories in

the public of the black panther party are with people standing around with gun, but there were programs. there were ideas and there was so much going on other than men toting gun, right? >> oh, 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, but as you point out the black panther party had all kinds of programs. as a matter of fact, free breakfast program that is run by the department of agriculture. that idea emanated with the black panther party because the assumption was children could learn if they were hungry. very simple, but no one else had done it. >> if the panthers were so engaged and so involved and so committed and had such great

ideas, how did they fall apart? why are aren't they still in motion today? >> there is a new black panther party, but -- >> a very different organization. >> exactly. exactly. but the -- if you looked at the ten-point program that the black panther party developed you will see that the schools and health care and into the occupation of the police in that community and all of the other things are still very much on our agenda. the demands have never been fulfilled. they're still there. they still need food, we still need clothing. we need schools. we still need an end to police occupation and we still need to do something about the enormous numbers of black people in prison today. >> want to talk to you about the prison crisis and the mass incarceration crisis and how to

resolve it. stay right there. >> at that time there were only a couple hundred thousand people behind bars. today there are more than 2 million. ♪ ♪ ♪ [ waves crashing ] [ martin luther king jr. ] i still have a dream that one day on the red hills of georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. i have a dream today! [ male announcer ] chevrolet is honored to celebrate the unveiling of the washington, d.c., martin luther king jr. memorial. take your seat at the table on august 28th. [ female announcer ] real fruit... means real fruit smoothies from mccafé.

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♪ ♪ after witnessing years of brutality, abuse and injustices in the criminal system, angela davis has become an advocate for abolishing the prison system altogether. you've been one of the people who hasn't talked about reforming prisons, but actually abolishing them. can you say something about that? >> this goes back further. i date this back to the attica rebellion in 1971 so that is 40 years ago, right? >> yeah. >> it's very interesting that at that time when the attica rebellion took place and there were 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 hundred thousand people behind

bars. today there are more than 2 million, 2.3 million people behind bars and this is, of course, the census on any given day. >> how does this happen, though? because so many people say the reason there are so many people in prison and if people commit more crimes we need more jails. >> this is a process called criminalization. as a matter of fact, if we look at the way in which 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 and the mandatory minimum sentences to end up in prison for an upon

entire lifetime for simple drug possession. >> wow. >> so the fact that the prison population has risen so drastically has absolutely nothing to do with the number of crimes that are or are not committed. the more compelling explanation resides in how imprisonment has become a very profitable enterprise there are so many corporations that have a stake in the larger prison population that it's very difficult to slow down. >> the fight to abolish the prison system started in the '70s when she was fighting for the release of political prisoners across the country. >> the sisters and brothers that come to participate in the march from oregon will go back to oregon and will continue to build the movement there to abolish the death penalty in north carolina to free all political prisoners in north carolina. >> if we were to get rid of the prison as we understand it or not use it as a primary

mechanism of punishment, what do we replace prisons with? >> we have neto think about sime kinds of things. what about schools? the resources that ought to be going into education especially here in california, but all over the country, are going into prisons and therefore people don't have the opportunity to acquire the kind of literacy and relationship to knowledge that would steer them away from trajectories that lead to prisons 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, those services to people then they would not move along the trajectory that leads them to prison and then, of course, there is the question of what we do about people who really do commit. >> that's the question, because

there are people who say that sounds great and i believe in investing now as opposed to paying later, but what about the rapists and what about the child molesters and what about the people who have serious anti-social crimes that aren't driven by shifting social policies. >> well, what are they driven by? 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 throw them 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 very 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 of the things that we've done around -- with violence against women over the last decade, we see all kinds of programs and however the incidence of violence against women is the same no matter how many people we put in prison for committing the violent act against women that does not prevent the next generation from replicating it. so i think we need to try to figure out what is going on. as long as we have the prison to steer people into -- who commit these acts is an excuse for not trying to figure out how to deal with the problem itself. 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 and throw people against prison. it actually makes the cycle even more effective. i would say what he saw was an infinite progression of struggles for freedom. we will never actually reach the point where we can rest. ♪ ♪ ♪

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closed captioning for "our world" is brought to you by -- v, 'cause foot skin's 20 times thicker. this stuff really works. anke la davis has had a long journey since the black panther party. i asked her how she wants to be remembered. >> it's not about an individual legacy. i'm not concerned about people remembering me, but i do think it's important to remember that movement because the fact that i was facing the death chamber three times, the fact that i -- that the political environment was extremely conservative and that people refused to believe that they could not win this 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 probable 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, you know, those of us who are involved in the black liberation movement and the 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, and we believed that it

was possible to do that here, and i think that in a sense you always need that 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, and i think that was productive naivety and oftentimes they refused to believe that it's not possible. i'd like to point out that 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 broadens, and it becomes more qaa

patience. it becomes to include so much more and perhaps that is what it's all about and perhaps we'll never reach that end goal. you know, as nelson mandela pointed out in "long walk to freedom," whenever he reached a 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 an infinite progression of struggles for freedom. we will never actually reach the point where we can rest. >> and we'll be right back. one, two, three, come on! when i say mango, you say pineapple! mango! [ crowd ] pineapple! mango! [ crowd ] pineapple! hey, when i say pineapple, you say mango! pineapple! [ crowd ] mango!

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that wraps it up for us here at "our world" with black enterprise. visit us at blackenterprise.com. i'm lamont hill. follow me on twitter or facebook. thanks for watching. we'll see you next week. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com