THE SYSTEM IS THE PROBLEM

Angela Davis and Kwame Ture sit at the crossroads of Black freedom struggle; two towering voices whose work reshaped the civil rights and Pan-African movements. Davis, a lifelong abolitionist, exposed how prisons, policing and capitalism operate as an intertwined system of social control. Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, renamed himself after African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré, dedicating his life to the political unification of African peoples and the wider fight against global colonial power.

This Black Journal conversation from 1973 captures them breaking down the foundations of American capitalism with sharp clarity. They challenge the idea of “free enterprise,” arguing that the U.S. economy is dominated by monopoly corporations whose wealth dwarfs the realities of ordinary people. For Black communities, they insist, the promise that small business ownership equals liberation is a deliberate distraction from a system built on exploiting the labor of the many for the benefit of the few.

The clip stands as a reminder that the struggle for racial justice has always been tied to wider questions of political power, economic inequality, and the global structures that shape life for the oppressed.