You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.
When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.
We are never assured of justice without a fight.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.
I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.
We must always attempt to lift as we climb.
Justice is indivisible. You can’t decide who gets civil rights and who doesn’t.
The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?
Walls turned sideways are bridges.