I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.
It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals
Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
We are never assured of justice without a fight.
The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.
I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.
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?
If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.
We must always attempt to lift as we climb
Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.
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.
I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Walls turned sideways are bridges.
You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.
The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.
I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.
Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.
Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.
But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.
Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.
As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.
I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.
Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.
I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.
What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.
