Quotes About Justice

As white America chose itself over a truly just and multiracial society,

Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.

It is up to white people to release themselves from their own captivity.

Baldwin penned a powerful open letter to Angela Davis, later published in The New York Review of Books. He famously wrote: "We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Color," as he wrote in 1963, "is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.

King told the audience that night, "was that black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave." He went on to say that "so long as the lie was believed the brutality and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience to bear.

The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of women reveal that our basic creed that "all men are created equal" was a lie, at least in practice.

Instead of confronting what we have done to bring us to such a moment, we forget, or as Baldwin put it, retreat into a "weird nostalgia," a longing for a time that never was. What was needed, he believed, was an unflinching confrontation with the ruins. That included confronting the ongoing terror and brutality of white supremacy.

quoting Baldwin: "Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.

Color does not say, once and for all, who we are and who we will forever be, nor does it accord anyone a different moral standing because they happen to be one color as opposed to another.

When residents erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, after the murder of Freddie Gray, one activist was seen outside the Western District police station with a sign quoting Baldwin: "Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.

White people deserved whatever happened to them, he said. The problem is that we don't deserve any of it.

in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by

King conveyed the gravity of the moment in 1968 and the necessity for the Poor People's Campaign, he conjured, without a hint of nostalgia, a history of the heroism of everyday people acting against all odds, a history no less full of disappointment and trauma. He

But, like Baldwin, King struggled with America's commitment to the belief that white people mattered more and to the lie that made it palatable: I must honestly confess that I go through moments of disappointment when I have to recognize that there aren't enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege. But I am grateful to God that some are left.

Today, our task remains the same, no matter its difficulty or the magnitude of the challenge. Some of us must become poets, but we all must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay attention to it, and not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

A moral reckoning is upon us, and we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we will truly be a multiracial democracy.

those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters.

I remembered working on my last book and traveling to Ferguson, Missouri, and to Raleigh, North Carolina, to bear witness to what happened there. In those spaces, I saw and heard people saying no. In their pursuit of a more just America, they made a choice to not adjust themselves to the status quo and to put their bodies on the line for a different America where black people and those on the margins of this society might flourish.

bear witness. To what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.

People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world!

You found the words for what we feel. We curse your enemies, Mavis Moody." "Oh. Well, then, um…" "May they rot in hell.

Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices.