Angela Davis

“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.”

“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.”

“Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'”

“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”

“Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.”

“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.”

“I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.”

“Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.”

“Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.”

“As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.”

“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.”

“I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.”

“I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.”

“To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.”

“Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.”

“Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.”