freedom Quotes

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

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

That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

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.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.

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.

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.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

Prejudice is a chain, it can hold you. If you prejudice, you can't move, you keep prejudice for years. Never get nowhere with that.