I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.

I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.

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

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.

I don't know whether the movement crashed as a result of the overwhelming character of the institutions we set out to change. I think repression had a lot to do with the dismantling of the movement and also the winning of certain victories had something to do with the inability of the movement to take those victories as the launching point for new goals and developing new strategies.

We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations - that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor.

I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.